I was able to observe the 4B Level Reading class taught by Ramin Yazdanpanah and his intern today. I introduced myself to both at the beginning of the class and they welcome to me. It was clear that both had an excellent rapport with their students. The students seem to very at ease and talk to freely with the instructors. I was introduced to the class, and to the instructor had each student introduced themselves to me.
The class lesson today had been prepared by the intern. She handed out copies of the lesson to every student and also to me. She had prepared a Pre-Reading Activity, leading a short discussion in mental health problems in general. She asked each student about mental health problems and they have seen that were issues in their country. She also asked about attitudes between religion and mental health treatment.
The class was provided then with an article entitled the new focus on The New Focus on Theistic Psychotherapy. This was a very technical research survey article about the emerging issue of psychotherapy within the context of religion or spirituality. Quite frankly, I had to really concentrate to understand it, which surprised me because I have a mental health background. I felt sorry for the students, at that point. The instructions they were given, of course, were to look for context clues. They didn't need a lot of help with this. Quite a bit of technical language was used in the piece, and in at least one instance the article confusingly used a technical mental health term in an non-technical way. This must have added to the students' confusion; it added to mine. The students were asked to take the article paragraph by paragraph, and write down words that they did not understand from the paragraph, as well as questions about the ideas in the paragraph. The students were good about stating what was unclear to them. This must be a skill in itself--being able to elucidate what one does not know.
The intern have provided a list of questions at the end to test for comprehension, however, we did not get that far. I imagine at this level, and given the depth of the article, this must be quite common. The students did not seem discouraged, however. And, this was the first time they had ever seen the article. The class spent some time talking about how difficult it was to work through with the instructor and the intern. They made it clear that it was difficult on purpose, but they felt quite certain that the students would be able to work through the article with more readings and more analyzing. The class ended on an "up note."
No comments:
Post a Comment