Teaching Practical Reflection : Week 4

It has been a month since I started teaching in CHS and I am still alive, thankfully.

So what happened last week? We focused on few things :  past tense, continuous tense and drama elements. For last week I experimented on a new approach in class by giving them more freedom in speaking and communicating in class. I noticed in the past few weeks, my students are not really giving any response whenever I ask them questions in class. But they communicate just fine among their friends. And I realized that maybe I am constricting them when it comes to talking in class because I am expecting the correct answer and not giving them the freedom to answer in from their point of view. Okay so I drafted out activities where they have the freedom to talk whatever they want in condition that they still speak in English. One of the activities was to create their own story as a class. I divide them into groups of four where they were given an element of drama each. Without consulting the other groups, they create their own points which then are combined afterwards. It was a funny and fun activity where students came up with illogical stories with adaptations from famous movies and cartoons. But most importantly, every single student spoke during the activity although I heard some native language here and there but they tried. One student even came up to me, teacher I really like this lesson. Can we do it again next week?

Another approach that I experimented was , giving instructions in class. I realized that I am not good at giving specific instructions which usually leads to a different outcome from each groups. For this, I did a simple power point slides which contains the instruction, expected outcome and time given.

 Example : Discuss on the drama element in your group. Come out with at least 4 points without referring to other group. ( 15 minutes )

What I got is similar outcome from the whole class and the students are more aware of the allocated time. So no more “ teacher what to do? / Teacher how long do we discuss this? / teacher why they discuss on different topic ? “

Next week, I’ll be experimenting on public speaking. Another problem with some of my students is that they avoid speaking in public while some would go up in front without being asked. So there’s two huge gap in communication here. I have some ideas about that but if you have any fun and interesting ideas to add on, please do.

Some questions :

1.       Do you allow students to discuss in their native language?

2.       How far can you go in teaching certain issues in class? Exp : Gender equality , Feminism etc

Will update more on that later. Toodles J