The reflection

The Reflection:

After listening to Ellen’s situation and performing researches on the types of teaching method best suited for the scenario, I have tried to simulate an identical situation with applications of different teaching methods as her teacher. From Ellen’s story, her year 10 drama teacher was a ‘non-interventionist’ and did not have adequate preparation prior to the lessons. Ellen’s teacher would pick random topic without following the curriculum. Apparently, his teaching method made his students uncomfortable and experienced difficulty in understanding the appointed tasks. Nevertheless, the same teacher taught Ellen in year 11 media class and it was noted that this teacher enjoyed teaching media very much. The teacher followed the outlined curriculum in the latter and as a consequence, the students were able to engage easily in his teachings. This case instigated several provocations in my mind. First of all, I have been thinking of the provocation 6: what will students want and need from me? What would I do if I was not interested in teaching the particular subject? What could I do to engage my students in the classroom?

As Andrea (2006) stated, “Use routines for all classroom activities so students know what to do at all times, e.g. where to put materials, when to transition, what the schedule is, and so on, should be familiar and routine to all students. Using routines allows students increased comfort level.” I believe that most students would prefer to understand what and why they are given particular tasks. If they have gotten used to the routines in the classroom, they will be able to engage and contribute more in their studies.

Sara also mentioned about Glasser’s theory in the presentation which I found very useful. Glasser’s choice theory is based on five points that emphasise on student’s prime needs: safety, belonging, power, fun, and freedom. Once we know what are the students’ prime needs, we will be able to come up with a well planned lesson that meets their desires. 

“When students like the topics being studied, and thus want to learn about them, they almost always do well and rarely misbehave seriously.” (Charles, 2005 – Glasser)

This statement is very true. Pupils will only be motivated if they are interested in the subject. There are three main reasons of motivation in their studies: 1) they choose the subjects they are really interested in; 2) taught by teachers who are nice, useful, and able to help them; 3) they are confident in the subjects and will be able to score good grades. Thus, lesson planning should not be only covering students’ educational needs; but also to consider methods that will motivate students in their studies. 

“In an educational context, motivation may be described as a student’s desire, intention and behaviours directed to learning and achieving their full potential. Motivation plays a significant role in student interest and enjoyment, is subject to influence from peers, teachers, parents, subjects and schools and is informed by ethnic and cultural background.”  (Churchill, 2011 – MacCallum 2001; Martin 2007, 2008)

Ellen has revealed that all of her classmates were motivated in the drama class and were really keen on learning initially. However the disorganisation of her teacher has led them to lose their interests and desires to learn.

The creation of a positive classroom environment is also very important in students’ learning. Alfie Kohn has emphasised on “developing caring, supportive classrooms in which students are able to pursue topics of interest in depth.” (Charles, 2005) It is always beneficial to the students if they understand the purpose of learning, be less restrictive in their teachings, and be well-organised with a tinge of flexibility at times. Providing students with opportunities to present in front of the class and infusing them with a sense of belonging and involvement will undoubtly boost their motivation and engagement for that particular subject.

Ellen has made a comparison of her year 10 drama teacher with one of her favourite teacher. She stated that she preferred to have group discussions and interactive teachings which were absent in her year 10 drama class. I personally reckon that group discussion is very important as students will benefit from their exchange of ideas and learn from each other as students originate from different backgrounds. As Michael Reynolds (1994, Pg17) stated, “a group of people could make prior experience available for learning, could generate fresh material through experiential activities and could provide a forum for collective decision making about the content and direction of learning and development.” 

In Zach’s presentation, he stated that making clear boundaries between teacher and students are very important. I was gobsmacked on listening to Ellen’s story about her classmates asking the teacher to sit in a corner and stop teaching, which then the teacher heeded their suggestions, adding to my surprise. As a teacher-in-training, I was initially offended with the rudeness of the students because this is unacceptable from my culture, considering the Asian background I was brought up in. I also felt that this teacher was unprofessional as he could actually reason with the students and notify the students that their behaviour was inappropriate. Ellen has also revealed that they have a close relationship with this teacher and thus treated him as a ‘friend’ instead of a teacher, giving them the courage to spit such words at him. This made me recalled the twenty tips from Andrea’s (2006) article: “Make clear boundaries for acceptable student interactions with you and with peers.”  As a teacher, I am there primarily as a tutor, role model and secondarily as a friend. If the boundaries of a teacher and their students are non-existent, it will lead the pupils to misbehave and the teacher may end up losing control of the situation.

In conclusion, in order to create a positive classroom environment, we ought to contemplate on the students’ primary needs and to attempt to adjust our teaching methods accordingly. It will be good to have a well planned out lesson for both the students’ and the teacher’s benefits. In general, Ellen’s class can be categorised into the “fight” category. Thus, clear and concise instructions are utmost important for their education. Moreover, a well organised but flexible lesson plan is best suited for them. 

