Reflections 2 - Shortcomings, Here They Come!

Hi fellow bloggers! We are all moving into the seventh week of teaching practice and I am sure most of us are still enjoying every of its moment. We’ve hurdled numerous ups and downs as educators, I am inspired to read the sharings from all of you. Each of us faces different challenges and it was amazing to acknowledge ways to overcome the obstacles from all of you.

I am (thankfully) still enjoying my time in school. Not much of teaching these days as the students are having their final examinations, still I believe I have gone through worthy experiences to share with all of you. Shortcomings, sense of achievements, joys and sorrows really put colours to my otherwise monotonous teaching practice.

I am teaching two classes – 4 Angsana and 4 Dahlia. 4 Angsana is the top Science class in Form Four while 4 Dahlia is the first Sub-science class. The students’ level of proficiency is upper intermediate regardless being in different streams of classes. Most of the students are highly proficient in English writing and speaking as they communicate in English daily.

I am going to share some classroom strategies I used  to engage closely with the students. Upon first entering the classroom, I did some ice breaking activities as well as expectation settings. There were two activities I used to do ice breaking session called ‘Back-sweetalking’ and ‘My Colours, My Story’. Before playing these two games, we did  conventional self introduction like getting to know names, interests and ambitions. In Back-sweetalking,  students pasted a piece of an A4 paper behind their back and they must move around within a certain period of time writing their friends’ characteristics on their backs. Words such as ‘friendly’ and ‘nice’ are exempted as they are too cliche. For example, A thinks B is a determined person, hence A will write on the piece of paper on B’s back ‘determined’.  Then, we discussed whether what the friends said about themselves were true.

The second activity was My Colours, My Story where everyone got M&M chocolates each. Each of us told a story based on the colour. For example, red M&M was for heroic stories, brown M&M was for sad stories, yellow M&M for happy stories, blue M&M for embarrassing stories and green M&M for anything that the students did for the first time. As for me, it was compulsory for me to tell each of the story as I was the one who needed to break the ice most importantly.

After the ice breaking session, I did expectation settings session with the students. This was basically to ensure that I would manage to deliver an efficient and enjoyable lesson for the students while I myself feel at ease in conducting the lesson. First of all, I took out a list of expectation settings from myself to the students. As shown in the picture, those are the expectations I looked forward from each of them. Then, I gave each student two sticky notes which they were required to write goals and expectations from the lessons. All of them had various goals and expectations from the lessons. Having done those, both the students and I agreed to adhere to the expectations and I would try to help them to achieve their goals in the lessons. As expected, most students looked forward for ‘fun’ lessons and I planned to devise my lesson plans to meet the expectations while following the syllabus and teaching schemes.

However, after three weeks of teaching, I noticed that there was a distinction between these two classes. Students in 4 Dahlia were more verbal and active when conducting classroom activities that involved group work, presentations and performances. For example, they were eager to do role play, singing activities, lyrics composition, debates, mock bidding and drawing. On the other hand, students in 4 Angsana were more interested in intensive classroom activities such as summary and essay writing, in-depth grammar teaching and exercises as well as they preferred more serious activities like formal class presentations and discussions. I noticed this problem when I received different responses for the same activities. I experimented the activities for one week to see if my hypothesis on their preferences was right. After that one week, I asked the students if they enjoyed such activities. During this one week, I did role play, drawing and mock business summit with them. Students in 4 Dahlia claimed that they really had fun and learned a lot at the same time. They even requested for more activities and it would be best if I can have the lessons out of the classroom or the language room. They wished for more fun-type activities. 

However, the feedback that I received from 4 Angsana students were the complete opposite. The students said they were fine with the fun-type of activities once a while but most of the times they prefer total-academic activities as mentioned before. I took into considerations of their feedback as what is most important is their learning curves in the classrooms. Though these two types activities differ greatly, they are extremely impactful for each type of the students. It comes to my senses now that the definition of ‘FUN’ varies for these two type of classes.

For the following weeks, I have came out with new strategies on how to create more impactful and meaningful learning for my students. The strategies shall be explained in my Reflection 3.

Awatif Ghapar