Brian's Japan Adventure

Wow. That was a busy week.

Wednesday and Thursday were essentially repeats of Monday and Tuesday as far as events went. Lots of explanation, discussion and theory on Wednesday, and lots of interacting with LEAP students on Thursday. Sure, there was more to it than that, but I’m going to go light on the details so I can talk about Friday.

Fridays are the Practicum days. 

Every Friday, I will be assigned to observe some LEAP class and see how the class is taught and managed. Essentially it is learning by watching. Each week, I will be observing two 2-hour classes taught by two different teachers, for a total of ten classes by the end of the program.  This week I watched a LEAP level 2 (intermediate on a scale of 1-3) class on Speaking and Listening and another on reading. It was both fun and useful, and I can definitely understand why it’s a requirement. Things were not exactly what I was expecting (a great deal more chaotic than I had imagined), but educational because of that.

The first class was on Speaking and Listening. The teacher broke the class into several groups and had every student pick a fable/fairy tale from a list. The list was comprised of fables from around the world, so there should be at least a couple of stories that each student would know. Each student was to pick a fable from the list and tell it to the other group members. After this was done, they reported the stories to the entire class. It sounds pretty simple, but it was very involved, and the students seemed to have a lot of fun doing it.

The second class was also level 2, so many of the same students were in the class. This time it was a Reading class. They did vocabulary and read passages from their book, and so forth. There was nothing unexpected, and it was all pretty standard stuff. The teacher did assign me and the other observer to groups to help out, which made it much more interesting for me, but I probably confused the heck out of the students, since I hadn’t heard the teacher’s previous lessons. Ah well.

Overall, I did learn several new teaching tricks, and if the other Practicum days go like this one, I will learn a lot of good material.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.