Feedback 1

Feedback on Mehmet Demir’s First Official Presentation 

In his first official presentation with the seventh graders, Mehmet shows a good example of attracting attention of the students to the subject. At the beginning of his lesson, he makes the students play a hangman game where they try to discover the topic of the lesson, which is “holidays.” This game proves quite good for activating them as they are really challenged while trying to find the word. Also, by making a concept map about the subject, he was able to activate the students’ background information about holidays. The level of participation in this part shows that the subject was really interesting for the students. 

 I was also able to observe the way Mehmet presented the conditional structure to his students. In fact, I found him quite successful in this part as he focused on the usage and meaning of the structure instead of the grammatical rules. The students first found some conditions and results from the text about the Iztuzu beach and caretta-carettas. Later, they talked about these sentences and negotiated about the meaning with the questions Mehmet asked. He asked them whether the actions in the second conditional format were real or not real. Through this discussion, the students were aware of the fact that second conditional is meant to be used for unreal situations. 

 In the following parts, the students worked on a worksheet and reviewed their knowledge about the conditionals. Mehmet was helpful to his students both in this part and the other parts. The students were successful in completing the exercise and they controlled the answers all together. In my opinion, it would be better if the sentences of this worksheet were connected to the theme of holidays as well. Such connections between the activities make the lesson look like a complete unit rather than separate parts added after one another, which in my opinion makes the lesson more effective. 

 The issue of time management may be a big problem for all of us from time to time. Mehmet also could not finish the post-activity as a result of the lack of time. In my opinion, this is a skill which we will all gain in time. Being in a real classroom is different from presenting to your peers in many ways; that’s why we sometimes cannot see that all the activities we prepared for one lesson plan are in fact too much in an actual classroom. 

 To sum up, I can say that I found Mehmet’s lesson quite effective. He was a positive and helpful teacher. I especially liked the way he prepared his students for the class and the way he presented the grammar. He needs to work on his time management as all of us do. I think that he will be an effective and positive teacher in the future.