WENDY: Learning from my peers

What impressed me most is Pei Pei’s reflection about her struggling with a group of high proficient students. The first week was overwhelming for her and she was constantly worried about how the lessons would go on in the following weeks. From her last post, I can say she has done a fantastic job. She pointed out that using presentations in the class incredibly involves her students, even the passive ones. This strategy is very suitable and challenging for high-proficiency students such as form 4 and above because it provokes their critical thinking on a range of social and global issues.

At that age, students have some experience in life and are able to discuss many topics from different aspects and deeply. Once I prepared a debate in my two form 1 classes and the effect was enormous. Not only did my kids loved it and participated passionately, but also they astonished me with their logical, persuasive and powerful arguments. Sometimes, students can come up with certain arguments we can never think of, which makes our teaching more like learning and intriguing. I strongly agree with Dr. Adele’s title of our fourth reflection—“To teach is to learn twice”. 

Therefore, Pei Pei’s presentation strategy can be a wonderful way of teaching and learning. What’s more, Farul’s third reflection about his struggle with the teaching process. He mentioned that he gained respect from his students by having heart-to-heart talks with them, which echoes my way of handling a bunch of teenagers. My students tell me they feel so close to me as I understand their feelings by talking with them over their problems regarding their behaviors in the class. I notice the tiny changes of my students in every class and surprisingly my kids open their heart to me and tell me a great deal about themselves. They feel the chemistry between them and me. 

The longer I’m with them, the more understanding I become about their behavior and reaction in the class rather than being judgmental. Sometimes, what students need more is not just a professional teacher who knows his/her stuff well, but also one that helps them emotionally; thus, open the knots in their hearts, especially those teenagers who are sensitive, moody and obstinate. If we impose our ideas on them and force them to do what we think is right without listening to their opinions first, the impact is always very negative and harmful for both sides in the long run. Whether as a teacher or a parent, analyzing their behaviors by listening to them sincerely proves to be a great way to getting close to them. And the job is harder for a teacher since he/she has to deal with a number of teenagers not one. From my friends’ post, I see we are really concerned about the students’ well-being and have benefited far more we expected. And I wish all of us enjoy our last week in the school. 

TOTEACHISTOLEARNTWICE

I cant believe some of the things you went through at school. I have spoken to some of you and spent some very lengthy discussions after discussions and I am amazed at the things you've come up with. From reading your posts, from observing you at school, from listening to your supervisors and mentors, I feel like you have gone through a lot in a very short period of time. Nonetheless, I am proud of every single effort that you put into your experience at school. I am thankful for every mistake, every challenge, every success that you had to go through. They are all part of learning.

For your Fourth Reflection, read your peers' posts and identify at least 2 very insightful posts that you could learn from. Cite reasons.

Don't forget to come back online for Reflection 5, your last post. One last thing: all your supervisors are very proud of you. 

Wendy's Ideas for all to share!

Changes in my students & My strategies

After six weeks of teaching, the most obvious difference I notice in my students is that they become more outgoing and they dare to try. These changes come from the way I approach my students. I at all times encourage all the students to try and if they are afraid of making mistakes, I will assure them not to worry. If any student laughs at other students due to their errors, I will scold them and give them a lesson. As time goes by, all the students learn to respect their peers and gradually many have changed. They become braver and more cooperative in the class. There were almost two weeks’ examination time and after that the teaching became harder since some students got lose after the tough exam: they didn’t come to the class or they couldn’t focus on the lesson. Therefore, I have designed several games in every lesson with certain purpose in order to achieve meaningful learning while having fun. 
For instance, “tongue twister” game is to enhance students’ pronunciation; “idiom” is good for expanding students’ English knowledge and enriching their language; “categorization of content” helps to improve their reading skills. “English songs” are incredibly great to attract students’ attention and I focus on the meaning of the lyrics, not just for enlarging their vocabulary but also for stimulating their critical thinking. My experience is that the pupils generally love these games and whenever they feel high-spirited and interested, I start to teach grammar, reading or writing immediately, those relatively boring lessons. And their performance is satisfying because when they’re interested, they can focus more and better, thus, learning faster. So games and songs can be used at any stage. We should be flexible about using games meaningfully and accordingly based on students’ proficiency level. My students now feel excited to have English classes because they never feel bored or feel like wasting time and the majority of them participate actively in the class. 

Pei Pei: of managing a bunch of really proficient kids

For the first three weeks in school, I started by doing observations in class. Not only did I learn about delivering lessons effectively, I learnt about classroom management as well - a very crucial part of making the whole lesson a success because no one wants to teach in a class where all the students are doing other work and students who are interested to learn will not be comfortable in a noisy classroom as well.

