Reflection 3

Reflection 3: Micro-Teaching

The experience of micro-teaching for me, proved to be an eye-opener and I started to realize the importance of organizing what I wanted to teach coherently so that I would not confuse my students. For example, I realized that in my micro-teaching stint, I was not able to effectively relay to my audience that plate movements were a result of convection currents and only managed to briefly explain that convection currents occurred in the earth’s interior. I did not explain that plates moved according to the directions in which convection currents below them moved. Looking back, I realized I assumed people would make the connection because the convection currents in the diagrams were just below the plate margins. When I was planning how I would teach, I ignored that detail on purpose because I felt that it could be inferred along the way. It was only when I was teaching that I realized it would not make sense unless I had put the two together.

My friends’ micro-teaching stints also made me realize a lot. For some units in the geography syllabus, I felt that it was almost impossible to come up with an interesting lesson that could trigger students’ interest and engagement. For example, the unit on natural vegetation was very well done by Aidilah and Lai Peng. Instead of giving out worksheets asking students to differentiate between the different characteristics of different types of forests, they planned an activity on picking out the peculiarities from pictures. I felt that it was very engaging and would be more appropriate then making students picking out specific information from lines of words. It would also be an in informal assessment of whether the students had really understood and taken in what they had learnt in class previously.

However, I would agree with the rest of my classmates that a real-life teaching experience in the classroom would have done well for us. Given that we had just been introduced to various means of differentiated teaching, it would have meant a lot to see which strategies worked or backfired for ourselves, before practicum.