For my third class observation, I observed Olivia James' reading class, Group 3A. The main focus of the class was a method of note-taking, a CIES adaptation of Cornell Notes. The class was structured into two parts: the first one was an explanation and demonstration of how to take notes using this system, then during the second part, the students applied the note-taking technique to a passage on a handout.
Olivia pointed out to me that a few of the students in the class had mentally checked out, since it was such a high-level course and some of the students had already been admitted into the University. It looked like two students didn't even make any attempt to learn anything or do the in-class assignment and tried to play on their phones the whole time. Another one just said he didn’t care because he was leaving in twelve days.
Something Olivia did that I will definitely try to do is that she knew each of her students' professions and/or goals. I saw this in how she went from student to student during the note-taking activity, and pointed out how the note-taking technique could be relevant to what the student was attempting to achieve. For example, she related the technique to one student who's in pursuit of film, and then related it to another student in pursuit of engineering.
Overall, there wasn't a whole lot to see due to the individual work taking up a good portion of the class time, but I definitely saw the importance in getting to know the students, especially when intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be lacking class-wide.
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