WEEK TEN REFLECTIONS (30/4/2012 – 4/5/2012)

This is the last week of my practicum. As such, I will use this opportunity to do an overall reflection of my practicum experience. In the first place, I have to admit that being a practicum teacher is completely different from a contract teacher. Last year, I had no need to plan my own lessons and generally only had to adhere to the instructions / lesson plans of my mentoring teachers. However, as a practicum teacher, I had to take charge of the entire JC1 H2 History cohort and plan for both my lecture and tutorial lessons. Undoubtedly, this was an immensely challenging task, but it was sweetened by the fact that I could assume personal ownership of teaching the JC1 Southeast Asian History, and the firm demonstration of my Cooperating Teacher’s confidence in me despite my lowly trainee status.

In addition, I was given a first taste of the full job scope of a full-fledged teacher. Other than my routine teaching responsibilities, I also had to be involved in CCAs and other ad hoc or regular school committees. Such non-academic commitments (such as preparing for the Humanities Carnivale 2012) were at times extremely time consuming and ran the risk of distracting me from my key teaching duties. Similarly, the need to bring students out for CCA competitions also served to minimise the free time available for me to do detailed lesson planning, forcing me to juggle between my desire to focus solely on teaching and the need to fulfil the necessary roles and responsibilities which the school expected of me. In short, I fully realised the importance of prioritising my time as a full-fledged teacher, particularly as the rising frequency of student consultations further reduced the relatively free time-slots which I had briefly enjoyed during the first few weeks of practicum.

Finally, I was really happy to be able to establish a smooth and solid rapport with my students, without which my confidence as a practicum teacher would probably have been severely shaken. After all, it is my strong belief that a good student-teacher relationship can make or break my teaching career and fundamentally determine whether the teaching profession is suitable for me over the long term. In this respect, the surprising lack of a generation gap between me and my students worked in my favour, allowing me to present myself as an open-minded, youthful and energetic teacher to the highly impressionable students. Hopefully, I will be able to retain this energetic drive and continuous passion for teaching long after the conclusion of my practicum.

WEEK NINE REFLECTIONS (23/4/2012 – 27/4/2012)

History

This week’s tutorial sessions were sorely devoted to conducting my first essay test for the students. As such, practically no teaching took place. As for my lecture, I was able to wrap up the topic on pre-war nationalism in Vietnam and thereby completed the minimum ‘A’ level requirements of teaching three countries (in this case Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam) for the topic on pre-war nationalism in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, I realised that I might not be able to complete the case study of the Philippines during my last week of practicum, therefore the need to request for my Cooperating Teacher’s assistance to wrap up the lesson on my behalf. Certainly, the imminent end of practicum could turn out to be more disruptive than initially expected, especially when we finally grew into de facto full-fledged teachers over the ten weeks.

    

Project Work

   

For PW this week, the focus was on reiterating the requirements of the Group Project Proposal and providing useful hints and tips on how to refine the students’ preliminary ideas.

WEEK EIGHT REFLECTIONS (16/4/2012 – 20/4/2012)

History

The focus of this week’s tutorials was to provide relevant feedback to students on how to improve their skills in writing essay paragraphs, as well as to teach them how to write introductions and conclusions. Since essay writing constitutes the bread-and-butter of History, I found it necessary to place a strong emphasis in this area, having already devoted four tutorial sessions for this purpose. While students demonstrated their ability to construct the basic essay structure, it was clear that they still needed much hands-on practice in order to improve. As such, students are required to sit for their first essay test in Southeast Asian history next week to motivate them to consolidate and synthesise what they have learnt thus far. This will serve as a timely assessment of the extent to which they have gleaned useful learning points from my lessons and, at the same time, provide critical feedback for the efficacy of my teaching pedagogies to date.

Project Work

   

For this week’s PW lessons, the focus was on guiding students in refining their research methodology as well as teach them the importance of research etiquette. Students were taught key pointers about the conduct of interviews, such as identifying the appropriate candidates and also the need to come up with well-thought and well-crafted questions. Students were also reminded of the importance of the pre-interview preparation, which included doing a thorough background research on their interviewees and taking relevant safety precautions in the process of conducting the actual interviews. Ultimately, students had to comprehend the need for good impression management and its applicability to their future lives as working adults.

 

Ten-Pin Bowling

This was my second observation of the ten-pin bowling CCA and it proved to be as uneventful as last week. Basically, the basic administrative work of the teacher-in-charge was clear cut, which would make the job of running this CCA a relatively smooth and hassle-free process. 

WEEK SEVEN REFLECTIONS (9/4/2012 – 13/4/2012)

History

For this week’s tutorials, the emphasis was on continuing with the lecture (on the topic of pre-war nationalism in Vietnam) and basically providing students with the overall analytical framework to tackle this new topic. The aim was for them to bear in mind the underlying factors, especially the impact of key external events such as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, that contributed to the origins and development of pre-war nationalism in Vietnam, following which students would be able to identify and relate to the specific Vietnamese nationalist organisations that were directly inspired by the key external developments. The final 20 minutes of each tutorial was devoted to conducting a fill-in-the-blanks test on pre-war nationalism in Burma, which would help students to consolidate and synthesise what they had already learnt to date about the topic in question.

     

Project Work

For PW, the focus this week was on guiding students in the planning of their research process. The PW teachers introduced to students the four primary research and data collection methods, namely observations, experiments, surveys and interviews. As well as getting students to acquaint themselves with the research process, much attention was also paid to assessing the reliability of the data collected as student needed to be aware of the flaws of a biased research methodology. The PW tutorials were devoted to individual consultation sessions regarding the students’ proposed preliminary ideas for their PW.

