Feedback 4

Feedback on Tuğçe Aydemir’s Second Offical Presentation

When I started watching the video of Tuğçe’s second official presentation, I thought that she made a good start to the lesson. She introduced the topic to her students by connecting it to the weather that day and started the lesson in a chatty way. This actually provided her with a good transition to the grammar point. Later, she elicited some reported speech examples from her students and quickly moved to the other activity by showing some questions from Harry Potter movies to revise their knowledge about the reported speech. At first, I thought that she was moving too fast between the activities. However, I later realized that there were only five students in the class and this was the main reason why the lesson was so fast.

There is another point I want to talk about related to Tuğçe’s lesson and also related to my own classroom experience: Should we give some right of choice to our students? At the beginning of her lesson, Tuğçe asked her students whether they liked Harry Potter movies. Most of the students unfortunately said: “No.” This could be quite a demoralizing answer if you prepared your entire lesson plan on a theme like this. As far as I can observe from her video, Tuğçe did not lose calmness and positive attitude even after this answer, and I want to congratulate her for this. In fact, the lesson went on quite well contrary to the students’ claims that they did not like Harry Potter. Yet, what can we do in such a situation? What could be a possible solution? I think that it is possible to be prepared in advance for such situations. For my first official presentation, I was really uncertain about what to do in the classroom as my teacher told me that I was completely free. Then, I taught that asking my students what they preferred would be a good idea. Actually, this worked quite well in the classroom and all the students participated in the lesson enthusiastically as it was their choice to have a speaking focused lesson. However, there is also a disadvantage to this: The students might be unhappy when you do not take their idea into account for the following lessons. It is not always possible to do what the students want. There is always a curriculum to follow and objectives to be met. In my second presentation in the same class, the students again thought that I would ask for their opinions about the topic. When I couldn’t do this as I had to follow the curriculum, they were upset and they did not attend the class as much as the first one. Therefore, I cannot reach an agreement about this issue right now. Yet, I think that if Tuğçe had chosen a theme according to her students’ interests, the level of participation could have been higher.

Overall, I think that this was an effective lesson and Tuğçe was successful in terms of classroom management. I congratulate her for being so calm and energetic at the same time. I hope that my feedback will be useful for her self evaluation as well.