Observing Julia's Class

              Class   Observation (2)

On Thursday I went to Julia’s reading and writing class. There were 12 students in class. I was deeply impressed by the way Julia stimulated her students to reflect on and write about what they had read. 

  The class began with the passing around of the sheets of students’  annotation, which had been chosen by the teacher from what the students handed in as assignment. The students were given several minutes to think and raise questions. When the students raised the questions, Julia put some questions or add more provoking questions on the blackboard to urge students to dig deeper into the meaning of the story so that the students associated the story with philosophy about our life and society. 

Julia is teaching

      After that, Julia handed out two sheets of paper to students so that students naturally were divided into two groups of six. While one group were discussing, the other group sat around as observers to put forward their different ideas afterwards. As the parts of the story were different, students actually were discussing two different parts of the story. 

           It is amazing that students expressed their ideas from different perspectives. This, to a large extent , owes to Julia’s specific requirement for the discussion. She emphasized that students’ talk should be based on sentences and words in the story and each should illustrate his or her point with reference to a specific paragraph. So I found different students drawn by different details.

   The assignment Julia gave is to write blogs , a further reflection on what students had read and discussed. 

Students in discussion

    A good reading and writing class involves thinking and commenting, which asks for a quite good comprehension and exchange of ideas with others. Julia ‘s class succeeded in doing this.