Teaching Needs to Have A Goal

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At first, our group thought that teaching listening was very easy. We just need to provide a song and a lyric with some gap on it. In fact, it’s not as easy as that. Teaching means you need to have a goal, what you want to get from that activity and how effective the material and the activity to enhance student’s listening skill. When we got into the real teaching in the class, suddenly we felt that there is something wrong. The material that we chose did not have a strong goal. Each activity has to have meaning, means that you have to know what you want from your student to achieve from that activity. There has to be a correlation between one activity to another. The best point from our teaching is we use several activities which are interesting. One of the activities is sport role play. We divided the class into several group and each group has to act out something based on the instruction. It is proved as an interesting activity because all the students (my friends) really enjoyed it. According to their feedback, they understood what we wanted to teach to them. The bad point is we did not really think about our goal when we use the activity. We just picked up any activity which is interesting without thinking about its effectiveness. So we concluded that it is effective enough. Next time when I teach listening, I will use different activity but before that I will think about what is my goal then choose the appropriate activity as a tool to accomplish my goal.

In general, other’s teaching group was very good. They can collaborate some of the teaching method in one lesson. It seems that they adapted our lecturer teaching method. In Nancy’s group, they got turn to teach speaking. Their activity was very interesting. They used drawing in the elicitation part. For the main activity they asked the students to write a descriptive text and role playing it. In my opinion, if they want to teach speaking, it will be more appropriate if they did not use the word “writing text”. Writing and speaking are two different things, even though they are related to each other. They have to be more specific in using such kind of “jargon”. It is ok to select vary kind of activity, as long as they can achieve their main goal that is speaking ability.

hectic week

This is the toughest week. I have to think of a concept of a learning blog. I have look for materials and the right curriculum for a listening session. I have modified this concept a lot of times, which made me confused. Looking for a suitable listening material for beginners isn’t easy. At first I just put in all the materials without thinking twice. After I consulted it with my lecturer, I realized that I cannot put everything, the ones I put in need to have a purpose. Then I searched the right curriculum for a beginner level, after that I searched for a suitable listening material. Then I adapted several materials with my own way of speaking. The construction of this blog still continues even at this very second.Wait and see :)

Assessments in a Different Perspective

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Last Friday was a hectic day, I needed to be an MC (Master of Ceremony), wanted to donate blood, noon has already passed and I haven’t eaten anything. Suddenly my friend told me,” Grace lets go to class.” I was shocked. I didn’t even remember that I have a class that day. The week before my teacher told us that we would have a “make up” class on the following Friday.

We rushed to class, and by the time we reached the class, my classmates looked at us, it turned out that an hour already passed since the class started and they were having a group discussion. I was assigned to the group with Nancy in it. Miss Tika gave me the subject and told me that I only got 5 minutes to read it and understand it. Honestly, I don’t understand a damn thing in that article.

Luckily, the article was about types of assessments and I had the same topic once in LTM (Language Teaching Methodologies) so I already had a rough idea about it. The main idea of the article was types of assignments which are diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments.

The first type is diagnostic assessments, usually in the form of a pretest, or oral communication, to know the standard of the class to serve as a guideline throughout the course. The next type is formative assessment, formative assessments takes form as written assignments either in class or home assignment throughout the course. The last type is summative assessments, or usually known better as final exams to know the growth of the students and to know whether the teaching method is effective or not. A good teacher should combine all three types of assessments

A lot of teacher in Indonesia tends to forget that diagnostic assessment is a very important part of a teaching-learning activity.  They only think about the final result (summative assessment) which isn’t really a good practice. A teacher should know the strengths, weakness, and the average ability of the class for a subject to be absorbed optimally by the students. In conclusion all three assessments are very important in a teaching-learning activity.

" A Chat with My Friend"

Last wednesday, me and my friend went to mall for windows shopping.while we were waiting for our menu to come, we were talking about our academic result. She told me so many things about her college life. One thing that made me feel upset was when she told me about her lecturers at her campus. The lecturer did not really care about his/her students progress. The way he/she taught is not interesting, eventhough they already used ICT in her/his classroom. They just teach and teach all the time. My friend said " the lecturer is just like a robot. They came to the class, lecturing with no pauses, then gave us the assignment and i'm sick of it". I think this kind of situation happened almost in all university in Indonesia. The important thing for the lecturer is, they delivered the material to the student, they got the score from the assignment, then it's done.  This sort of problem made my friend thought that the most important thing in studying a subject is the score not the knowledge. Hearing this statement, I felt shock. I suggested her to be more dilligent in order to get the knowledge. The score is nothing. The most important thing is the knowledge. What is the use of score if you don't get the knowledge? As the next generation of teacher, i will try to solve this issue. I will teach and monitor my students progress as well. Teaching will happen if there is a change in our students.

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