Thursday, 14 November 2013

Reflecting on My Teaching Experience



Learning Journal 2 - Week 9


Reflecting on My Teaching Experience


Introduction
A Training Programme was given to all of students (Year 1, 2, and 3) in School of Education. This Training Programme duration is four weeks which was held in a Tamil Primary School called Skeolah Jenis Kebangsaan (Tamil) Ladang Semenyih. Our given project theme was “Environment” and the objectives were to help Primary 6 students to improve reading skills, writing skills and students’ confidence in speaking. Other than achieving the objectives of this project, there was another requirement given. Students were to present on the last week (Week 4) of what they had learn during the three weeks. Consideration of this requirements, we chose our topic as “Saving the Environment” and our group planned for the students to do a short Drama performance on the Week 4 which their presentation will be to send message of how Environment could be saved. Having this view, we planned our lesson on Week 2 to read about Saving the Environment and on Week 3 will tell the students to write about the script for short Drama performance.

For this teaching training programme, most lessons’ activities were based on Visual, Auditory, and Kinaesthetic (VAK) teaching styles and some consideration of Multiple Intelligence (MI) and Experiential Learning will be provided under the results and discussion parts.

VAK Learning Styles & Application
There were about 70 students and were divided into three groups; so there were 23 students in our group. Each group consisted about 8 teachers which were Year 1, 2, and 3 students. In our group, there were two Year 3 students, two Year 1 students and four Year 2 students (including me). The four weeks are on the Fridays; 4th October (Week 1), 11th October (Week 2), 18th October (Week 3) and 25th October (Week 4). So, Week 1, 2, and 3 are teaching weeks and Week 4 is Presentation day.

Before our lessons start, our group had always met earlier to plan a lesson plan. Our lessons were mostly based on VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic) teaching and learning styles.

Week 1 (Introductory Lesson)
For the first week, it was an introductory lesson where we had applied a lot of mixture activities of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic. These providing VAK activities enabled my students to become active in class whereby one activity of this week lesson actually included the three learning styles. The activity is called “Sad and Happy Face Earth”. So, here a ‘Sad Face Earth’ (picture) will be shown to students and question them “why do Earth has a Sad Face?” Students were required to write their answers in Memo Pads and stick it on to the board. In addition, the same happening for ‘Happy Face Earth’; the question would be “How to make Happy Face Earth?” Therefore, by looking at this activity, this application, students write their answers through visualising the Sad-Face and Happy-Face Earth and students will be able to listen to teachers’ explanations by looking at the Earth Faces. Finally, this week’s activities include a lot of kinaesthetic activities but the main activity was Deborah’s Game. Deborah’s game purpose is to learn each other’s names. So it includes movements from one student to another student by calling out the names of the students. Students were able to learn each other names quickly during kinaesthetic activity (Deborah’s game); in fact I also learned students’ names by playing this game. Therefore, applying VAK teaching styles allowed students to experience somewhat VAK learning activities which enabled them to learn effectively.

Before our group started to teach the students of this Week 1, we had planned to observe at the students’ learning abilities (performances in class). So, based on this Week 1 activities’ observation of students’ performances, we were able to acknowledge and address issues with learner differences when designing and carrying out our classroom activities for future.

Week 2 (Reading Lesson)
According to students’ learning ability observed from Week 1, we had divided the students into three groups of learning abilities; high, average and lower ability groups. For this week, we did not include so much of kinaesthetic teaching styles as Week 2’s main purpose was to read about environmental issues in the world and gain information/ideas for their presentation (Week 4). There were only two hours for this week, so teachers in each group prepared their lesson with pre-teach vocabulary session, before reading session, reading questions session, reading article and answering the questions provided in the worksheet. Each group will have different topic and level of articles and the worksheets. In this two hours, students will be applied with mostly on visual and auditory learning styles. Students will visualise the mah-jong papers written of the pre-teach vocabularies and learn those words. In addition, some teachers will be showing a real concrete example of the vocabularies so that they will have longer memory on the learning vocabularies. Furthermore, auditory teaching styles will occur during Feedback session which is when teachers discuss the answer of worksheets with the students. Teachers gave feedback about whether the students are wrong or right; if the students’ answer was wrong, then the teacher will teach mostly by verbally. 

