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Reflection: Learn-think-express Workshop Benjamin Tee Xin Rui

23 June - For the course attended last month, I have attended a talk given by a lecturer in Taiwan
named Chang Hui Chen. Several useful information I picked up are understanding children
behavior, the limitations of conventional teaching, teachers micro and macro teaching and also
some pedagogies to improve learning for students.
For children behavior, he explained on why students become lazier. One of the reasons is
study is less life changing anymore. Besides that, study is harder than most of the things in life
nowadays compared to basketball and games. It is normal students behave in that way. The
syllabus of the past which carry forward in the 21st century has proven to be lacking in terms of
application of context. Language learning is also less useful in daily life whereby he uses the
context of Taiwanese people does not see the necessity to learn Taiwanese native language, similar
to Hokkien. One main reason is also because teacher always ask student to do something but did
not explain the underlying reason behind it. Therefore, students do not see the importance and
eventually do not do it. The situations highlighted deeply connect to my experience as a newly
appointed teacher and answers most of the problems arisen for the past two months.
In another questions highlighted by the lecturer, why do students do not discuss academic
questions? Although the situations do not really connect to my experience, I believe this happened
and is still happening to almost every school. Students felt that mark is the essence and coupled
with traditional teaching, no curiosity is sparked leading to no academic conversations between the
students. Thus, teaching has to connect to students experience and leading to discovery for
learning to be fun.
Some of the limitations of conventional teaching includes the lack of learning material
provided by the textbook only, student inability to discuss with each other due to rigid classroom
setting, teacher centred and also the speed of information transfer is delimited by the speechs speed
given by the teacher. In my opinion, the limitation suggested are all true and self-reading is truly
the key for student to learn more. However, students attitude in learning has to be taught first
before implementing the strategy or they would easily retaliate. Soft landing approach as suggested
by the lecturer should be attempted in the initial stages.
Teachers micro and macro teaching must be at an above average level for the
implementation of this strategy. First of all, teacher has to get used to be the master of ceremony
in each and every class, letting students be in the limelight. In short, teacher should be moderating
the class. No answer is provided to students to stimulate thoughts as well. As the semester
commenced, student are reluctant to think and would prefer to stay in the comfort zone of usual
traditional teaching. I believe there is a need to assist students in seeking information before selfreading were to take place. Some students do not know the main points from the pool of
information. Teaching resources has to be complete, and teacher can use songs and encouraging
words when replying and teaching students. Voice intonation must be utilized and topic content
preparation must be suitable for target audience by ensuring the content is not too difficult for
students.

The pedagogies taught by the lecturer includes Blooms Taxonomy (revised) on thinking
skills and also Ice berg theory on emotions by Sattiere. The Blooms Taxonomy has six level of
thinking skills namely remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating.
The levels are arranged in increasing level of difficulty in which the former is lower order thinking
skills and the latter is higher order thinking skills. We learnt how to ask questions that challenges
student mind in the level suited for them. For Ice berg theory, beneath every behavior of students
lies the copings, feelings, feelings about feelings, perceptions, expectations, yearnings and self: I
am during the classroom lesson. Teacher has to be aware, acknowledge, allow, accept, act and
appreciate the students behavior in order to connect teaching for students learning.
Some of the essential steps in making the new teaching method work would be to follow
the set of introduction (whereby all students have to formally introduce to the teacher) on name,
nickname, interest, specialization and reason why pick the subject. Group divisions method are
also taught where the weak students pick the intelligent ones into their group and the average
students get to pick their own groups. The distribution is even on intelligence. Teacher also suggest
weaker students to sit near to the lanes where teacher can walk through to provide help whenever
necessary. Using marks drawn as snails can help students participation in the classroom. Reward
others instead of punishing one particular student, the highlight from teacher.
Overall, I have implemented the method to 4g but it seems that student is yet to adapt and
requested for a change. Some retaliate with strong sentiment and I assume it is because of the
competition of marks happening and some students hate to lose out. I believe I should use a soft
landing approach and for now, I will put aside the group discussion and focus on other aspects
before coming back to the groupings. The workshop has helped me to learn to be a better me in
teaching than I was before.

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