Georgia | English Language through Civic Education | 28 Feb 2015

Twenty pre-service and 20 in-service teachers came to watch three of their colleagues give a formal 45 minute demonstration lesson based on the ELCE II curriculum that they had previously taught in their classrooms. Approximately 10 parents of the 2nd grade pupils from School #6 brought their children and stayed to watch the classroom demonstration. Guliko Janova, Department Chairperson of English Language at the Samtskhe-Javakheti University, attended the lesson. All three lessons were videotaped so they could be used in the Year 2 training session of the program.

Nino Begishvili of Alhaltiskhe School #6 and Maia Teliashivli from Vale School #1 taught lessons on Vocational and Life Choices for her 2nd grade and 6th grade students. Nino employed a variety of strategies to keep students active and motivated (e.g. she used letters of the alphabet written on separate squares of paper, so that children could hold them up to spell the new words they had learned as an effective strategy for teaching spelling as well as helped students to visualize the correct orientation of the letter.)

The activities Maia used in her class included but were not limited to using group work strategies, reading texts about occupations, using post-its containing written facts to help students categorize information, and matching activities with words and pictures to reinforce student’s understanding of new vocabulary.

Tinatin Vardidze, lecturer from Samtkhe-Javakheti State University, taught a lesson on Holidays in several different countries. ELCE-II participant pre-service teachers acted as students in Tinatin’s class. The teacher used interesting and interactive warm-up activities to open the lesson. Students were asked to form two concentric circles. Then they paired-up and asked each other questions on the topic. Every two minutes students shifted to the right and had new partners to ask another set of questions. Tinatin used pictures of holidays and asked students to guess in which country the holiday might be taking place. She provided several sets of communicative and student-centered activities involving matching of phrases and pictures.

Demonstration lessons were followed by a reflection session facilitated by the ELTT in Samtskhe-Javakheti region Judy Elliott, during which all the attending teachers discussed methodologies and activities used during the class and received supplementary materials and handouts.

“These kinds of demonstration lessons are very beneficial for all of us: the ones who present and the ones, who attend” – shared Tinatin Vardidze after the event. “Peer feedback is usually very beneficial and to the point. In the reflection session, we shared ideas about the activities that could also be used to effectively reach the lesson objectives and got inspired to use those new ideas in our future lessons” she added.