➳ Day 2 (17 Oct) & Campus Tour (31 Oct) ➳

17th of Oct, Day 2 @The Tamil School

Before we go...

Due to the shortened period of contact, my teammates and I need to forgo and revise some of the activities planned. All of our activities were structured to meet the 3 focuses of the theme - My Primary School Memory, Qualities of Secondary School Students and My Ideal Secondary School. One of the activities would be a reading passage and worksheet, with an aim to compliment with the students' respective topic of presentation. My partner, Syeera and I had written one passage but improvement in terms of the content and coherence was requested by the seniors. Some elements of Harry Porter adapted in the passage were required to be amended simply due to the assumption of a lack of western influences on the students. Naively, to clear my confusion, I asked, "Well, why couldn't we just introduce Harry Porter to them?" (Great book isn't it?) The reply I received was "that's not the point.". Frankly, I was quite upset about this response. Well, albeit given the autonomy to design the teaching materials, there are still some considerations needed to be taken into account. Maybe this is the whole intention of the project, the students from different cultural background, what to do? *evil laugh in the background* Consider this video on how a teacher manages the classroom by giving spoilers of Games of Throne (and I was inspired to adopt this in my future classroom, WAHAHA).      

Besides, it is a must to pre-teach vocabulary before distributing the passage to the students. The seniors encouraged us to use the elicitation technique i.e. to give hints to the students so that they can guess and come up with that particular word themselves instead of passively accept and therefore learn a new word. The principle of teaching vocabulary was also shared by the seniors - Hear, Say, Look, Write. I found the elicitation method really problematic because of two reasons - first, some vocabularies are difficult to give hints (eg. imagination, awesome); second, how could a student elicit a word that he or she hasn't learnt previously? However, after reconciled ourselves with the rationale behind this approach, Syeera and I decided to rewrite our passage - Harry Porter was replaced by the common fairy tale setting whereas some vocabularies were substituted by the more suitable ones.

Hello, kids!

On the road again in the chilly  morning, going to be the teacher of the Tamil School kids for the one last time. We started off the day by recapping what the students had learnt last week, elated to observe the students being able to recall the previous lesson. Next, we divided the students into 3 groups to play a Hangman game and scores will be jotted down. The group assigned to Syeera and I were falling behind the score which enraged Syeera because we were losing the game. It was thought-provoking to witness this situation. Reminiscing my personal experience, teachers have been imposing a certain degree of competition cultural within the students and I couldn't agree more on  this little recount of a man on triumphalism as all the limelight of public interest has been converged on how a person succeed instead of how he/she fails (*people like Bill Gates who failed High School but succeeded in the later part of his life doesn't count!). p/s: Our group didn't win in the end and I think it shouldn't matter. I just hope that I won't participate in the enforcement of triumphalism by influencing the students with less appropriate attitude on competition. We shall educated them to enjoy being in a competition where they can meet like-minded people to upgrade themselves and winning a title shall just be a by-product, not the focus. 

Afterwards the students were given another 30 minutes to finish drawing their presentation poster, followed by a pop quiz. Again, the pop quiz was conducted in groups and each group was given a mini whiteboard and marker to display their answer. It can be observed that most of our activities were structured in the manner that encourages group work as stated in one of the learning outcomes, students will establish cohesive group dynamic and interpersonal skills. What a progressivist approach!

The next activity is reading comprehension, particularly a passage on "My Ideal Secondary School" for my group. In this activity, I was the main teacher whereas Syeera was my co-teacher. Before distributing the reading passage, I had given the students a scenario.  (*the passage is in the form of a letter)

"Dear students, I had written a letter to Syeera but she can't understand what I wrote. She said some of the words are difficult and asked if you all can help her?"