References:

1)      Babkie A.M. (2006), Be Proactive in Managing Classroom Behaviour, http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.canberra.edu.au/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=b656af4c-23d0-49ee-b3da-b9efebfc1400%40sessionmgr113&vid=2&hid=111

2)      Charles C.M. (2005), Three Bridges to Twenty First Century Discipline (Ch5). In Building Classroom Discipline (8^th Ed) (Pg.  72 – 92), Pearson

https://docutek.canberra.edu.au/eres/docs/13692/charles.pdf

3)      Churchil R., Ferguson P., Godinho S., Johnson N.F., Keddie A., Letts W., Mackay J., McGill M., Moss J., Nagel M.C., Nicholson P. and Vick M. (2011), Teaching Making A Difference, John Wiley & Sons, Australia.

4)      Renolds M. (1994), Groupwork in Education and Training: Ideas in Practice, Kogan Page, UK.

My Observation Day 1

I am going to Burgmann Anglican School in Gungahlin for my observation. It is a private secondary school. All of the school staff members are very nice and good to me. When I arrived that school, I was so worrying that I might lose my way to find my supervisor because I was totally fresh at there. However, one of the staffs was willingly to lead my way to find my mentor and that let me felt warm and comfortable. 

My mentor is a very helpful and caring person. She was introducing me to the classroom and prepared a timetable for me so that I could know where the class were up to and what they are doing at the moment. She was encouraging me to join in her class for example giving some comments on students’ performances, teaching me how to use “garage band” (one of the softwares to compose music) gives me a chance to have a look at how other teachers work with kindergarten students and junior school students. She said that even though I am majoring in secondary school teaching, it will be good for giving me a chance to have a look at other areas.

I believe that Sandra is a teacher who is very care for their students and responsibility. When I entered her composition’s class, she was giving the advice on how to do the assignment. She described what she wanted in a clear and concise way and even did her own report and showed to her classroom. Actually, since I entered kindergarten until now, not many of my teachers would do the same thing – actually done his/her own report and showed to the classroom, might be no more than 5 of them did this thing. But Sandra and Steve are two of them who did this and showed their support to the classroom! It feels like we are on the same boat and could feel very encouraging from her.

Apart from that, I was so lucky that I had a chance to have a look for Questacon to perform in this school. Sandra was telling me that Questacon was coming to demonstrate how the instruments making the sound to the kindergarten students. That was fun and the young children are so cute! 

Sandra was also encouraging me to ask more questions and I did ask her quite a lot of questions! I am so grateful to have her as my mentor and I believe that I can learn more teaching methods on music from her!

PPLE 3rd post

PPLE 3^rd Post

After listened to your story about the class revolt, my first thought was “it is not easy to be a good teacher as we couldn’t fulfil every student’s needs.” We have to be very flexible and tolerate every situation no matter the outcome is good or bad. If I really try my best to prepare and to lead students to the positive pathway but end up with “I was just not their type”, I think I will be very upset and frustrated in the beginning. However, I will try to think about my teaching method and also try to discuss with my peers to exchange ideas on how could I deal with these kinds of students. 

I believe that students are forming attachments to familiar leaders. If their leader has changed to a new teacher, some of them might feel uncomfortable and will always try to disrupt classroom order and interrupting teacher teaching. Students will feel more comfortable with the leaders they familiar with because they have already get used to the way how they used to be taught and also the pace of learning. On top of that, both leaders and students have already known each other’s behaviour and characteristic and they will feel easier to deal with any situations compare to the new leader. When the new teacher get in charge of the new classroom, they will feel awkward and hardly to gain understanding between each others in the beginning, however, I believe that time will change one’s thought. When they get along longer, they will build up more on trusting, supporting, encouraging and positive recognition. 

In my point of views, I think that the difference you have made between “freedom to do thing” and “freedom from all sorts of control” is quite useful. If we gave students freedom from all sorts of control, as a teacher, we will definitely hard to maintain classroom order. In this case, students will not listen to what we teach and choose not to come to the classroom. Not all the young teenagers will realize the importance of gaining knowledge. Most of them come to school because they have to instead of they want to. If we still giving them freedom from all sorts of control, I believe that those young teenagers who are not engaging to the classroom will definitely choose to do whatever they like to do instead of learning. The consequences of this will lead those students to the pathway of criminal as nobody could teach them what the differences between right and wrong are. 

I have chosen to read the article about “Lee and Marlene Canter: Discipline” for this week. I found that this article is very useful for me in my future and I think that it is very interesting and easily to understand as it is closer to real life experiences instead of lots of academic theories.  It teaches me about the student rights and the teacher rights. On top of that, it also clarified different teaching methods and the results of each of them. It suggested assertive discipline is the most popular among all of the other teaching methods. Furthermore, it gave some examples on setting the rules for students in the beginning of the semester and has to make sure all of the students understand all of the rules. By setting the rules could help the students know what they could and could not do during the lesson. 

