Third Week: Teaching Practice

            Hi everyone! Welcome back to my SEA-Teacher story. In the previous post, I talked about an activity before teaching practice and it is teaching assistance. Now, I will tell about the teaching practice. My teaching practice was in Primary 6/2, M1/2 and also M2/2.

In primary 6/1, I taught parts of body and doing exercise. In the previous meeting, Teacher Steve did teach the student the same material, so I what I did was doing review of the material. I prepared my lesson plan far before teaching practice and added a game for teaching practice. The game was adaptation from “Simon says Games” but I changed the name into “Teacher Says”. I used Power Point Media and some colored paper that were attached to the whiteboard. I did consult it to my cooperating teacher in Primary, teacher Ali. At the end of the class, I gave the evaluation to the student in a paper with 10 questions in total. 

In the other day, Teacher Beth asked me to prepare the lesson plan and material about the use of “There is and There are”. I was confused when I was asked to teach Lower Secondary class because for so long I was in Primary 5 and Primary 6. The total amount of secondary class was not so much. That was why I finally in Primary class instead of Secondary even my major actually to teach Secondary class. I prepared my lesson plan and showed it to Teacher Beth. She agreed with the lesson plan and she gave me some papers that could be used as media. I decided to use flashcard as the media. Firstly, I explained the material about the use of “There is and There are”. Students were asked to make group: boys group and girls group. After that, they are asked to patch the flashcards that were prepared on the whiteboard according to their category. The group that answered the question with no mistake would be the winner. The next activity, students were asked to do a game. I pronounced some words or phrases one by one. If the word/phrases was categorized as “There is”, they has to stand up and if it was “There are” they had to sit down. The group work and the game were used as evaluation.

THE TEACHING PRACTICE

1.      Procedure of teaching

The first thing that has to be done before teaching in the class is to plan the lesson. Firstly, I had to decide what lesson I would teach and how I expanded it. Secondly, I prepared teaching things just like lesson book, pens, flashcard, prepare quizzes, and game. The procedures of teaching are divided into 3. The first one is opening for about 5 minutes. Here I had to do some activities such as, greeted the students, checked the attendance lists, gave brainstorming to the students by asking what did they know about countable and uncountable noun and asked them to mention the examples. After the Opening activity is finished, the next activity is Main activity or teaching process. I did review the material because it was already taught before. The teaching procedure in Thailand and Indonesia is different. In Thailand, the main activity is only divided into 3. They are opening, main activity and closing activity. While in Indonesia, what usually used by teacher ia scientific approach which contains of several activities. I did categorize the example of countable and uncountable noun that were given by the students into “There is” and “There are” category. After that, students were asked to do exercise by divide themselves into two groups. Boys group and girls group. I prepared the flashcard as the media. Students listened to the rules of the exercise and drew T chart on the whiteboard. Every group will be given 15 flashcards one by one. The students from both groups are asked to patch every flashcard that is already given in the T chart (There is/ There are) on the whiteboard one by one. Students may come back to their sits as soon as all of the flashcards are patched already on white board based on the category. The students checked the answer from both groups one by one. After that, the activity continued to another exercise using game. I explained the rules of the game. Students are asked to stand up. I said phrases that will be categorized into “There is” or “There are” category.  If the phrases are categorized into “There is” category, students have to stand up from their chair. If the phrases are categorized into “There are” category, students have to sit down. Students that do not follow the instruction and do mistake will sit and lose from the game and will not go along the game. The only student who stands up until the end of the game will be the winner. The last activity is Closing. Before ended the class, it is important to summarize the lesson that was already learnt. Students also given a change to ask any question whenever they did not understand the lesson. The class is finished by saying thank you to the students.

2.      Time management and Organizing Activities

In teaching activity, time management running almost through all aspect of teaching; organizing the classroom, deciding how long and how often to do opening, main activity, closing activity, recording student progress, or keeping time-consuming behavior problems to a minimum. In teaching activity, I divided the activity into three parts. The lesson had one hour class. I gave 10 minutes for opening activity; so that the students could try to remember the material that was delivered before, 40 minutes for main activity; so the students could understand the lesson that was being delivered and also 10 minutes for closing activity; to make sure that the students had a chance to ask any question related to the lesson if they did not understand the material.

3.      Problem-solving

I taught English in Lower Secondary class, it is M2/2 or grade 8. Most of the students were spoke Thai and used it in their daily live. This thing had to be considered more. Whenever I delivered the lesson, only some of the students understood what I did say. The rest of them seemed get a kind of difficulties to understand the idea. This thing became one of the problems in teaching and learning activity. Teaching and learning would work well if the teacher and the students giving and receiving. But in this issue, the students needed something to make them received what they had to. To solve this problem, I decided to do repetition for more than just twice. Repetition is needed to be done because English was the only language we used to communicate. After three times of repetition, most of the student seemed better in understanding the lesson.

4.      Classroom management

Classroom management is wide variety of skill and techniques that teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive and productive during class. Meanwhile, the students in Satit Bangna School spent their time in the school start from morning until evening. Concentration of the students would not last for the rest of the class. Sometimes, if they felt distracted by something, they would lose their concentrations and attentions to the teacher and the lesson. Because of that, they would get nothing from the lesson. So to make them focused and productive during class, it is important to design an attractive learning activity. Here, created a group and a game as exercise was working for the student. If the students were just given a paper of several questions and asked to do it with no focus on their mind, that activity would not benefit them well. By creating a group to play an attractive game, all of M2/2 students were excited and paid fully attention to the exercises.