REFLECTION FOR MICROTEACHING ALIA FARHANA BT AB AZIZ ( TESL 2)
Based on microteaching session that my group members and I conducted last week, there are a lot of things that I manage to learn and reflect to improve our teaching during P&P in class later. First thing first, during our microteaching session, we just freely give our commands without clearly discussed who is going to take turn to conduct in every part. As there were three of us that conducted the microteaching, we should clearly delegated the task so that there will be no confusion happened. For example, we should assign one of us to conduct set induction, another person to conduct practice part and another person to conduct production part. This is to make sure that only one person talk at the same time and there will be no interference of other commands from other teachers. Second, while we played the song, we kept paused it and ask pupils to do gestures in between the silent period. The rationale we did this is actually because the song is too long and we were afraid that the pupils will lost their attention. Recommendation to improve this part is that, we should let the pupils to hear the full song first until they managed to get gist of what they are going to do. It is true that the pupils feel a little bit confuse when teachers keep giving commands while they were eager to listen to the song. Next, pupils usually need examples or models before they can do something rightfully. In our case, we instructed pupils to do actions without giving them a clear example on how they should do them. We, as teachers, should do the gestures first so that pupils can follow us, steps by steps. By doing this, the teaching and learning session will be more effective and the objective of the lesson will be able to achieve. Fourth, another part that my group members and I should improve more is the way we give our instruction. Instruction for pupils should be simple and easy to understand. To improve this, perhaps we can plan what we are going to say, and try the planned activities with friends first. By doing this, we are able to see which part will work and which part we should improve. Giving instruction to our friends should be easier because they can understand things quicker. If friends do not understand our instructions, pupils will face the same problem either. If we face this problem, perhaps we can rephrase our sentence and try to
lower the level of activity conducted so that our pupils will be able to understand and eventually do the activity. Besides, the handouts and worksheets that we distributed to pupils, which show the parts of body, need a few modifications because it is not suitable to be used with low level pupils. For example, the handouts should include instructions such as; Fill in the blanks with correct parts of body in singular/plural form even us think that the pupils might already know what to do. Next, some say the picture that we include in the handouts can make the pupils confuse which is which. But I think that as hair and head is actually situated in the same position, there is nothing we should do unless the boy in the picture has no hair. Moreover, we had stated during the microteaching, fill in the blanks with the correct parts of body based on the song, Head, shoulder, knees and toes. So pupils will be aware that the vocabularies for them on that particular day are just based on what is in the songs. Last but not least, to make the picture in the handout is easier to understand, we should use colour coding according to every parts of body. For example, we can use colour red to show shoulder parts. We also can specify each parts of body by circling each of the part and put the empty box besides so that pupils are more clear which parts of body should we labelled. To conclude, my group members and I really learnt a lot of things from the feedback based on our microteaching. This experience can be used for our practicum later as we will be dealing with real pupils that need more attention and clear instruction.
