In the Classroom part 5 (New Material)

Hello,

My name is Wintermute and this is Dumbr, a blog about my time teaching English in Korea. This week we have discussed common classroom practices, and today we continue with how to introduce new material to your students.

Sometimes this can be a little bit more difficult than you would think. Generally speaking my method has always been to make sure you have the classes’ 100% attention the entire time, which I know you are saying “duh”, but it seems to go over looked a lot. I do not allow the kids to have their books or pencils out at all when teaching new material. Otherwise the kids will attempt to follow along or do it themselves and work ahead getting answers wrong, or fall behind the others and get lost.

Instead I spend the majority of the class period teaching, and then at the end let them get their books (no pencils), we do the page/s together in class, I ask if everyone understood, and then let them get their pencils and have at it. For me this seems to be the best method, it allows for no distractions on their desk, and they should know all the answers as we did them together.

 As I said in my earlier post not every kid learns and works at the same speed. This method is good because say you had the books out and tried to do it together in class, you will have every kid sitting on question 2 for 30 minutes when the greater majority could have moved ahead. You should not let one student force the others to fall behind, instead take the time to help that one student.

Something I’m sure few have thought of that I have noticed is presenting new positive and negative material at the same time. There will be moments when you will teach a lot of new words, and I found that depending on the order you teach them it can have very different results. Say you are teaching emotions, I find it better to teach the negative emotions first and then positive. If you teach negative last your students will leave the class feeling… well negative and go home to their parents yelling “I’m sad, hungry, and angry!” Same goes for weather, start with the dark dreary stormy, and then move into bright happy and sunny.

Hope these few tips helped a little, I tried to keep it short as yesterdays lesson ran a bit long. Do come back tomorrow where we will start our new segment on Discipline. Be sure to spread the word of this amazing blog Dumbr, as we want everyone here reading along.

Your Teacher,

Wintermute