Samedi, the Second Teacher Workshop Day 01/11/14

This is a late blog post. I’m sorry, readers. I bet I could tell you what we ate for lunch (you got it – peas, rice, sauce and goat). Today was our second day of the Teacher Workshop, and we decided to talk about teaching speaking. Our rationale for this was that the teachers have all expressed at different points their desire to improve their personal speaking abilities. Additionally, they have acknowledged the deficit of the Haitian educational system when it comes to speaking.

Our lesson outline looks like this:

1) going over the syllabus and calendar

2)  journal sharing/writing in pairs

3) admonition of authentic texts/situations

  • budget speaking time in lesson plans
  • create authentic/relevant situations
  • purpose of task à how do they want their students to learn English?

4) Take 5: students stay in same pairs, choose a picture, come up with five vocabulary words about the picture, identify their lexical category, then share with the class à THEN create a dialogue, role play or sketch that incorporates the five vocabulary words. Everyone performs

5) Inside/outside circles (students rotate on a timed schedule, 30 seconds of fluency building)

6) Debate à should children be allowed to use cell phones in school?

7) Practice OPI, stage an interview

8) Think-Pair-Share about the OPI

On the whole, the lesson went pretty well. We didn’t get to give as much time to the OPI as we would have liked, so we just explained it to them. This session was 3 hours long, and the teachers seemed tired by Sunday (the following session). I don’t know if there’s a way to improve this for future workshops.