My CT is the contact teacher of an eighth-grade class, 8C, so in the conversation we had, we mainly focused on that class for discussion. In terms of the class profile, there are 17 girls and 11 boys in the class. They are all Norwegians and Christians, hence in terms of the racial/religious make-up of the class, it is largely homogenous. Also, the class is made up of mixed-ability learners, with students of different characters and needs, as academic banding and streaming are not done in the Norwegian school system. Hence, the teacher will need to ensure that activities in class will cater to the varied needs of students.
During lesson time, I observed how my CT varied her activities and strategies throughout the lesson, considering the different learner needs present in the class. In eighth-grade German, my CT started off the class by going through a grammar practice that was given as their homework and getting students to volunteer their answers. Following that, my CT provided an opportunity, as it was the last lesson for the chapter, for the students to air their concerns and clarifications, which she then took the time to go through in class. To cater to the different learner types in the class, the teacher used visualisation to go through the topic of Time, using the classroom clock and getting students to say the time in German. I feel that this gave the students an opportunity to apply their knowledge in a real-life scenario and helped them to see a need for language learning.
As a final activity, my CT used a quiz game, where a student would take on a famous figure and the class had to ask questions (in German) to guess his or her identity. This provided a variation in classroom activities for the students and allowed students, especially the kinesthetic learners, to learn through an activity that catered to their needs. By using the game, my CT introduced a fun element to language learning. As German is a language that is first offered in eighth grade, the students would have had little to no experience with German prior, and as this was the initial stage of language learning, fun activities such as role-playing will help to encourage students to participate actively in the learning process.
Also, through my lesson observations, I noticed that my CT was able to manage lesson time well, even when unexpected events happened in the class. During my conversation, my CT shared the importance of planning lesson activities, but more importantly, the awareness that a teacher will need to be flexible and adapt to changes in class during lessons. My CT also shared that her personal practice is to rank the different activities based on importance, as well as to ensure that there was a good variety of activity types to cater to the diverse learner needs in the class. Based on the progress of the lesson, she would then adjust the activities accordingly, removing those that would take up too much time or not be as effective in execution based on her real-time assessment of the class.
In addition, it is also notable how the instructional materials such as the textbooks and the workbooks, in the case of English, had differentiated tasks and instructions, classified as Basic, Challenging, and Demanding tasks. My CT explained that when assigning work from the workbooks, she would provide one task from each category for the students to choose to work on. This provides the students with the autonomy to assess their own ability levels and choose the task most appropriate for themselves. This can also be attributed to the motivation and interest of the students to learn, thus providing autonomy can be useful to allow the students to take greater ownership of their learning.
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