Now is the end of Module C and Module D is coming soon. I am getting used to the system of UC and also have already figured out what is going on for this course. In the very beginning of the course, I admit that I was very frustrated, nervous and everything seems very confusing to me because UC system is totally different from what I used to know. Because I was a music student when I was in my degree and what I needed to do is to practice hard instead of study hard. However, I was almost “faint” (exaggerated) when I realized that I have to study hard and also lots of writing tasks for me to do within three months! Luckily I am quite well-organized for my work and I managed to plan my study timetable in order to finish them on time (hopefully) and get a chance to look back what I have already done before summit it. And now I am getting used to this life as I found that I am very happy to have a chance to learn something new other than just piano! Hopefully I would be able to merge my new knowledge and my piano skill and pass it to the next generation! In terms of my language development, actually English is my third language. I learnt it when I was in my high school. However, I didn’t put much effort on it as during that time I didn’t realize the importance of learning English and also my high school just provided 5 hours English classes per week. I started to focus on learning English when I realized that I had to master English in order to come to Australia for further studies and studied overseas was my dream when I was young. Hence, I was working very hard in order to improve my English skill. When I first arrived Australia, I seldom communicate with other people due to lack of confidence and always thought that I am not good enough to communicate. It was my family and my boyfriend who lead me out of that situation. They kept encouraged and supported me. Now is my fourth years in Australia and I believed that my English skill has improved compare to my first year. I will continue to learn and to speak and my philosophy of learning attitude is that tomorrow I have to do better than today. 

p/s: sorry I wrote too long… hope you don’t mind.

PPLE 2nd post

In the lecture, I have learnt 5 different models of classroom management and also some theories based on the Great Pioneer in Modern Discipline. I found that it is very useful for us to think about the theory which you have shared and provide us some mentally preparation before working as a teacher in the future. As a teacher, we have to allocate our students’ needs in front of us. We have to make sure that all of our students will feel comfortable and engaging in the classroom and they will be able to share their thoughts and ideas with others. If a teacher could make the students feel actively involved in the class even on the subject, this could be helpful for the students to develop a good learning behavior and motivation of self-learning. On top of that, the need of belonging is also very important for students. Different kind of student has their own characteristic. Perhaps most students are very outgoing and active, hence, it will not be a problem for them to join with other group of students. However, there are a small percentage of students who are shy and conservative. They are not really good at social communication but they also desire to feel belonging to the particular group. At this point, we have to think some ways to help students to feel engaging and belonging to the classroom/groups. By doing this, we could arrange some group discussion, gathering or camping in order to enhance the relationship between students and teacher. Sometimes, it would be a good idea to teach students outside the classroom so that students will have more opportunity to interactive with each other and get to know each other. This let me think about one of the provocations = is teaching a professional or a trade. In my opinion, if we treat it as professional first then trade, we will feel more enjoyable to teach and will be willingly to devote more time on the students and always try to think a better way that suits students. As what you have mentioned during the lecture “the better I teach the subject, the less I have with difficulty classroom management.” 

For the Krause’s article, I have read about the manager conflict and problem behavior. I will choose this article to read is because I feel that it is quite a serious issue that happening in school and I would like to learn deeper for this concern and how I could handle the problem if I were facing it. This chapter comprises a numerous ways of students’ misbehavior such as bullying and harassment, alcohol and drug abuse, racism, and sexism and it mainly focused on bullying. Krause had mentioned about the seriousness of bullying and pointed out that it is a worldwide problem. He also provided some case studies of how was it happened and how the teacher/school reacted to this issue. I found that this is very useful as he had given some ideas on how to avoid these kind of things happen and also how to react if we were facing on it. However, I have a question about bullying and not really know how I could do if I have to deal with the problem. Sometimes, the parents are the perpetrators for student’s misbehavior. If we found that there was a case that a group of students were trying to physically attack a victim and we inform the school principal and the school principal notified the ringleader’s parents. Before calling to the ringleader’s parents, we had no idea on his family background and soon we realized that actually the ringleader was living under the violent attack from his parents. Hence, this was the main reason for him to vent on other students. In this moment we could call the police and the related center who could handle this matter. However, the ringleader was still trying to protect his family and hopefully we would not call the police. What could I do with this if I were facing on this case?

For the five different models of classroom management, I would choose to study the interactivity area as I believe that it will be better to discuss with students instead of setting a lot of rules and require students to follow it. It will be better for the students to treat us as a friend and a tutor instead of just a tutor. Furthermore, if a student trying to disrupt classroom order, it will be better to talk to him after the class instead of yelling at him in front of other students. If we talk to him after the class, this will not only concern about his self-respect but also could understand his motive of disrupting the classroom order. 

When I was listening to the story of Nick, I thought about my secondary school life. I used to have a friend who is as intelligent as Nick. Every time during the class, she would not pay attention to what teacher teaching about but kept talking to the friend next to her instead. One day, when she was talking to the friend as usual, my secondary school teacher asked her to solve a question in front of us in a sudden otherwise she might get punishment because of not paying attention on that particular subject. We were all very worrying about her because she had never pay attention to that subject and the question she was asked to do was quite difficult. Nevertheless, she solved the question easily and my teacher was feeling impressed of her. I guess that every student has their own talent on the particular subject. The student might feel either the task was easy to be done or he/she wants to get attention from the teacher. If I have this kind of students, I would either do the same thing as what you did to Nick = ask them to do something related to the subject I teach or give them a small quiz every month in order to test if they pay attention to what I taught and find out their weakness of the particular part through the quiz. Once I find their weakness of the particular part, I would be able to help them to improve.