Guan Ai Teacher Wins Teaching Competition
Kiel Harell | Posted on March 25th, 2009 in RCEF. 
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Yang Li Na teaching 5th grade English class
Guan Ai teacher Yang Li Na won the annual PuZhou township English teaching competition. The competition was held last week and included eight English teachers from other schools in the township. Teachers were required to prepare a lesson from the 4th grade Oxford English textbook and present it to a classroom of students in PuZhou. Each teacher taught for 25 minutes and was evaluated by the other teachers from the township.
Yang Li Na’s lesson focused on teaching prepositions (in, on, under, beside, and behind). She taught the students hand movements for learning the words using teaching methods she learned from the visiting Dulangkou teachers. The students were excited to move around and do something other than simple recitation. After the students mastered the hand movements, they worked on creating their own unique sentences with their existing vocabularies and the new prepositions. It was clear by the end of the short lesson that the majority of the students were able to synthesize the new parts of speech into their knowledge of English.
Having won the local competition, Yang Li Na will now continue onto the city level English competition this week in Yongji. Wish her luck!
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David Pho says:
Added on March 25th, 2009 at %I:%M %pCongratulations to both Kiel and Yang Lina for this great achievement! They both worked hard on introducing new teaching methods which allow the students to better understand what is taught in the standard textbooks. The hard work has paid off, so my compliments to you and I wish you good luck with the next rounds!
Jia you!
David
Steven Liu (blog author) says:
Added on March 26th, 2009 at %I:%M %p恭喜恭喜！
Wei Ji Ma says:
Added on March 28th, 2009 at %I:%M %pThat’s fantastic! Congratulations and way to go! I am really glad that all improvements you guys have worked on so hard is starting to receive recognition. Will the city-level competition feature the same lesson? Will you tell us how it goes?
BOB CHING says:
Added on March 28th, 2009 at %I:%M %pLi Na,
Stay IN there! Hold On to your lead! Rise UNDER pressure! We are BESIDE you and BEHIND you!
Bob
Kiel Harell (blog author) says:
Added on March 28th, 2009 at %I:%M %pThe city-level competition is an entirely different format. The teachers are assigned certain parts of the book to teach (they don’t get to choose) and the lesson is even further truncated. Instead of being a 25 minute lesson, the teachers have to present their materials in 12 minutes. It’s disappointing because it won’t showcase Yang Laoshi’s teaching style very well, but I think she will still do pretty well.
In addition to the short lesson, the teachers also have to recite something from the 9th grade English text book and explain the teaching methods they chose for the lesson (in English).
I’ll be sure to give an update after the next round.
Kiel Harell (blog author) says:
Added on April 2nd, 2009 at %I:%M %p***UPDATE***
The city-level competition was held on Tuesday morning. Yang Li Na explained a lesson on introducing helping verbs from the fourth grade textbook. She didn’t receive an award in the competition, but I think she did pretty well. The format of the contest was very limiting so she wasn’t able to completely show how the students would be working with the material in her lesson. If the competition had involved actual teaching, I think she would have definitely won an award because the judges would have seen how much more focus was placed on the students in her lesson. Some of the other contestants had better pronunciation than her, but I don’t think any of them developed a better, more student-centered lesson.
It was a good experience to see the township and city-level competitions. Hopefully, next year they will use a format that highlights actual teaching instead of recitation skills.
ting says:
Added on April 24th, 2009 at %I:%M %pwell that’s crappy! it’s kind of ironic that a contest aimed to recognize “good” teaching methods fail to acknowledge methods that would benefit the students. nonetheless, being the local contest winner is no small feat! congratulations li na, keep up the excellent work!