Peer Assessment for Jay

Link to the Jay’s Teaching Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J5mDLnbsGg

Jay’s teaching video is very well constructed to show his classroom teaching consisting of following activities: Lesson Introduction (0:06), Research & Brainstorming (2:40), and Information Sharing (3:20), Presentation (4:31), Wrap-up (5:30).  At the end of the video, it provides also interview footages of student participant (6:33) and supervising teacher (7:59). As my understanding, the sequence of the teaching activities seemed based on Kolb’s experiential learning cycles.

Topic of the lesson was Equality in Finnish Education and Working Life for pupils of 9 grade at Espoo International School. I assume that approximately 17 students (shown at 03:03-03:19) including both of genders were participated in his lesson as a form of guidance counseling classroom learning.

Jay used quite a strong introduction method to encourage the students’ engagement to the topic. He distributed candies to 4 groups of student unequally and asked them to think about what just happened? Many of students have expressed their curiosity and interesting to know about the topic (1:23-1:47). And he led very skillfully the student to break-down the equality into their scope of learning. I think that it was quite interesting introduction and well managed to get the students attention and involvement, but if he used small group discussion method for the activity, the classroom would be more motivated to learn from each other by sharing their experiences.

In the second activity; Research & Brainstorming, Jay demonstrated proper time management, asked the students to perform the tasks in 15 minutes (2:40). And he addressed clearly the learning objectives for the activity; Equality in Finnish Education and Working Life compare to the rest of the world. As the student interviewee stated in her feedback for the teaching (6:49), this research activity was the most interesting part of the lesson. Jay used a learning method of small collaborative groups to research and braining storming using PC internet connections.

The next activity, Information Sharing (3:20), was a part of student assessment using verbal communication method. And Student worksheets were collected for assessing (3:52). It looks like this part of the activities, majority of the students showed low level of involvement, but (maybe) one person from the back side of the classroom dominated most of the conversation with the teacher. This situation continued to the next activity of Jay’s Power Point presentation (5:14). I think this video does not show everything, but if it tells some truth, Jay has to pay attention to equal opportunities to the students to share and engage in the learning dialogue.

I like the supervising teacher’s interview (7:59), she suggested some improvement areas such as; Sharing to be divided into equally 20 minutes for each groups, presentation method is recommended when sharing the information to get attention for every students. And students’ different international background to be addressed to contribute to the discussions. I am sure that Jay will do much better if he do double lesson and reflecting those suggestions.