A Visit to EGRC of Lishan Junior High School

           As soon as I was informed to visit a gifted class, I was that excited with high expectations to see something interesting and different. Entering Lishan Junior High School, the campus was packed by a large number of “young” students. A strong feeling came up: we belonged to different generations! Their faces were teemed with innocence, but they were vigorous.

       “Wow! It’s a mini-class,” everybody said with surprise. It was English Gifted Resources Class comprising six students. The classroom was a microcosm of a regular one, but its all-English environment was the huge distinction. The left-hand wall was decorated by posters stuck four words: Enthusiastic, Gifted, Reflective and Creative; the right-hand wall was filled with notices, newspapers, aphorism and students’ work.

The teacher, Ms. Hsu, started the class with a brief review. She asked students some questions to fresh their memories by using graphic pictures. The students were very active, answering the questions correctly and fluently. Then, Ms. Hsu played the CD of new reading part and students repeated what they heard and imitated the intonation. After that, Ms. Hsu explained the plot by paraphrasing and emphasized the usage of new vocabulary. For instance, she aided students in distinguishing American English and British English. She further related the content to students’ experiences, making the class more interesting. I found that students voiced their thoughts confidently and Ms. Hsu valued any opinions. The feature of Ms. Hsu’s teaching style is to spark students’ interests via keeping asking questions, and she even asked a question like “what’s the roof of the world?” when talking about the word “roof.” On the other hand, Ms. Hsu would require students to predict the following plot; meanwhile, students used logic and imagination to create their stories. I was amazed by this part and thought that it was worth learning to apply in my teaching. This way, students didn’t gain knowledge passively; instead, they constructed knowledge by their own.

I learned a lot but had a sense of complexity after observing the perfect class every teacher dreamed of. In the future, we can’t choose what kind of students we’ll teach, so we have to equip ourselves well to face challenge and overcome it. The approach we learned from Ms. Hsu may not fit to low-achiever or passive learners. Students will get bored by too much grammatical teaching and then start to talk with neighbors. Teachers will spend much time dealing with students’ distraction, or the class must become a chaos. Therefore, the teacher must understand students’ characteristics and adopt right method and integrate suitable material into teaching. The most important thing is to make a lesson plan in advance and prepared well. From this visit, I am wondering a question: do I prefer to teach gifted students or average class? It’s sort of a dilemma for me: it is easier to get sense of achievement by teaching gifted students, while average class can train our abilities to manage a class and face the different situation. If we prepare ourselves well, we will be qualified to teach any kind of students.