Observing a Class: Are you an “interferer” or a quiet onlooker?

Pair work is great. Pedagogically, it builds rapport, encourages collaborative learning and may lower learners’ affective filter. From a second language acquisition perspective, it increases student talking time and the amount of comprehensible output and input, and according to the interaction hypothesis, the negotiation of meaning leads to the acquisition of the forms students need in order to convey meaning.

And the best bit is that whilst students chat away, we can put our feet up and finish that coffee. Right?

OK, maybe not. This week I saw a class where the teacher had a very active monitoring technique. The classroom was set up perfectly for pair/group work and there was plenty of space for the teacher to walk around and see what the students were up to. Pair work took place at different stages of the lesson, providing the learners with many speaking opportunities and they got to talk to different people as the teachers instructed them to swap partners for different activities. It was also great to see that she  included the rationale of pair work in her instructions as students do not always see the benefit of pair work (Lightbown & Spada 2006).

And whilst this pair work was in progress, the teacher walked around, helping with vocabulary, taking part in the conversations and offering corrections. In teacher training manuals this classroom management technique is called monitoring, and this teacher clearly mastered it well.

It got me thinking about the different ways we can monitor and when to use them. Scrivener (2012) suggest varying your approach depending on the stages of an activity. Silver (2008), on the other hand, uses the term observing, instead of monitoring, and describes lessons where teacher-student interaction during pair/group work is handled very efficiently but with minimal intervention.

At the beginning of an activity, you may want to check that all pairs are on task. Quietly looking around to see what is happening may be enough to check that everyone knows what is expected of them. Once this has been confirmed, you may wish to choose from three different approaches:

1. Discreet monitoring: slowly walking around or sitting down somewhere where you can listen to what is going on. You might make notes for error correction later or offer brief guidance to pairs that are stuck or ask you a question. Avoiding eye contact or not standing right in front of students usually stops them from trying to engage you in the conversation. In small classroom I have actually turned around and had them stare at my back. The key is that you do not want to became part of the conversation because often you end up dominating it.
2. Participatory monitoring: you join in the conversation. This could be because the students need to be nudged in some direction or given new ideas, or the stronger students in the group need an extra task.
3. No monitoring: you just let them get on with it. It shows that you trust them. Having the teacher listening and watching always adds a bit of pressure. Sometimes this is good as it may push students to perform better but at times you may simply want to leave them to it.

To sum up, it is not a one-size-fits-all kind of situation. There are different ways of managing your students during pair/group work. Depending on the topic, the activity and the rest of the lesson, sometimes you may choose to “interfere” and sometimes simply to look on quietly.

 

Bibliography

Lighbown Patsy, M. & Spada, N. 2006. How Languages are Learned. OUP.

Scrivener, Jim 2012. Classroom Management Techniques. CUP.

Silver, Rita Elaine 2008. ‘Monitoring or Observing? Managing Classroom peerwork’. In Farrell, Thomas S. C., Ed. Classroom Management. TESOL Classroom Practice Series. Accessed on 6 February 2016.

 

Photo: Hiding behind a bush/plant/tree may not be the most discreet form of monitoring…Taken in Vienna.