History
Even though this was only the second week of my formal History lessons with my students, I would say that on the whole I felt a strong sense of achievement. This was primarily because I was very confident that I had effectively won over all my H2 History students and gained their acceptance of me as their teacher. Having already left behind a relatively good impression during the first week of lecture and tutorials, I was very pleased with the conduct of my lecture in which students were able to learn something meaningful and also enjoy the learning process at the same time. I came to realise that inserting interesting anecdotes jokes into the lecture was one of my key strengths in being able to hold the students’ attention throughout the lecture. While I again overestimated the time available to cover my intended lecture content, it was unquestionably a highly positive teaching episode for me.
For my tutorials with the H2 students, I could sense the beginning of a strong rapport between me and my students as they proved to be increasingly open to sharing their opinions and participating in class discussions. My teaching style evidently appealed to them, as I had a distinctive preference for using interesting animations and pictures in my visually impressive Prezi presentations. When coupled with my ability to liven up the lessons with interesting and relevant historical anecdotes, I certainly believed that I had discovered the perfect formula that was ideally suited to my personal teaching style and beliefs. The next challenge for me would be to improve on my questioning techniques in order to better stimulate students’ critical thinking skills during my lessons.
The one major blot on my experience this week was my first tutorial with the H1 students. In many respects, it was a relatively demoralising experience as I did not get the feeling that the students had accepted me as their teacher. At times I really struggled to get them to concentrate on my lesson, mainly due to the rather dry and technical nature of the tutorial topic. The hot weather and relatively poor ventilation in the classroom did not help matters either. This was my first teaching experience with a H1 History class and it was undoubtedly a massive challenge for me, both in terms of teaching content and pedagogy. Nevertheless, one bright spot was the willingness of a few students to ask me questions and clarify their doubts, which in the process allowed me to ascertain that I had pitched the lesson appropriately at their level of understanding. My next step would be to think of ways to try and engage their interest in the tutorial class so as to facilitate the teaching and learning process for both teacher and students.
Project Work
This week I observed my first Project Work (PW) lecture in PJC. The focus of the lecture was a step-by-step guide to using certain information technology (IT) tools, specifically Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Boolean operators in internet search engines. Clearly this was an extremely dry topic for both teachers and students who were familiar with these tools, but the fact that this lecture had to be conducted in the first place drummed home an important learning point for me: we should never have a blanket assumption that all students are necessarily IT-savvy and proficient in the use of various IT tools. Thus, however boring the lecture may be, it was still relevant to the students’ PW assignment.
The PW tutorial was a lot more interesting, as I got the opportunity to be the co-assessor for the students’ presentations of their mini-PW projects (which served as a form of preparation for the actual PW assignment). While the quality of their different groups’ ideas differed widely, what struck me most was the ability of the students to deliver generally fluent and confident oral presentations, particularly in terms of the pace of their presentations, pronunciations, enunciations and intonations. Many of them also demonstrated clear evidence of having done extensive preparations and rehearsals for their individual presentations, which certainly bode well for their handling of the actual PW assignment after the term break.
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