Wednesday 4 March 2009

Teenagers!

Today I taught Fastrack E2 for the first time on my own to a group of eleven 16-18 year olds. I find it difficult as they are a really lovely bunch of teenagers but they are lively and can be quite hard work. I've had good rapport and a good relationship with them so far and I know they are not purposely trying to annoy me but sometimes they just get carried away. Talking over one another, shouting out and arguing with each other. I find myself either yelling for quiet or standing at the front possibly looking slightly bemused! I should know how to handle them, we covered it in a managing behaviour module last semester but once you're put on the spot it all goes out the window!

The lesson started really well. We were focusing on the past tense and as a warmer I had created a wordsearch of both regular and irregular past tense verbs. I told them they could work together however silence fell upon the room as they all concentrated on finding the words themselves. Perhaps it was the competitive nature of the task? After 15 minutes we came back as a group and they came to the front of the room one-by-one to point the words out on the smartboard.

The next task was to complete four sentences in the past tense about what they had done the night before, last week, last month and last year. They all worked well on this task and again seemed focused. I checked their work constantly and offered plenty of support to all learners, the weaker learners in particular. The issues arose when I asked them to read a sentence each back to the class. They talked over each other, showed a lack of respect for the person reading our their work and didn't seem to respond when I asked for quiet. I found this very frustrating and will be thinking over the next few weeks about strategies to avoid this. As a starting point I will be reading Getting the Buggers Motivated in FE by Susan Wallace as I know there are some good tips in there which I will then try in future classes.

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