Teacher: Good.
Pupil: There is a tower in Özgön town too.
Teacher: OK. Yes, let us discuss about Özgön tower in our next lesson ...
the time is coming to an end. Several pupils were active and prepared for
today’s lesson well. I give Aida ‘five’, Sanjar and Jyldyz also ‘five’, Nargiza – I
give you ‘four’ – I noted you read homework at home and prepared, so I can
see you made good progress. I will ask others the next lesson. Now, take
your homework. At home, read your conspectus about monuments again;
in the next lesson I will teach you about Towers and Stone Monuments.This transcript illustrated this teacher’s teaching approaches, including
how he interacted with his pupils, dealt with pupils’ attendance,
checked homework, explained concepts and assigned homework. He
went through the homework by asking pupils random questions.^10
He revised the previous lesson material and examined whether pupils
had understood the concepts. He then started what he called ‘teaching’
(introducing a new theme) by lecturing, retelling, asking questions (directed at
the whole class and to individual pupils), and responding to pupils’ questions.
At the end of the lesson, he gave some pupils marks for their performance
and assigned homework.
His teaching beliefs and practices reflect the conventional teacher-centred
approach. Kanybek used a combination of methods: lecture, question-answer
and discussion. His predominant method was the lecture, however, which
he explained as being because he wanted to cover the material within the
limited time allotted for history lessons. He commented, ‘I teach the most
important aspects of the theme, and encourage the pupils to study the rest
on their own’. He dictated his conspectus to his pupils and had them copy
the material to read for homework. By using the lecture method, Kanybek
addressed the challenge of the lack of history textbooks, but he also believed
his lecturing was preparing his pupils to be able to study at university. He said,
‘If I lecture and have the pupils write down notes from my lectures quickly,
then it will be very helpful for them when they go to university, because I
learned from my university experience that writing notes in a lecture is really
tough’. Kanybek believed that teachers’ success was usually measured by the
number of their pupils who entered higher education institutions.
10 In other lessons, Kanybek called the pupils’ names from the class register to make sure
that pupils who had not responded in previous lessons got a turn to respond.