by Leenke Wolf, Malik Al Zakwani and Leona Sedlaczek
During our Study Week at the University of Borås, we held a short 25-minute lesson on the Arabic language. Our students, the proPIC group made up of students form Barcelona, Karlsruhe and Kiel, acted as our guinea pics. With the help of Richard Baldwin and Tobias Ruhtenberg, our lesson was recorded by a camera robot. In this short videopaper, we reflect on our lesson and the tools used to conduct it.
L E S S O N G O A L : Give students an idea about the basics of the Arabic language with regard to intercultural learning.
Starting the lesson, we used mentimeter to engage with the students and the topic, the Arabic language. We felt that it was a good tool to get the class going and it proved itself while conducting it with the proPIC group. The clip shows the reactions from the group – there even was cheering from some students which showed us that mentimeter as a visual tool attracted everyone's attention.
On another note, we also noticed little difficulties working with both our own device and the big screen. The situation with Leona always turning around to the screen while operating it from her computer was not ideal. In order to prevent this, it would have been helpful to have a run-through beforehand with the devices that will be used in class (something that was not possible in our case but would be in the school environment). This is also why we co-taught as soon as Malik started speaking, i.e. Leona operating the computer.
During the lesson we noticed several moments of successful co-teaching which were generally unplanned but helped us a lot during the lesson. The scene you see here shows a moment where Malik is presenting facts about the Arabic language while Leona managed the slides. This way, Malik didn't have to occupy himself with the digital device and could concentrate on the classroom and student interaction.
Moreover, during the lesson, Malik could often help out with pronunciation and extra information thanks to being a native speaker of the Arabic language.
We observed several moments of well-working task-management but also some in need of improvement. In this scene we see a group work coordination which could have been more successful if Leenke gave more or better instructions in the beginning. Instructions have to be given clearly and completely so that everyone understands what the task is about before they start working on it. In that way, you could make sure that a situation like this one, where everyone is already occupied with the task while the teacher is throwing in instructions, can be prevented.
In comparison to the former example, Leenke is here very clear about her instructions for the following task. Although seeing her body language in the video feels unfamiliar to her, we feel that through her gestures the task became very clear and everyone knew exactly what to do and how to navigate within the classroom to complete the task. This could be especially helpful in a foreign language class to make sure that every student understands the task.