Our Unit 871 Instructor, Caleb, details the effectiveness of Student-Led Teaching in Lana’s English-Language Training program.
At Lana’s English Language Training (ELT) program, I teach the advanced level English class named “Alpha” to Vietnamese military officers. In order to improve student abilities, a new method that I have implemented for this cohort has been Student-Led Teaching.
When I was studying Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, one of my electives was Historical Linguistics. In that class, we had a very dynamic teacher. One thing he did was to involve the entire class in teaching portions of the lesson. He would break the class into groups of two and three, and assign us a portion of the textbook. Then, he would give us 15 minutes to discuss it, and then take turns presenting it to the whole class. I really enjoyed his class, and we all had high regard for one another.
A Brave Volunteer
In my first week of teaching the new cohort for Class Alpha, a Captain named Chien approached me. He said that he liked my teaching style and also mentioned that he was an instructor in a military facility. He asked me to give him some advice on how to teach. I was delighted with the opportunity and told him, “Sure, you pick a grammar portion from this current book, you have about 7 class days to prepare. The morning before the book quiz, you will teach a 10-to-15 minute lesson on that grammar point to the class.”
He was interested in doing it, but also slightly apprehensive. I reassured him, “Don’t worry, every day after class, I’ll sit with you, show you how to structure it and give you some ideas.” So, each afternoon when classes had adjourned, I sat down with the captain, listened to his ideas, and gave him some thoughts of my own. The biggest challenge was getting him to not have self doubt, because it is naturally difficult to stand up in front of a group of people and teach in a foreign language. However, I tried to show him a simple method to follow: introduce with an activity, present the main topic, get some examples from the class, give a controlled practice, and apply with a freer practice.
Captan Chien’s Lesson
When the day rolled around for Captain Chien, I introduced him to the class and stepped aside. He started out by using the flash cards in a brief game called “Back to the Board”, then used that to introduce the topic of Question types. Chien then asked the class for the various question words like, “Who, what, when, etc”. He then went through and described the way to use each of these question words and elicited answers from the class. Following the grammar review, he put them in pairs and had them ask and answer questions for several minutes. To wrap up, he asked for specific questions and answers from the students’ conversations, and corrected for pronunciation mistakes.
I was very impressed and the class was as well. From that point forward, we decided to have a rotating schedule where each student teaches a grammar concept from each book. Two days later, Captain Chien had given me a schedule of all the student-teaching periods for the class. Although this class is significantly lower in English proficiency than the previous two cohorts, they have some of the best camaraderie I have seen. In an afternoon session last week, the commanding Major asked if he could teach the last period of the day. I was only too happy to oblige.
Some teachers feel that the best class is one taught only by a highly trained instructor. But the best instructors are ones who can effectively involve their students in the instruction process.