Week 3 Reflective writing

(Appendix 1: Sharing Session)

    Getting others' insights is important. It shows how well someone knows the subject and may give you further clarification on the topic that is being discussed. Dr. Lina's class for the week started with a sharing session from everyone in the class regarding our progress on the weekly blogs. The questions asked by Dr. Lina encompasses a wide range of topics from the students' insights on their destiny to explaining the 5Rs to our class, to the take away of the previous class sessions. I was tasked to share if seeking help is important and in my opinion, asking for help can be a huge relief. The sharing session is a great way to see students' understanding and reminded me of when I used to ask my students how they were doing mentally or what they were feeling that day and ask if they remembered what we had learned the previous week. This helped me to understand where my students stood in regards to their academic and emotional well being. For me, the most significant aspect of asking for help and asking someone about their perspective and well being is that it bridges the gap between teachers and students and overall sets the 'mood' of the classroom for that session. Furthermore, teachers' emotional and social competence is important to create a conducive, safe environment for the students to express themselves and to promote the necessary developmental skills and outcomes (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). In addition, asking for help can be rewarding and make you realize that you aren't truly alone in this world and that there are people who can and are willing to help you academically, and be there for you emotionally. For future reference, I will continue to implement the sharing session in my future classroom as it will help me to better understand my students hence I can respond accordingly to their needs. 

(Appendix 2: 6 Major teaching strategies)

    As the session went on, Dr Lina explained about the 6 major teaching strategies which includes graphic organizers, manipulatives, reciprocal teaching, assessment for learning, interactive teaching, and cooperative learning. As shown(Appendix 2), graphic organizers is the most popular and highest ranked teaching strategy among students and cooperative learning, the lowest. This shows children retain more information when it is presented in a concise manner with pictures or graphs to help them digest easily. For example, students are more likely to pay attention to presentation slides with pictures than to slides with long sentences. I believe children are motivated by pictures and graphs as the human brain is trained to search for aesthetic things and a colorful draft is more aesthetically pleasing than a slide with long, boring explanation. Similarly, students that I had the privilege to teach, also preferred to look at pictures as it helps them to understand the instructions better than verbal instruction. I have realized how important graphic organizers are in the classroom and will continue to implement it in future classrooms. 

 

    

(Appendix 3: Jigsaw method)

 

    After we were introduced to the 6 major teaching strategies, each group had to assign one teaching strategy per person in the group and move on with doing the jigsaw activity. I chose the whole class interactive teaching/learning. Unfortunately there was few information in the Evidence based teaching course document, hence my jigsaw group turned to searching information about the topic in google. What we found was that whole class interactive teaching/learning is that language is created by the whole class in an interactive and collaborative way. Initially, I felt this method was one of the best teaching method for a classroom as it implements critical thinking among the students, however, after researching about it, I can understand why this is one of the lowest ranked teaching strategies in the Evidence based teaching course as it could be difficult for primary school students to fully understand or come to a common conclusion. 

 

(Appendix 4: Written 6 Major strategies) 

 

Despite that, I do believe that whichever teaching strategies that we choose to use in the classroom, depends heavily on the students' needs and which strategies that works the best with the classroom itself. This reminds me of  my high school days where I would understand certain subjects better when the teacher used cooperative learning rather than other strategies and vice versa. This is due to the fact that fact based subjects like science, mathematics and the like requires group work for the experiments and just for general asking as students are more likely to ask their peers about a math problem rather than going to the teacher directly at first as they trust their friends to explain the problem with a chance of them being wrong, as their fear of getting scolded by the teacher is bigger than their need to understand the concept. 

References

Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The Prosocial Classroom: Teacher Social and Emotional Competence in Relation to Student and Classroom Outcomes. Review of educational research, 79(1), 491-525. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325693