Dropping Keys

Background:  I do not teach this class alone but rather I co-teach it with a Nicaraguan colleague. Although he is extremely knowledgeable of teaching pedagogy, his English level isn’t as high as some of the other professors I have worked with at the university. He also depends highly on PowerPoint and other technology for class presentations, which can be a plus and a minus at times. We are working on creating a healthy balance between the use of technology and human interaction in the classroom.

The students are in their second year of the English major and therefore are my youngest students; 16-20yrs old. There are 21 students total: 11 male, 10 female. Three students are very advanced for their level within the major. They can have a full intelligible conversation in English with little difficulty.  I would consider nine of the remaining students to be at intermediate level and nine at beginner level. The group is rather lively and it’s easy to get group participation. There are a handful of girls, however, who don’t speak at all unless called upon.

This course is ‘Basic Communication II,’ the continuation of ‘Basic Communication I’ which they took last semester. Both courses focus primarily on vocabulary building, thus grammar is not heavily focused on in any unit. Actually the course textbook is a dictionary!  Last semester the students were introduced to vocabulary related to: everyday language, people, housing, and food. Topics for this course are: clothing, health, community, transportation, and work. Our goal for teaching this semester is to bring the vocabulary alive and show how it’s used in everyday conversation rather than simply covering vocabulary out of context.

This is the last class of the semester. We are finishing up the work unit focusing on applying for jobs and the job market. The students have learned the names of many common jobs and required job skills found in a lot of ‘help wanted ads.’

Issue:  My primary goal in this lesson is to check for comprehension frequently to make sure that the students follow the lesson because many Nicaraguan students are clueless when if comes to how to write a resume and pursue a job.

Narrative:  We began the class with a short discussion on the types of jobs my students hope to obtain after graduation. Some of the answers I heard were: English teacher, translator, tour guide, businessman, and ‘I don’t know.’ We then made a list of the ‘steps to getting a job’ which we agreed were 1) prepare yourself – study!, 2) job search, 3) turn in a resume, 4) go to an interview, and 4) accept/ decline the job.  I told them that today we’d be focusing on the resume phase looking at what type of information should be put into it and how to make a good resume. From there we began with the question ‘what is a resume?’ defining it in our own words. Then I asked ‘why are resumes important?’ trying to get at the usefulness and practicality of today’s class. Afterwards, we brainstormed the key parts of a resume and the order in which they typically appear. Finally, we talked about how the information we write on a resume can either help us or prevent us from getting a particular job and why. I let the students talk as much as possible throughout the entire discussion, but this question seemed to be the most difficult for them and I had to help them some.

We then transitioned into creating an example resume. Since the majority of the students expressed wanting to become English teachers, and all are familiar with the position, we created a resume for a future English teacher. Our goal was to create the best resume possible for the most ideal English teacher ever. We thought about the level of education they should have, the work experience that would be beneficial (both formal and informal), the skills they should have, the languages they should be able to speak, and the references they should include. We stopped and talked about each section as we wrote it, clarifying our decisions and their importance.

Afterwards the students were asked to do the same thing on their own, in pairs. They needed to create the perfect resume for a job applicant of the job of their choice (we’ve been studying the names of different jobs and job skills in previous classes). They had to include all the main sections of a resume.  In no place on the resume were they allowed to put the name of their chosen job.

To finish off the class, I wrote a list of the jobs the students chose to make resumes for up on the board and I asked the students to rip up a piece of paper into smaller pieces equivalent to the number of jobs on the board, writing the name of one job on each piece of paper and folding it in half. In the meantime, I placed all the resumes around the room, each on a different desk face up. Then I told the students to get up and walk around the room, reading all the other resumes carefully. While doing so, they needed to identify which job resume they were reading and place the name of that job in a little cup beside the resume. Once all students had read their classmates’ resumes, each student picked up the cup beside their resume and dumped out all the pieces of paper. If anyone had multiple different guesses in their cup, we looked at the resume on the board. There were two resumes that got confused – architect and engineer. Therefore we looked at those two resumes and highlighted key features that led towards one or the others. We also discussed what other information the writer could have included to make it even more obvious and better.   There wasn’t any homework because this was the last class. All they have to do is study for the final exam.

Reflection:   My purpose in this lesson was to check for student comprehension frequently to ensure that my students really understood the importance of writing a good resume and how to do so.  I hoped this class would help show how the vocabulary we were studying (job names and job skills) is applicable to the real world.  I also think it’s an important topic for my Nicaraguan students because job searching is not a very common topic in most schools and few Nicaraguans have experience doing it.

In this lesson, I setup several ‘comprehension checkpoints.’ An indirect way of checking to see if my students were following the lesson was to ask ‘why?’ By doing so my students had to really stop and think about what we were talking in order to formulate a logical response and justify what they were saying. Also, as we were creating the example resume about the English teacher as a class, I made the students tell me what sections to put and what type of information to include. This showed me whether or not they had understood our discussion earlier about the important parts of a resume and what helps/hinders someone from getting a job. Having the students create their own resumes, too, was a check to see if the students had understood how to make a good resume specific to a particular job.

The setup of the last activity was also comprehension check in and of itself. As the students walked around reading one another’s resumes, I was seeing if they had understood the whole unit including vocabulary from previous classes. I wanted to see if the students could apply their knowledge about job skills and resume writing to identify the job, almost in an inductive backwards style. Considering that only two of the resumes got mixed up, and logically so because the jobs were similar in nature, I think my students did a really good job.  In the final discussion about how to better the resumes or make them even more distinctive and applicable to that specific job, my students threw out some really good ideas. All of this made me confident that they did understand the topic well and were able to apply their knowledge to a real world context.

Building creative comprehension checks into a lesson plan is something that I still need to work on. It’s a way of doing formative assessment within one class period; a type of mini-evaluation on the spot. I think I unconsciously do it often, but I rarely plan it out in advance and thus pay special attention to it. Maybe I could try to put more notes in my lesson plans to remind me of it?  I also think I should stop more and ask the question ‘why’ like I did today. I really like the reaction I got from my students as they really thought about what they were saying. I think this technique would dually serve as a means of teaching my students to think more critically as well.