     

Ten-Pin Bowling

As part of the rotating basis for our CCA observations (as part of the NIE practicum requirements), I switched from Hockey (Boys) to Ten-Pin Bowling. In many respects, this was a much more comfortable (at least from the perspective of the teacher-in-charge) and relatively low-risk CCA compared to hockey. Moreover, being an indoor sport, it was not subjected to the exigencies of weather conditions, whereas the competition schedule for hockey had to be constantly adjusted due to poor weather causing games to be postponed. The only problem for ten-pin bowling was the need to conduct training at an external avenue, which necessarily posed transport and related logistical issues for the teacher-in-charge.     

WEEK SIX REFLECTIONS (2/4/2012 – 6/4/2012)

History

This week I had my second and final lesson observation by my NIES. The focus of my tutorial sessions was on hands-on practice in the writing of essay paragraphs using the PEEL framework. Having conducted an introductory lesson on the writing of essay paragraphs during last week’s tutorials, I was keen to see the extent to which the students had internalised the relevant requirements and techniques. In this respect, I decided to get the students to form into small groups to tackle an essay question and construct paragraph responses in accordance with the PEEL framework. This was in fact my first attempt at introducing cooperative learning into my lessons, and the outcome was even better than I had expected. Despite my initial concern about possible classroom management issues, the students proved to be highly motivated in dealing with their group task. I was hugely impressed with their serious attitude and firm focus during their group discussions, which was reflected in the high quality of their final paragraph responses. Certainly, there remained much room for improvement in the formulation of their arguments (e.g. presentation of their key points in a clear and succinct manner), but it was evident that I had generally succeeded in getting them to integrate the PEEL framework into their writing styles, which will undoubtedly prove useful to them in the writing of essays over the long run.

   

Project Work

For the PW lecture this week, the emphasis was on teaching students about the need to avoid plagiarism and how to do proper citations and references. While this may seem to be a common-sense task for me in view of my university experience, I fully recognised how alien this was to most of the students. However, this topic would only come in useful when the students had to write their final group papers towards the end of the PW cycle, by which time they would probably need a refresher course in this area. As for the PW tutorial, the students were required to critique their group-mates’ preliminary ideas. However, as far as I could see, there appeared to be no proper evaluative framework for the students to do a systematic critique of the various proposals, which could limit their ability to come up with constructive criticisms and/or suggestions. Hence this may be one area for me to consider should I need to conduct a similar PW lesson in the future.

     

Hockey (Boys)

This was my second week observing the Hockey (Boys), after which I would be switching over to Ten-Pin Bowling for the next two weeks. Since the boys would be having their first competitive game next Monday, they were particularly motivated and hyped-up during their training sessions. In fact, they even wanted to conduct additional training sessions during the long weekend, but this was understandably vetoed by the teacher-in-charge since the boys would obviously need time to recuperate for their competition. Looking at the boys’ sense of confidence and strong determination to do well, I sincerely hope that this would be effectively translated into their actual performances on the pitch in a real competitive environment. After all, the fate of their hockey team literally lies in their hands.   

WEEK FIVE REFLECTIONS (26/3/2012 – 30/3/2012)

History

This week I had my first lesson observation by my second Cooperating Teacher Ms Nurashikin. The focus of the tutorials was introducing my students to the basic requirements and techniques of writing essay paragraphs using the PEEL framework. Clearly this was a relatively dry and technical topic and, although a necessary component of the History syllabus, may end up boring the students after a short while. As such, my solution was to insert some thinking exercises (e.g. evaluations of sample topic sentences) into the lessons to get the students actively involved, as well as assess how much they had understood the lesson content. In the event, my students generally proved to be highly motivated and showed great interest in the lesson, probably because they understood the importance of mastering essay writing skills in the History examinations. I was particularly pleased by how my students were able to quickly grasp the essence of writing essay paragraphs and ask highly relevant and intelligent questions about the topic. As such, my next step would therefore be to incorporate more hands-on practice in order to hone their ability to write good essay paragraphs and internalise the skills and techniques over time..

Project Work

For the PW lecture and tutorials this week, the emphasis was on familiarising the students with the essential components of the Preliminary Ideas (PI) as well as the assessment criteria. In this respect, the PW teachers discussed the different PI components in great detail, paying great attention to the importance of innovation and originality, and also showed students some sample PI formats for reference. One particularly interesting way of inducting the students into the PI process was to get them to evaluate a sample PI proposal in terms of its originality, feasibility and manageability. From their subsequent group presentations, it was obvious that the students were good in highlighting the flaws in the proposal but had much room for improvement in coming up with constructive solutions to remedy the flaws. Hence, the latter area is probably something which the PW teachers and the students have to consciously work on over the coming weeks.      

Hockey (Boys)

This was the first week when I observed the responsibilities of a teacher taking charge of a CCA as part of my NIE requirements. My initial feelings were one of dread, as the training sessions were frequent (twice or thrice per week) and usually lasting till late in the evening. Moreover, the incidence of injuries was pretty high due to the nature and competitiveness of the sports itself. However, having participated in their team talks (conducted after each training session), I was truly touched by the students’ dedication and devotion to hockey and inspired by their determination to do well in the upcoming inter-school competition. An added motivation for them is the danger of the disbanding of the hockey team should they perform poorly, primarily due to budget constraints. Therefore, I have resolved to try my best to assist the boys to the best of my ability and forge close bonds with them, so as to give them the full confidence of my support as their teacher in their valiant endeavours.