After reading and discussing effective teaching methods with right and wrong teaching strategies used by two teachers I witnessed the same in our library session where the librarian effectively presented and taught us a lesson on APA style citations, showed us books and articles that are most relevant to our course and gave us handouts about the same. She asked us about the topics that we were interested in researching was attentive and answered our questions satisfactorily.
The following day I worked as a third grade substitute teacher and observed a Spanish teacher who made the lesson an interactive and fun learning experience for the children with pictures of a customer talking to a bank teller while withdrawing cash at a bank with dialogues written at the end. The teacher asked the students the meanings of the words that they were familiar with and translated and explained the meanings of new words. She then repeated the dialogue in English and told the students to keep translating the sentences in Spanish after which she made them work in pairs with one person posing as a customer and the other as the cashier. Towards the end she also made the children sing a song in Spanish and finally told them to write down the .
dialogue in their notebooks and also write a list of the new words with their meanings. .
The introduction to the lesson and variety of teaching methods were effective, interactive and a good fun for the kids and ensured that they understood and memorized the words. The teacher was attentive towards the behavior and attitude of the children and did not show prejudice. However, I felt that instead of a bank scenario a lesson with different situations of a child interacting with a shopkeeper in a chocolate, candy or ice cream shop would have made the children relate to it even more and further enhanced their learning.
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I also observed a music teacher teaching some music terms to the students and felt that the lesson was irrelevant since third grade children would have enjoyed singing and dancing a lot more than hearing about music terms that they had not heard about but were not interested in learning either.