Feedback 2

Feedback on Özlem Öztürk’s First Official Presentation

While watching Özlem’s video, I realized that I was in fact unlucky for not being able to observe any young learners. From the very beginning of the lesson, Özlem’s nine year old students are so enthusiastic that it seems impossible to lose their attention. In my opinion, this is also partly due to Özlem’s good rapport with the students. She generally addressed them with their names, which is really valuable for the students. They feel that they are cared for by their teacher this way.

The game part was incredibly effective with this classroom. In fact, they were so enthusiastic that it was sometimes impossible to stop them from jumping on their desks or shouting all together to be chosen by the teacher. This is in fact one of the difficulties of working with young learners. At some points, the class was noisy and it was difficult to hear Özlem’s voice in the video. She tried to handle the situation by using her voice and by moving around the class. She was quite effective in doing this. However, the number of people in the classroom may also be a disadvantage for a novice teacher. In my opinion, if there were less students in this classroom, Özlem’s lesson could have been much more effective as she could have managed the class more easily. There were still some students who did not wait for the teacher’s instructions and continued to talk in their groups. If the classroom was bigger and if the grouping arrangement allowed Özlem to go and visit all the groups, she could be able to solve this problem.

Regarding her instructions, I think that she did a very good job as the students generally did not have any problems understanding what they were supposed to do. In the group work part, she did a very good job providing assistance to all the groups and giving them positive feedback when they did something correctly. Overall, I think that this was a very lively and successful lesson.