And the sky got clearer....

(I still came late... Came in during someone’s session… Man, gotta come earlier next week)

The title’s basically my poetic way to say that things are much more endurable this week. I still yawn here and there, but it’s only because I’m not getting enough sleep the other night. But then again, just because some people are performing well doesn’t mean that the whole class’ performance is getting better. But yeah, hopefully, with enough exposure to great teaching performance, many of us could learn to be better teachers ourselves.

Anyways, there are still some things that are bothering me and I really think we gotta talk about them before the next ‘performance’ starts.

First, I still think the audience are portraying senior high school kids who are waaaay too smart, and that’s a problem. High school students are NOT smart. Most of them DON’T know the generic structure of the narrative, or recount, and most of them don’t understand what ‘generic structure’ means anyway (heck, even I didn’t know what ‘generic structure’ until my CMD class with Mr. Mukarto). Therefore, starting the class with, “okay, so who can tell me what is the generic structure of narrative texts?” is really not a good move. What a good teacher should do is explain to the students what a narrative text is all about and why in the world they should be concerned with it. THEN, they can talk about the parts of narratives and how to analyze a narrative text.

HOWEVER, since we ‘students’ are too smart, too earnest in answering each and every question, and since we give such accurate answers, the teacher would no longer feel it important to explain anything in fun and creative ways anymore - which is dangerous when what you really want to achieve in a microteaching session is to develop ways to engage your students better.

We smart students have, in a nutshell, robbed the teachers their opportunity to grow.

Therefore it’s best, I think, for us audience to just play dumb and for the teachers to start with the assumption that their students don’t know much - I may try to discuss this with the rest of the class next week... That way, teachers would have the opportunity to not only learn new ways to explain and demonstrate ideas, but also to develop a good eye for gauging students’ learning progress.

Seriously, even though it’s stated in the 25 classroom management tips that we ought to develop good questioning skills for gauging students understanding, I haven’t seen any of the teachers - not even those who are doing well - practice any good evaluative questioning at the end of the lessons or during the teaching session. When they do ask questions however, they mostly ask the most OBVIOUS (and therefore UNNECESSARY) ones.

It’s important to mention also that the audience’s jobs aren’t only to portray themselves as senior high schoolers, but also to observe our friends’ performances. I don’t think we’ll be able to do the latter job well if we’re too engrossed in our ‘discussions’ or ‘narrative writing’ or whatever. Sure, it’s good to participate in the activities and make the class lively, but we need to keep in mind that we also have to analyze the teachers’ performance. “Why do they do this?”, “how do they do that?”, “how effective is this particular strategy?”, I think we need to be aware of whatever is going on in the classroom and constantly ask ourselves those questions.

Seriously, even if it’s not our turn to teach yet, we can learn a lot from a friend’s teaching session.

The next problem is the handouts. I think I’ve mentioned this on my previous post, but I honestly feel the need to give extra emphasis on this because, by the look of things this week, there might be more teachers who would rely too much on their handouts’ structure and content. I’ve seen this a couple of times in a real lecture - a teacher answering a student’s question by telling them, “just look at the handout”. I don’t know about you, but that’s just weak. Handouts are reliable guides, containing notes that students can refer to from time to time - but handouts shouldn’t restrain teachers. Teacher should be able to respond to students with information that are just as accurate as a handout, but in ways and techniques that are far more inspirational and impressive.



Ok then, onward to personal notes.

Student 1 - Stiff Gal. I came late on her turn. She was being gracious, as everybody are, but really, not to act the ingrate or anything, shouldn’t she actually ask me what’s going on, like “why are you late again for the millionth time?” I mean, isn’t that good classroom management?

Anyways, she repeated the ‘what is the generic structure of narrative’ routine and it’s really a pain to go through. I hope everybody else could see by now that it’s not working and try different ways to explain text genres.

She isn’t really responding well to what her students are giving her: I gave her a story and she could’ve used the narrative story as a basis for the rest of the classroom to dissect and analyze. “Hm, interesting story. Okay, so how did StonedTypist open his story? And then what happened? And how did the story end?” and she’d have got herself a more interesting way to explain the structure of narrative texts. She just let the story disappear, however, and I absolutely didn’t feel like I’d contributed anything to her teaching.

If I were a student, I’d have felt a little bit unappreciated.

There was a lot of focus on the narrative genre, which was her part, but then she gave us exercises on the Past-Tense near the end of the lesson. For me, this creates an incoherency, especially since she hadn’t explained a lot about the past-tense. 30 minutes is not a long time and if you really want to do it right, I think keeping the focus on just one material will be the most effective. If you want your students to be good in analyzing narrative texts, then just give them narrative texts to work with. If you want your students to be good in the past tense, then give them exercises on the past-tense.

