b.
Hi, I hope everyone is coping with practicum well. Anyway, I would like to share with you my experience from teaching practicum. I have learnt a lot from my TP and they included insights about my identity as a teacher and also some lesson learnt about classroom management and lesson delivery.
I would begin by telling you that this TP has helped me "find" who I am as a teacher. Last TP I was the overly-strict and serious teacher and whenever I tried to slip into who I am naturally, I find it difficult and students thought I was trying to hard. NIE has always taught us to be always strict when you start and with me that tip has never worked out. So what I do is to start nice and firm. I greet students say "hi how are you" all friendly but when I talk to them about discipline and about schoolwork, I get extremely serious. I frown real hard and show them I really mean business and then go back to being "normal" whenever I start teaching again. Whenever students go against any of the rules or do not meet my expectations, I will turn into this monster and students don't like it and usually behave better because they don't like that side of me.
Of course, I am still developing as a teacher and my identity as a teacher is something I still struggle with from time-to-time. How do I teach Lit the way I want but also maintain the balance between being fun and goofy and being serious and firm. As a result, I have had CTs telling me that I can be inconsistent because when I am nice "I am too nice" and when I am strict "I am too strict". So striking the right balance is still something of a struggle but I have learnt a lot about my capabilities and identity as a teacher and in the meantime I will continue to work on this.
Another thing I would like to share is my experience of the actual lesson delivery. I enjoy teaching Literature because I can run with different activities and my CT is very supportive and encouraging when I do this. For the lower secondary school lessons I find that the challenge is getting students to feel engaged with the text. So my lessons will always be dramatic and loud and I have learnt that being as loud dramatic and fun is the only way I can gain students' attention especially after 1pm classes (my school ends at 3-3.30pm on Mons to Thurs). However, I have a harder time with my upper sec Lit class.
It is a class of 19 students and they are rather shy and many of the activities that I plan do not go according to plan as students are too shy and reserved to participate. Also, I found that I have to be extremely clear and slow and as my CT advised "treat them like idiots" during my explanation of jargon like couplet and sestet which to me, were very simple to understand. My lesson delivery for the upper sec is not as clear as I assume that students know things and that things are easy enough for them. As such, a challenge is to be able to teach these students in a clear but at the same time make the lesson fun and not teacher centred.
So those are my thoughts! Thanks for reading til the end and I wish you good luck in your practicum guys! A few more to go!
Hi Yati,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that it is every teacher's nightmare when you organise a speaking activity for the classroom and everybody just keep mum. However, I realised that if we set a clear expectation for our students, which is to instruct them to carry the conversation in the classroom by themselves, with the teacher being just a facilitator, we as teachers have to commit to that. They have to realise that whoever is doing the talking is doing the learning. However, I would suggest that we could do this when we have our classrooms to ourselves.
Sometimes as your teacher says we might have to start simple. I was giving a lecture on Stalin's economic policies to a sec 3 class when a student asked me what is the meaning of surplus, a term I had used in my slides. I realized then that sometimes we might be pitching our content at a very high level to them.
It is then important to make them feel confident. Have students research or come prepared to class before hand by doing a web quest. Have them present their own ideas and add on information only if neccessary. I realised that buildng the confidence of students was a big struggle.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. Good luck for the rest of the practicum.
Hello, Yati, sounds like a supportive environment you are in. It is hard finding the balance between being nice and being firm and really, being who we are/want to be. Although your class of 19 is a dream class (in terms of size), I hope you get a chance to really move them forward in terms of their learning and thinking.
ReplyDelete