History
This was the week when I had my first formal lesson observations from both my CT (on Tuesday) and my NIES (on Friday). Surprisingly, I did not feel apprehensive or worried about the observations and this was demonstrated in my generally smooth conduct of the lessons. This may be partly due to my increasing confidence in my teaching abilities, coupled with the intensive and extensive preparations that I had made, which naturally enhanced my self-belief as a teacher even with the formal lesson observations. Moreover, the students in the two classes being observed were by far the best of the H2 History cohort in terms of learning attitudes and aptitudes. Hence I had ample reasons to feel confident about my teaching performances in these two tutorial classes.
On another note, this was the first time that I was conducting a source inquiry lesson with the focus on teaching for historical understanding. In many respects, the lesson outcome was better than I had expected. The students were clearly familiar with the idea of using sources in the study of history as well as the incorporation of relevant contextual or background knowledge. More importantly, I was pleasantly surprised that most of them had little difficulty in reading and understanding the sources, as demonstrated in the source-based written assignments which they had to submit at the end of each tutorial lesson. Therefore, I am seriously considering infusing the use of sources into my lessons over the long term so as to inject more variety into the tutorial sessions as well as maintain the emphasis on teaching for historical inquiry, which is the fundamental basis of the history discipline.
Project Work
For PW, this was the week when the questions were released to the students. On the teachers’ part, the focus was naturally on highlighting the key requirements of PW, its assessment criteria and some important submission deadlines. Since the students’ first job was to come up with the Preliminary Ideas for their group projects, teachers had to explain clearly to students the meaningful of key terms like “innovative” and “insightful” in order to ensure that they were on the right track when brainstorming their ideas. In short, this was only the start of what for the students would surely be a long and difficult process of self-discovery and hard work to complete their PW assignments.
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