I had the opportunity to observe Rain’s class. I always find it valuable to see how other teachers teach as it’s not something I have a great deal of experience in and have found it useful as a way of gleaning aspects that I could apply to my own teaching.
Rain’s class was online through Teams and one of the things I noticed was how welcoming and calm the atmosphere was. She started the class by playing some music in the background as she waited for everyone to arrive and then proceeded to tell the group what the agenda for the day and rest of term were. I’d like to think that I am a kind and understanding teacher, but I also think that I can often be quite critical of my students work in group tutorial settings and don’t emphasise the positive aspects of a student’s project enough. I see tutorials as an opportunity for students to push their projects forward and praise tends to be one of the last things I think about as it doesn’t help them develop their work. I think that it would be good to highlight more positive aspects of a students project as it will help them see what is working in their project.
Similar to me, Rain adopted a typical tutorial structure where a student would present and Rain would give feedback, often with interesting references. There wasn’t much participation from the group and that was the main piece of feedback I offered: how could student participation be increased?