Everyday I realize that I learn new things related to classroom management in both of my courses given by Anne Kristene and Peter. I am especially happy to learn different strategies, such as group discussions, class parliament discussion, and some more collobrative techniques to apply in the classroom. Actually I would like to say that one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Denmark was related to seeing its education system and being able to notice differences and similarities compared to my country. Sometimes I note down some activities which I found useful so that I can apply in my class, such as starting to draw before starting to talk about topic since it helps students to focus on better and making circles and thereby encouraging all students to participate in the course. In fact I also realized this last week with my friends and our teacher Peter. Yes, I would like to talk about my class experience related to class environment, teacher and students as a candidate teacher in pertinent to my class observation now.
First of all, I was really excited and unaware of what was waiting for me, but I really want to state the fact that in Danish classroom I saw collobrative type of learning with group discussions while in Turkish classrooms I generally realize the teacher-centered learning. It was a multicultural classroom. I really appreciated the environment in which students consisted of generally 5 students in each group. Students were all representing different worlds because all of them had different styles and different ethnicities. Students were talking in English and generally in Danish when asking questions to each other, which helps negotiation of meaning and communication as characteristics of Communicative Language teaching. The teacher applied collobrative tasks and learning by doing environment and thereby helping all the students to participate in the lesson. However in Turkey the style of sitting in the class is in rows; line after line, which makes heavy demands on teacher in terms of learning.That`s to say, teacher talks more in Turkish classes while in collobrative class both students and the teacher are active speakers like in the case of Danish class I observed rather than being passive receipters who just listen. Actually students were comfortable enough to put off their shoes which showed that their affective filter was low. This also shows why teacher is relaxed in terms of deciding what to discuss in the class because of not having a strict curriculum that inspectors in Turkey are crazy for.
As for teacher, I would like to say that she was a good type of collobrative teaching style. Actually, she gave lots of reinforcements during the lesson like `Allright, Ok, Well done, Very good job` etc. She used her voice effectively for both making herself understood and keeping authority.She gave different assignment to one of her students from the whole class in that the other students were far from her level. In fact it showed the fact that teacher considers students` psychological and physical needs.Actually the teacher sometimes used Danish when needed. That`s to say, she used L1 and then translated to L2 when giving explanations. She had an inductive way of teaching. She started to give examples and then she discussed the main topic, which is indeed the case in Oral Approach. She was really good in terms of classroom management. That`s to say, she was not too friedly with her students and put some rules in pertinent to cleaning and class like raising your hand, waiting for all the class finish the task etc. The exercises she did were on the exact level of students. All the students talked in English,which is a part of Communicative Language Teaching,but she not only gave importance to speaking but also considered writing, reading, and listenening to be important. She gave feedback to her students after they finished writing. She was actually a good type of collobrative teaching in that the activities she did showed this a lot. After the course finished, I really wondered how she did exercises and whether activities belonged to her. She told that her secret was `Collobrative Teaching` book. She effectivelly taught a grammatical topic in a circle as a way of encouraging all students become a part of the lesson.
Finally, the content was different in that the Danish education system taught culture in the course book. The grammar exercises were also different in that Turkish grammatical books don`t provide Turkish explanations in contrast to Danish books.
I look forward to using these strategies in my class in the future. I started to write down some techniques which I find useful and think be interesting and enjoyable for my students. I also want to make my class enjoyable since that day I wasn`t aware of the fact that how time passed quickly, which made the fact that really clear that the more you encourge your students to do something, the more chace you have to improve yourself.