The students agreed in excitement which met my expectation that they are able to draw some meaningful connections instead of merely taking this activity as another task. As I found this approach viable, I did some further research on scenario in education and found this interesting piece of article -  Microsoft's finding on scenario planning and future of education. Besides, scenario-based learning, as promoted by the UNSW Australia is proven an effective learning approach, especially on medicine and engineering courses. Then, as advised by the seniors, I taught some vocabularies that might be new to the students. Again, the elicitation method is troublesome as I included phrases like in the pink of my health, time of my life in the passage. Nonetheless, I managed to think of using pictures and flashcards to facilitate the teaching process. For instance, to teach the phrase "in the pink of my health", I painted a pink flower and shown it to the students. 

Questions that I used to prompt the students were as such:

"Students, what color is the flower?"
"Do you think the flower is healthy?"
"Therefore can I say pink is the color of healthy?"
(*show flashcard)
"So next time, when somebody ask you how are you, you can answer, I am in the pink of my health!"     

A pink flower drew by myself to teach "in the pink of my health".

Moving on, in order to teach the verb "motivate", I created another scenario for the students. Play the below video to find out more.

Likewise, I used the same method to teach the word "leisure time".

The students shown positive response as they were able to acquire new words. As this method is found to be practicable, I shall not be afraid to teach words like 'imagination' and ' awesome' in the future. Since the passage is actually a letter, I had put it in an envelope to give it more a tangible form. The envelope also acted as a container lest the students misplaced the passage and worksheet. Just want to keep this sentence simple, the students love it! (and I self-servingly salute myself for coming up with this idea!*I am able to come up with this idea is because I am an old-school letter sender. I have never known that what a teacher does in daily life will have an impact on his/her teaching!) Therefore, I'd say the recruit process of teachers is important because what kind of teacher a school recruited determine what kind of future the children are heading to. 

The reading passage is enclosed in an envelope. 

I guided the students through the passage by reading it together and I felt pressured to ensure the precision of my pronunciation. How important a teacher is! Basically everything we do will have an influence on a student! Later, we proceeded to answering worksheet, when Syeera stepped in with an extremely important role. The teacher-student ratio was 2:7, which was beyond optimum to take care of every student's need. Syeera was rather vital as she went around to establish close bond with the students and provide extra guidance. As the students receive greater teacher attention, they learn more effectively. Therefore, to have a co-teacher is even more important in an inclusive classroom setting.

It terrified me that the students struggled to answer question 5 as that particular information is rather implicit. Albeit this was my intention to examine if the students possess the so-called Higher Order Thinking Skills (or perhaps it is just a problem of language?), the overwhelming number of them who failed to answer is indeed alarming. I attempted to clear up their confusion by using another scenario.

"I am going to play football later, hopefully it doesn't rain."

"Do you want it to rain?"

"No, because you want to play football!"

"Therefore, if Rynnie says hopefully there isn't much homework to do, do you think she likes homework?"

Some students were fast to understand while some still struggled. Hence, Syeera stepped in to offer another examples to help the students. It is less burdening to work together with a co-teacher, and I certainly will be mindful not to take it for granted. I am also glad that I had managed the allocated time well. By the time we finished discussing the answers, the students had 5 minutes to take a rest before we proceeded to presentation demonstration and script writing.    

Teachers' demonstration on how to do a presentation.

Writing the script for students.

Making sure the students know the sequence of the script.

One question jumps into my mind during these 2 activities - where is the fine line between scaffolding and spoon-feeding? Sugrue in his book Complexities of Teaching: Child-centered Perspectives suggested, scaffolding is to equip a learner with methodology - how to think of a solution. Notwithstanding, "structures and communication routines may become sedimented" which will prevent a student to think and it is likely to take the form of spoon-feeding instead. It is appropriate to provide a demonstration for the students to observe but during script writing, we teachers provided the lines. This was actually a little miscommunication. I thought since we had gone through all sort of activities that were related to their presentation topic, in other words, we scaffold the students really well and suppose they are to draft their own script. But the senior of my group just decided to write the whole script for them. In this situation how could I assess if the activities worked and whether the students had learnt something? But, alas, I didn't ask for clarification from the senior at that moment. I just hope that events that carry the nature of "a means to an end" will not happen again. 