Week 3 (Writing Week)
The activities in this week was mainly to watch a movie, Wall-E, in order to make students visualise the concept of characters and roles, and to think and write a full script of a scenarios for their Drama performance on the Week 4 (Presentation). So, here we have used visual and auditory style to begin with students’ script writing by watching a movie. The application of visual and auditory resulted a successful flow of lesson as students learned the concepts of characters and roles and students were able to give out ideas and discussed effectively for their performances later. By the end of the lesson, we were able to write the whole script for the drama and had a little time to practice for a while. The association with the learning styles and our lesson planning was effective again.

Results
In my group, the overall objectives were met. We did try our best to improve our student’s reading skills by dividing them according to their similar learning abilities, and did work on to improve their writing skills by making them visualise the whole before start writing. Lastly, during the Presentation on Week 4, I could see that our students were more confident in speaking when I first met them.

For the three weeks, our group’s teaching was guided with experiential learning where the three weeks’ teaching were to reinforce students on what they have learned and perform on Week 4. This planning accordingly did end up well that students had performed it greatly!

Discussion
Multiple Intelligence (MI) was firstly proposed in 1983 by Howard Gardner which had been developing over the years; whereby he mentioned that there are 9 multiple intelligences: Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Musical, Spatial, Bodily-kinaesthetic, Naturalistic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Existential. Over the years, MI has affected hugely on educational fields. MI allows educators to distinguish students' weakness and strength intelligence which helps the teachers to focus on specific areas for their students.

Our group did not apply Multiple Intelligence (MI) into three lessons. It was not a necessary or a need to apply to get a better results or something. It was actually not so effective for the three weeks. So, my stance on Multiple Intelligence (MI) is neutral. I think to propose this area of theory had given great improvements on the fields of teaching and beliefs of learning. In my opinion, as a future teacher, being aware of my students’ intelligences is an important aspect in teaching. However, I believe it is not a necessary to tell students that they are in this particular intelligent. In my belief, as a teacher it is important to varify their teachings according to students' intelligence. 

Despite having my stands on MI in neutral, based on my teaching experience for three weeks and having performance on Week 4, I had felt some critiques on Multiple Intelligences (MI). Firstly, MI did not have much impact on our lessons; I felt that MI was unnecessary. The classes went smoothly without having to categorise students’ intelligences. Secondly, it was difficult to find each students’ MI as there were only three days. The three days had also only focused to enhance English proficiency (reading, writing and speaking) so the lessons did not have any areas of mathematics or science to divide them accordingly which was difficult to judge who student had bodily-kinaesthetic, or logical-mathematic, or interpersonal and etc. Lastly, my teaching experience enable me to be aware that what’s going on in real life is more complex and the theories does not real fit in real life.

Conclusion
This field teaching training programme did enriched my understanding of the content of the module where I had my on stand on each learning styles (VAK, MI and Experiential learning). In my point of view, the application of VAK teaching styles for teachers in class would be great as it enables students to learn in variety ways. In addition, if teachers were to apply MI into the class, in my belief, teachers should know it in their heart and not tell the students, and unconsciously use the MI into the teaching. This is because I think students should have multiple intelligences not only focusing on one intelligence and also let students find their own strong intelligence to improve on it by themselves. The experiential learning was effective as it as associable with our three weeks teaching and final Presentation (Week 4). So the three week teaching enabled students to enhance their English proficiency which was shown by performing on Week 4. Overall, through this opportunity with applying on the theories, I learned a lot and it was really meaningful as it was my first time teaching in School. 

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