My Classroom Observation Week 1

For this week classroom observation, I don’t “really” get the thing that is effective or ineffective in the classroom, because for this week I only observed two classes and one of them is having a listening examination.

For the grammar class, what is effective enough based on what I observed is the teacher let the students to understand the concept of active and passive sentence by themselves. The teacher just asked them and encourage them to recall their understanding about that lesson. All the students showed their enthusiastic in giving the answer. Then the teacher give the student exercise. The teacher asked the answer of the question to the student. One number for one student. After the teacher got the answer from the student, she discussed it and asked why the students gave her those kind of answer. It required an analytical skill to explained the answer. If the students did not give the right answer , teacher will ask them to analyze the characteristic of the sentence. With this method, students will learn from their mistake and hopefully they will not repeat the sama mistake in the future. According to my observation, actually I still wondering is drilling method (teacher give the concept and lots of worksheets) is effective enough to make the students familiar to the concept? Besides teaching a lesson, the teacher also taught the students to behave. There is one student who is quite naughty and when he wanted to do silly things, the teacher always remind hi to behave. Discipline and classroom rules is very important. Without these two things, I think that effective learning will not happen.

If I have to teach them, maybe i will give them a warming up games because the teacher just go directly to the course and it makes the classroom monotonous. Sometimes as a teacher  we are too theoretical and forget that our students also need some jokes or games ro refresh their mind and soul. As a teacher, discipline is number one. It does not mean that you have to scream or get angry all the time. What is more important is you always stick to classroom rules and agreement and try to understand the class and students condition.

Handphone as Learning Tool

What your mobile phone can do?

google.com

Have you explored all the fitures on your handphone (HP)? Or maybe you just use it for text  messanging and making a phone call? Then, it's time for you to explore more and get benefit from your HP. HP can be use for learning tool. How? You don't have to have the expensive one. Make sure that your handphone provide an internet browser. Then just type "google" or other search engine and you will be able to find any material that you want for studying. It's so easy. Internet is a gate of knowledge. Perhaps you can get many important material which is not in your textbook. With HP you can access the information anywhere you want. Nowadays, a seven years old child already have HP. It is not an expensive and weird thing anymore.Unfortunately not all parents and teachers realize that their childrens' hp can be use for learning tool too.They have to teach their child to use hp in an effective way. For teachers, they can encourage their studens to learn something via hp.Example: teacher ask their students to use english in their mobile phones. It can increase their language skill. For maths teacher, you can ask your student to use their handphone as the calculator. It is just as simple as that.So from now on, when you used handphone, don't use it just for SMS and making a phone call, explore more and you will get more.

Here are the video about the evolution of mobilephones :

The Evolution

LTM (multiple intelligences seminar) reflection

expectumf.umf.maine.edu

I felt so happy when my lecturer said that we will have a seminar about multiple intelligences. In my point of view, multiple intelligences is the best teaching methodologies ever. It is a new “weapon” to teach in a class with diverse students. Not like the ancient teaching methodology,  such as: TPR, suggestopedia, Audiolingualism and etc, multiple Intelligences offer the new way of teaching. It provides so many choices in teaching and learning. If we see in Indonesia, there are still many teachers who use the old style of teaching. Then what happen? Flash back to my school experience, the class will be so bored. Teacher treats student as they are all the same, in fact, we are all different. If teacher keep on doing the same things, not all the students can get the knowledge properly. Most of the teachers tend to stereotype student. They said that a clever student is someone who get high score in exam or someone who get the 1^st rank in class. Then what about the other student who don’t achieve the academic score? Are they all stupid? This is an old point of view. In multiple intelligences every student has their own intelligence. It is very unique. As a teacher, we have to consider each intelligence that each student has. We are responsible to implant our knowledge teaching style based on multiple intelligences.  Multiple intelligences provides teacher with so many interactive activity for teaching. This methodology helps teacher to help student for mastering a lesson perfectly. It is good to apply multiple intelligences in Indonesian school in order to achieve students and teachers academic goal.

The Seminar

Multiple Intelligences Flipchart

Diversity Creates Creativity

Imagine that you are a teacher. If all the students were from the same background, religion, ethnics, social economy and characteristics, what it will looks like? For me personally, It will be boring. If we give them a questions, probably they will give the same answer. Then imagine if in one class, there are 23 students with different background, it's gonna be an interesting class. If you ask them a question which needs a critical thought,  each of them will give different answer because they all have different characteristic. It's good to be different. As a teacher, it is a must for us to respect the diversity of our student. We cannot use the same way to approach our student. If you are different from others, it doesn't mean that you are not as good as them. The only key is to respect and tolerate with each other.

_teachers are concept of tolerence_