Amala's Reflection #5
Six weeks have flown by very fast and now we are moving on to our seventh week of our Teaching Practicum 2. I must say that these six weeks so far have been both a pleasant experience and at the same time, an eye-opener for me in terms of understanding the students' capability of relating to Literature in English.
Firstly, I am teaching Stella Kon's 9 Classroom Plays to the Secondary Two students from the Normal Academic Stream and what I have realized as of now is that many of them are very disengaged when it comes to the Literature lessons because of their lack of interest for the subject itself. I heard about students' lack of interest for Literature as a subject but only through my Teaching Practicum 2, I have witnessed it myself.
The practice that was being practised in the three classes before I started teaching them was, the teacher wrote all the points in a very precise and deatiled manner such that the students were comfortable with that practice. Also, they were required to only refer to the points and write their answers in prose forms for their weekly assignements for each text. However, I decided to use my own teaching style by only giving them the brief points and evidence for the questions so that they had to think of their own explanation or elaboration for the assignment. Through this, I thought that they will become independent learners who can be responsible and think of their own answers. However, the feedback that my Cooperating Tutor gave me was that this practice made it tougher for the students to do their assignment as they were used to the teacher giving them all the answers.
Personally, I feel that this makes the students feel very spoon-fed such that they might suffer in the examination when they previously were given all answers by the teacher. My objective is to ensure that students take responsibility for their learning and deviate from being spoon-fed by the teachers. However, I aam concerned about whether they will be independent learners who will think and write their own answers and have a two way interaction in class.
I really hope to see changes in the students such that they take the initiative to at least find for a few answers that will help in running the discussion for the questions on the text. At the moment, there is only a handful of them who conscientiously put in the effort to complete their handout prior to the lesson whereby I am aware that there are a few who might write a few points for the sake of writing or even copy from the others.
Hi Amala, good attempt to get the students to think. Hopefully, when you get the chance to set your own tone for your own class, you will be able to get students to think independently right from the start of the year. The class culture is often set at the beginning of the year and starting with the class at the beginning of the year always gives you a better chance of encouraging the kind of desired class culture you are interested in.
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