Through the observations, I find that lessons in school is still very traditional, very teacher-centered. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is altogether a bad thing. It's just that now since we are moving towards PBS, I feel that lessons need to be more colourful/vibrant and engaging to students at the same time. This makes me feel that I want to focus more on student-centered activity like presentations when I start teaching later in the same week.

My mentor made me teach during the first week itself because no matter how many times I observe, I can only get so much experience, she said that once I start teaching the experience that I get will be totally different and I will learn more when I actually teach. I really agree with her because standing in front of the class to deliver a lesson is totally different from being a listener at the back. Now that it's been sometime, I'm glad that she made me start early because I have more time to experiment and improve myself at the same time :)

For the first literature lesson, I taught them about imagery. Students are divided into groups and each group get an imagery from the poem In the Midst of Hardship. They were given drawing blocks, colour pencils/pens, coloured papers and also newspapers for them to illustrate the imagery that they got. They are supposed to make the other groups guess which imagery they are illustrating.

From this lesson, I can see that MOST of the students are enjoying the activity as it gives them the freedom to express their creativity. Boy they were really creative, they make tools and props out of the newspaper when I was only expecting them to paint a picture. From this lesson I learnt that I can test out more fun and creative activities with this class, as they are very proficient in English and they enjoy presentations, which is really becoming one of my strategy to get the students to involve themselves.

I can see that even the passive students participate once their friends start to do so, which is comforting to me because at least, they are participating in my lesson, good start, I thought to myself :)

I think that one of my challenge in teaching a class with a very high proficiency is that I need to constantly look for interesting and challenging materials which will still provide meaningful learning for the students while engaging their minds and concentration in class at the same time. I tried looking for materials which are not found in the textbooks or workbooks. I research online to find more resources which I can use. There are many lesson plans online but most of it are not suitable so I usually look for interesting articles and create my own worksheets most of the time that can cater to my students' level. Creating my own worksheet was the hardest part T__T because I need to create worksheet which is meaningful and challenging for HIGH proficiency students! Which is not easy, given that I'm not that proficient myself :(

Sometimes when I'm lost for ideas, I will discuss with my partner to look at more possibilities. Being a teacher, one have to always look around for new resources AND also for helping hands so that when you feel that you are falling, you have hands that will pull you up again. In this case of T.Practice, discuss with your mentor, partner and even the other senior teachers if you face any difficulty, surely they are more than willing to help if you ask!

And yes, there are really some naughty/mischievous students who will always twist my words into other meanings and make the class laugh! Although they make it harder for me to manage the class, but I enjoy having them as they make the class more lively - which I really appreciate as I feel that a class which is too silent is boring and it somewhat shows that students are not really interested!

So just how I tackle these talkative kids at the back of the class? Like what I did during the day Dr.Adele observed me, I usually will just pay attention to what they want to say, and I let them to have the chance to speak because you should never restrict your students from giving response no matter what their response might be!

My strategy is that I will listen to what they have to say, and if they say something related to the question I asked or something which is decent, I will give my response to their answer. BUT, if what they say has got nothing to do with my question, I will ask them to say it out loud to the class then I will ask the class what do they think of their naughty/mischievous friends' response to my question.

Most of the time, the rest of the class are helpful and cooperative with me and these naughty ones will get their lesson because their own friends will start to question them back and ask them to explain their response/answer and they will be lost for words and sometimes they even feel shy! :D

I think it works because every time I do that, no one dare to mess with me again. However, I think there should be new strategies because some of them seem to be not affected at all by this and this trick won't work forever.

Therefore, in my opinion, I still think that classroom management is one of the most challenging part of a lesson and I will strive to improve!

Wang Yi: Give me one more week!

Sixth week! Everything is going fine. I just want to say "Give me one more week!" I wish I can spend more time with my girls. I have already taught them more than one month, in the first two or three weeks, to be honest, I felt nervous before I went into the classroom, almost every class. I felt it was a task for me. Compared to that, now I'm kind of looking forward to teaching them, I started to enjoy my teaching here.

In the third week, our school had a retirement party for one of the teachers. Girls performed a lot during the concert. They sang songs, danced, even prepared a small drama, and also the impressive speech. I still remembered one sentence that the girl said "A good teacher is not teaching from the book, she/he is teaching from the heart" (to all of my fellows). I felt sooo lucky that I got the chance to attend the activity like this. We are just slowly into Assunta's life.

