This week's blog is a reflection essay about my groups' teaching demo and is one overflowing package to be opened! As you can see in the slide image above me, my group had covered the topic of water and air pollution. My groupmates had discussed and changed our topic countless of times due to the ideas either being too broad or not in our filed. When Dr Lina announced that we had to make sure the content of our demo teaching was suitable for Year 2 tertiary students, I was quite shocked for several reasons. One of them being that my group and I had finally decided on a topic for our teaching demo, and it is the water and air pollution! We had gotten Dr Lina’s approval before the announcement of being suitable for tertiary education was made and I was quite worried about touching the more scientific aspect of the topic as no one in my group is taking an environmental science class, in addition to being worried if it would be suitable for us to teach our classmates from School of Education, School of English, and psychology if both “teachers” and “students” do not have any expertise on the more scientific matter. For my part of the solutions for air pollution, I was interested in the sensors that could be placed in high-traffic air pollution areas to combat the air pollution in the early stages (Mano et al., 2022). Other source of information that I researched about was on the low-cost solutions that can be used to combat air pollution. (Jacobson et al., 2022) and the “Solution for air pollution prevention in vehicles” (Mou et al., 2023).
My group had decided collectively that we were going
to try our best to cover as many areas as possible with the time limit that we were
given. Hence, we had created enough subtopics for each member of the group. However,
as we had a new addition to our group, it had totaled our members to seven (7)
people from the original six (6) which bumped our speaking time to only two
minutes per person instead of three minutes if we kept the original six members.
This was concerning to me as I felt 2 minutes per person was not going to be
enough when factoring in our different styles of presenting, natural pauses and/or
any technical issues we would have, This situation reminded me of my diploma
days when I had to be grouped with 10 different people for a presentation and
it was quite difficult to keep in the time limit as we basically had to rap our
parts which in turn made me question if the audience had gotten any of the
points we were presenting at that time. I came to realise that my team members
for this teaching demo are competent, hardworking and can adapt to the
situation quickly when needed which for me, is a good quality to have. For me, the
most significant factor of being in a group that is adaptable is that I’m excited
to work with them as they are good communicators which helped us in minimizing any
gaps during our presentation. I have learned that the random groups that were
assigned to us in the beginning of the semester had forced me to be more
flexible and work with different styles of learning and teaching which will be
a great asset when I start working in the future as I inevitably will have to work
with different people who have different skill sets than I do.
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| Beautiful group members✨ |
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| Wore traditional clothes! (Cassie's idea💖) |
My evaluation of my teaching demo is that there
were a few hiccups, but ultimately my team and I did quite well in my opinion. Everything
was going smoothly, our voices were loud and clear, we got our point across to
the audience and overall, it was a fun session. However, Dr Alberto had sat in
to watch the Year 2 teaching demo presentation and he asked quite a bit about
our water and air pollution topic that had me to think on my feet about it. Although
I appreciate the interaction, I noticed he didn’t ask any questions to other
groups either before or after our group and that made me feel a bit uneasy and worried
if our topic was too simple and not suitable for tertiary level of education.
One question that struck out to me was when he asked about the methodology that
we used in our teaching demo and unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough to catch on
to what he was talking about and so didn’t have a direct answer which made me
feel disappointed and frustrated with myself. Dr Alberto graciously skipped
over the methodology and asked what the student level of our presentation is for,
and I believe its due to that fact that we didn’t think it was suitable for education
students to impart knowledge on water and air pollution from a scientific
standpoint as to avoid misinformation. In addition, the topic that we presented
was an overall general topic that in known to most people hence there wasn’t
much room for us to elaborate on. The anxious feeling that I felt, reminded me of
the time when I was a child and my parent would ask me a question just to test
my confidence and standpoint on a topic and I remember being nervous for what
seems to be no particular reason, but I was mainly afraid of being wrong. I
realise that although there were hiccups during the presentation, all the questions
from Dr Alberto and my classmates are proof that there is room for me to
improve myself even more. As a next step, I will strive to learn and be more
prepared to answer any questions by reading and studying more relevant material.
References
Jacobson, M. Z.,
von Krauland, A.-K., Coughlin, S. J., Dukas, E., Nelson, A. J. H., Palmer, F.
C., & Rasmussen, K. R. (2022). Low-cost solutions to global warming, air
pollution, and energy insecurity for 145 countries. Energy & environmental science, 15(8), 3343-3359. https://doi.org/10.1039/d2ee00722c
Mano, Z., Kendler,
S., & Fishbain, B. (2022). Information Theory Solution Approach to the Air
Pollution Sensor Location–Allocation Problem. Sensors (Basel), 22(10),
3808. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22103808
Mou, H.-J., Huang, C.-F., Lin, T.-I., Wu, C., Han, Y.-L., & Lin, C.-S. (2023). Solution for air pollution prevention in vehicles. In.
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