Sunday, March 29, 2009
My version of simulated teaching VS How I was taught at school.
First and foremost, this post is not to downgrade or criticize my learning experience when I was in school. I appreciate every single knowledge and effort my teachers gave me. I’m where I am today because of them. Just want to make some comparison here. The difference of what I’ve learnt in University, in terms of how a teacher should teach and what I’ve experienced from class during my school days is entirely different. My simulated teaching consist of 4 steps. Set induction, which is to stimulate the students brains and let them know about what we are to study for the day. Second is the pre-reading stage which initiated the day’s study process by reading the text and asks students to highlight significant words and lines. Third is the while reading stage which explains the need of the previous activity. Most of time, it is for students to know why are the phrases highlighted and for what reason. By this stage, students should already understand whatever that is taught for that session. The final stage is the post reading stage. This stage requires students to write out an essay or complete activities to ensure they understand what is taught. During my school days, the teaching of literature components is different. The teacher will spoon feed the students with all the information. The target is for students to be able to answer examination question by merely memorizing and not understanding it. The reason is because there is really insufficient time to teach and ensure the comprehension of students for literary components as literary components aren’t the only syllabus that the teacher needs to complete. Second, the level of English proficiency of the class isn’t high enough. There are only a handful of students that could cope with literature. Therefore, it is difficult to apply the version of set induction I’ve learnt ( and what my teachers have learnt) in classes. Therefore, it leads to the question if the simulated teaching that we all learn as future teachers in University could be applied 100% when we are teachers one day. Time will tell.
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Hi Soo kang,
ReplyDeleteI would like to give a word or two on how i was taught back in my school days. I could not agree with you more on how teachers spoonfed the students on their lesson. They gave us all the information they could on their lesson believing that we would memorize them to answer our examination not trying to make us understand what are they really teaching us about. But, however in this case, I would not blame the teachers hundred percent, because there are insufficient time for them to complete their lesson and furthermore literature is not the only component for them to teach us. What I'm trying to say now here is we as future teacher should try our lesson by breaking it ito four stages which is the set induction, pre reading, while reading and the post reading. I'm sure with clear and systematic lesson plan there will be sufficient time and also we can make sure that the students really understand what is being taught.