Our school's AV room is very nice. It helps me a lot in my teaching. Their teachers do not bring them there frequently. So girls were all excited when I taught them there. They like funny videos and colourful power points. Maybe all of them are girls, it is easy to cheer them up by only using some beautiful photos. I found that they will  concentrate morein the AV room than the normal classroom. One time I showed them a video at the end of the class, the most popular Korean song "Gangnam Style"'s MV to them, it was a reward, all of them did well in the class. The girls were like on the top of the world. Some of them even stood up and started to dance. Besides the videos and songs, I tried so many ways to attract their attention. Like using word cards. One of my lessons before was about 'how to write a short story'. There were five basic elements of a story. I prepared 8 colorful word cards and pasted them all on the whiteboard, and asked girls to pick up five from them. And the class control is more and more easy for me.

Here is a new problem I faced. Students do not like to do their homeworks, and cannot submit their exercise books or essay books on time. No matter how many times you mentioned in the class, some of them will just forget and ignore you. Other teachers in my office said you just scold them! But I cannot scold them like the other teachers did. I myself am still a student, I understand their thoughts and feelings. My friends, tell me the way how you deal with these kind of things please. Share with me your strategies.

Form 2's final exam will start  this Friday, all of my observations are completed. I can relax myself a little bit. I hope I can get a chance to observe my friends' school. Good luck to all of you.

Good night Dr. Adelina and my fellow friends.

Wang Lin: of lifelong learning

Six weeks of our practicum have passed and I hope all of our fellows are doing fine. For the past few weeks, two observations were respectively done by my supervisor and mentor. The feedbacks they gave were constructive and I discovered the weakness from my own lessons. We have to admit that many things happen in a classroom. No matter how systematically we prepare our lessons, they may not be implemented as expected. Therefore, we are always required to make wise decisions on whether all the students are actively involved in the lesson we prepared. Yet it is not easy to engage both good and weak students effectively at the same time. The suggestion my mentor gives me is getting students work in groups and assign the specific tasks to each of the group. It normally works because students can be more focused in a group rather than a whole class. In addition, visual stimuli are absolutely necessary in attracting students’ attention. Kids as well as teenagers are always interested in the colorful and intriguing things.

When I started my teaching practice at the very beginning, I often found it a headache to deal with disruptive students. And undoubtedly, there is always at least a group of talkative students in each class. However, the more I get to know them, the clearer I realize that they are excellent or even talented. And I understand when students are progressing at different pace, I have to give them work from basic to challenging so that everyone can participate in the learning process. Lastly, we have to make sure that students have gone through every important aspect as some repetition is essential to enhance their learning.

Fortunately, students are busy having their exams these weeks. I temporarily feel a sense of relief. The routine for everyday is either invigilating examinations or relieving a class. Because there is no teaching during the examination weeks, I make good use of time to learn from other teachers in the school. Through their experiences, I can tell experienced teachers should be informative and knowledgeable. And most importantly, they are encouraging, responsible and caring. So never stop learning, and never stop improving!

Best regards,

Wang Lin



Wang Siting: of depression and growth

Hello, everyone.

How is the teaching? This is the sixth week of our practicum. I am sure that each of us has gained the useful experience. We not only get to know the students but also know ourselves better. During this period, we focused on how to teach and considered what materials could be properly used in the classroom. The ultimate goal is to attract students’ attention so that it can help increase their interest in learning English. What I found these days was that students like colorful things in their learning process and they like crosswords very much. So, providing more visual aids or crosswords in our teaching could be a useful way to help students gain knowledge.

My supervisor and mentor have respectively observed me once. They all gave me so many helpful suggestions. My supervisor, Dr. Nanik, suggested that I should try to attract students’ attention immediately at the beginning of the lesson. Besides that, she also advised me that it is always better to ask students to guess the meaning of the words instead of explaining the vocabulary directly. My mentor suggested me giving one or more challenging questions to the students, even though you know students’ level is not so high. I will improve my lesson based on their advice in the future.

Things will not always smooth sailing. We have to face various difficulties . During the teaching. I felt frustrated sometimes and questioned myself. The things you fully prepared for students may not feel interested; the lessons may not be conducted ideally. But, on the bright side, we can find our weaknesses this way. It helps us to be stronger and stronger. The weaknesses make us depressed; however, it makes us grow at the same time. Make our spiritual world more powerful.

Besides that, students’ final exam has started already. My job is to monitor the examination (Form 2 students). When I look at them, it made me recall my schooltime. Truthfully, hope my students can do well in their exams.

 After the exams, I have to continue my teaching task for two more weeks. Hope that I could be better than before. Also, all the best, my friends.

Sincerely,

Wang Siting