Kristen H CO #2

May 10, 2016
Composition: 10am

Teacher Presentation: Instructor went over the schedule she wrote on the board. They would begin class with a worksheet that helped them build better sentences while she held conferences with each student regarding the 1st draft of their essays. At the end of class, they would go over the worksheet. 

Classroom Management: Students talked quietly in their pairs while attempting to complete the worksheet. Some groups would interact with another group if they needed help. The Instructor sat at a desk in the center of the room, holding conferences with students one at a time. 

Materials: handout "Building Better Sentences"

Student Participation: Students seemed engaged in the conferences. Also they worked diligently on the worksheet until the very end when the sentences began to get very difficult for them to put in to one coherent sentence. 

Feedback Provided: The Instructor explained why the worksheet was necessary. The students' essays, she noticed, were full of very basic, simple sentences, which could have easily been combined to form longer and more complex lines of thought. The worksheet had students take two-five basic sentences, and combine them using relative pronouns in order to "subordinate information" that was less important. While conferencing, the teacher emphasized coherent content for the 1st draft, and asked students to elaborate or provide more detail within their writing. 

Lesson(s) on teaching you learned: I learned that forming complex sentences can be difficulty for students to grasp at times, especially when certain elements in his/her foreign language, do not appear in the same order as they do in English. It is also difficult, at times, for students to choose what information should be "subordinate" in a sentence.