And seriously, if she’d really wanted to teach about the past-tense (and she actually got herself a FANTASTIC exercise material for past-tense drilling - which didn’t get enough attention, IMHO) there are so many things that she should touch on. The existence of different verb types (V1, V2, V3) in English, for example, or the different time-framing in English, the list of regular and irregular verbs, etc - and why not? Seriously, rather than listening to people explaining text genres to death, it’d be good to have something different for a change.

Student 2 - AllSmiles. Did an AWESOME job, as far as I’m concerned. He had a great set opening, which, sadly, ended too quickly and unsuccessfully when he didn’t get the kind of response that he wanted. The set closure officially killed itself when he declared, “okay, today we’re going to discuss narratives”, and blew off all mystery. It’s really too bad since he started so well…

He went into the sin of structurally elaborating the generic structure, but did a better job than the others by actually getting the class to discuss what a good orientation, complication and resolution should be. He could use more elaboration on the Past-Tense, but well, I guess he deliberately didn’t want to go into the tenses… a wise choice since it kept us focused on the narratives.

I noticed he explained one difficult word, “lumberjack”, by approaching the student who’d asked the question with a dictionary and looked up the word on the students’ table. I think it’d be better if he’d thrown the question back to the rest of the classroom and see if any of the students could contribute an answer - I think this is included in the Classroom Management list somewhere. And while we’re at it, I think it’s far better if he’d had the students skim thru the passage and discuss difficult words first before having them read the passage intensively.

One problem though: with so many reading passages that he gave the students, did he manage to go through each one of them thoroughly? I don’t know since I had to answer the call of nature halfway through his session, but I doubt it. Seriously, keep the amount of materials low and classroom activities high.

It was a fun and interactive session, and he left a really strong impression of a really nice English teacher - the strongest impression of the day, I think. The rest of the class could really learn a thing or two from this guy.

Student 3 - Rad Grill. This guy really got me concerned. I’ve done peer teaching with him, I’ve done group teaching with him and his problem’s really still the same: he’s really sticking it with the handouts. And this is extra problematic because his handout’s kinda difficult and he’s not making it easier by explaining it or anything. If he were teaching a real class, he’d really get the students demotivated. Talking about demotivation, I think he could use some motivation himself since he’s not transmitting any ‘excitement’ to the classroom at all. Not much on set opener and closure, and I really can’t say anything here because he wasn’t giving me anything to talk about. The guy needs to cultivate lots of stuff: enthusiasm, eloquence, charisma, interaction, etc, if he wants his lessons to mean anything to his students.

Student 4 - Rendra. This guy actually has some serious problems. First of all, for someone who’s teaching listening, he’s not explaining enough. After giving us this classic fill-the-missing-words exercise, he simply told us to go to the second page and “do it”. Wait, do WHAT again? You really can’t just give us a set of questions and expect your students to immediately get what you want them to do. You’d really just confuse them.

And it’s really unclear what he’s trying to achieve. He gives us a narrative text to listen to, but he’s not explaining what’s going on with the conversation within the text. There are terms that he really needs to explain but didn’t, and really, after we managed to fill in the difficult words, then what? What do you want yours students to learn by having them fill in the missing words? There’s gotta be more than just that, right? Unfortunately, whatever that is, I guess we will never know.

Student 5 - Return of Evey. I was actually looking forward to this one. She’d done a great job two weeks ago and I was really excited to see what she’d prepared for us this time.

She did an AWESOME set opener! I mean, really, this is how set-openers should be: nice, clear, and engaging. After her set opener, each one on us was really on our toes to see how she’d explain giving orders and asking for directions.

…Actually, her set opener’s so strangely smooth that I think it’s staged. I mean, she wanted to talk about giving orders, but her question was “who do you admire the most?” to which her friend/possible-accomplice answered “my mom”, which worked. But what if people answered Einstein or Jesus or some random singer? Then her set opener would have gotten nowhere near giving orders or asking for directions. Anyways, it doesn’t matter whether it’s staged or not anymore now. But the rest of us should really keep in mind to stay spontaneous and still engaging.

Her lesson is the most clean-cut and focused of the five. She kept her lessons close to her handouts but her actually elaborated more on her own, which is great. She should have discussed some of the more important parts in greater detail however. On imperatives, for example, a crucial element in giving orders. She could have explained more on that rather than just telling us that it’s a V1. She could try using real-life errors: “Mohon MEMATIKAN lampu setelah selesai” => “Please TURNING OFF after you finish”

She actually did a great job interacting with her students which made the class even more interesting. Her only problem, I think, would be her time management. She was still looking for students to read out their set of instructions five minutes before her time was up.

Still, she gives us a truly great experience. So, salute.

Hmm, I guess that’s about it then. My reflections just get longer and longer..

Tah-tah…



07 - March - 2009

(041214007)