After several practices, the students were asked to have a little rehearsal for their coming presentation whereas we teachers gave advice and corrected their mistakes.

Try-out session!

Lastly, as time allowed, we played the Kim's Game. The students were shown this diagram which contains a list of vocabularies for 1 minute and will be given 2 minutes to write down what they remember. Syeera who prepared this diagram is thoughtful to use different colors as supported by this study, color enhances attention and memory performance. However, of 23 words, most students can only come up with an average of 10 words ...... well, maybe 1 minute is not enough to memorize. If we were to justify the study we shall increase the time limit next time. Speaking of, will colorful materials appear childish to the students after elementary level?I guess might cause them to lack interest in study... anyway, the focus of this game was on spelling, we were delighted to observe the students spelling words correctly.

The Kim's Game

My fellow groupmates! (Not in the photo: Chin Yang)

Here the bell rang, we dismissed the class and gave a pat on each other's shoulder that we had done a great job dealing with the kids :D

 31st of Oct, Campus Tour & Mini Presentation

Campus Tour

The students arrived the University early in the morning with excitement. We began the campus tour from the lake with Sonia and I as the tour guides. I attempted to incorporate spelling check (ask the students to spell the venue where we arrived) throughout the tour but as amphitheater was after the lake, which was too advanced for the students to spell, I forgot to maintain my effort. Also, I had seen Sarah's group prepared mini indicator flags which my group didn't. Hopefully I will remember these two aspects for other upcoming campus tour. Notably, we constantly had a headcount to make sure the students didn't get lost in our compound.

Hello kids! 

After the campus tour, we assembled at the great hall for a short break and rehearsed again before the presentation began! We can tell that the students were nervous as they tended to chatter at times. Syeera and I did our best to soothe their anxiety by giving encouragement nonetheless.

Special thanks to my partner, Syeera!

Apologies for the bad video quality as Blogger limited the file size to be lower than 100 MB. It can be observed that the students were really nervous and didn't seem to be well-prepared. However, the students, during rehearsal shown their effort by reciting the script perfectly, therefore it was a bit disappointing that they weren't able to show it in front of their peers. I believe it is the lack of contact time and the foreign environment made them feel uncomfortable. Hence, hopefully if there is a similar project in the future, we can be assigned more contact time with the students so that we can achieve our desired goal :) Nonetheless, it was rewarding enough to have their presence at UNMC and witness their courage to stand in front of the crowd. Hopefully this mini presentation can prepare them mentally for their future challenges.

Then, Dr. Ghana was invited to give a motivation speech. It was valuable to observe how Dr. Ghana structured his talk in the language that the students will be able to comprehend which unlike myself who struggled to switch from academic English to a more everyday English.

Motivation talk by Dr. Ghana.

He used the 3 true 1 false game to deliver a message related to friendship. Scenario-based learning was again proven useful as the students were able to associate the game to their real life experience.

Little activity - 3 true 1 false.

And we had gradually come to the end of this project. In the closing ceremony, the principal of the school conveyed her utmost gratitude to our effort and bestow us a pen as a token of appreciation. Besides, the students were busy asking for our contact and signature, some even presented me a gift. I wonder where is the ethical boundary between a student and a teacher? I found it less appropriate to give them my contact number therefore I replace it with my Facebook account instead. Also, it was joyous to receive a little present from the students as a sign of their appreciation. But I don't feel good at the same time because I still find it less suitable. 

The atmosphere resembled a graduation ceremony. The sense of thankfulness and adieu diffused in the air. Albeit our short acquaintanceship, I value them as my students and hopefully I had inspired and influenced them in a positive way. As I have always aspired to be an inspirational figure of good will and the pursuit of dream, may my passion lasts.

Conclusion

To sum up, this project has allowed me to gain an insight into developing teaching material that is suitable for students from a different cultural background with flexibility. I had learnt to view things from a student's perspective so that I can deliver my lesson more effectively. Thank you the School of Education for providing me a platform to obtain all these meaningful pieces of information. I look forward to the next project.