Savannah CO #2

My second observation was Felicia Ciappetta's reading class. This class was a little less exciting than the first class because the students spent a lot of time reading passages. Ciappetta went over plagiarism, summarizing, and paraphrasing during this class. She had the students read a passage, close their books, then discuss it in their own words to a partner. I thought it was very interesting that she told the students to close their books. In my Spanish reading class, my professor does not tell students to close the books and many people end up reading directly from the passage. By telling students to close their books, the students had no choice but to come up with their own words to summarize the passages. Additionally, this reading class taught me that a teacher must be flexible with their lesson plan. Originally, Ciappetta had a passage on genetically modified food for the class to read. However, the class realized that this reading was not in their CIES text book. Ciappetta realized her version was probably an older one and this passage was recently taken out. She did not spend too much time stressing over this, however. She quickly came up with another idea for the students to do and went on with her lesson. I think this was a very important thing for me to witness because things like that are inevitable and instructors need to be quick thinking to keep the lesson running smoothly.