Andrea begins class by asking how everyone is and how they are feeling. I like this a check-in with students it is a good way to gauge the class for the day. Perhaps make small changes to help the students learn. The students are stressed, and she asks why they are feeling stressed. This is great because it shows that the teacher is not making just trying to make a superficial connection, but a deeper one. She also shows this by knowing things about them like exams they just had or that they are about to have. She also tries her best to make sure that everyone can participate or is able to be a part of the class. This is shown when she tries to help Ashanti with his internet problems by giving him different suggestions to fix it. This is something that I am sure many teachers recently have experienced and it was great to see her try and support the student. She begins the lesson by getting the class to go through the different careers of heroes, which leads to the ted talk.
The ted talk was very interesting, and I never really thought about using a ted talk before this program. The Ted talk was done by the Firefighter brother of Jeff Bezos. I think that this video was a great choice not only is it interesting but it also is relevant to the theme of heroism. You can tell that the video engaged the students with how talkative they are afterwards. Andrea uses a very interesting and smart listening activity for this video. She gets them to watch and listen to the video once and then asks one easy question. They then watch the video again and are give true false and not given type of question, which is the kind of question that would be on their IELTS exam. I love how Andrea has interwoven her lessons. She includes what she wants the students to practice while tying it to the theme. Adding the third layer of having them practice the IELTS type questions just shows that Andrea has thought about her students when lesson planning. She has geared the lesson to make it something that the students would be interested in, but also what they need for their goals. This is something that I was glad I got to see in practice and have an example of. Another wonderful lesson from Andrea has given me lots of ideas and good examples of teaching ESL in another country.
