Reflection Week 7 - Sharing about Teaching Experience

Talking about School Experience, my friends had shared their great experiences at PETA class last Monday. I did not share a lot because of my lateness because I had to say good bye to SMAN 61 Jakarta, but I think my teaching-partner had shared a lot of our experiences, so I have been represented. I saw one of the topics was the differentiation of perspective from my friends and their master teachers. Some of my friends did X, but their master teachers suggested Y, and according to our discussion Y is such as a-not-good thing. For example is teaching method, some of master teachers said “you don’t need to use group work,” instead for us group work is one of a good way to learn.

Based on my experiences on Teaching Assistance, I did not have problem with my master teacher about my lesson plan. She approved it even I used so many activities for teaching. Unfortunately, I did not do all activities because of the limited time, the activities are “bus stop” for the first class, and “bus stop and presentation” for the second class. I’m sure that it’s because of our time management is still bad, so my job is managing time nicely. 

Something that made happy is their comment or reflection. Most of them said that the teaching that I did is great, fun, enjoyable, and soon. They said that it’s the first time they learned Mathematics without stress, wow it’s shocking me. It means that my teaching was really fun, but I have a question, is my teaching effective?” I mean did the students understand my teaching? Based on their group work, they show a good thing, they answered the questions correctly even the questions were such a hard question, and then I concluded my teaching is quiet effective because they understood the material.

Another thing that should be considered is their individual understanding. I used posttest to assess them in the second meeting; it contained 10 simple questions from the easiest until the hardest one. Most of them succeed in the easy and medium questions, but their score still does not enough to reach the school’s standard–78. What do you think about the standard? Is it too high? Considering the status of the school as RSBI, I think 78 is an ordinary thing. Then, I analyzed what I have done in my teaching.

The first thing in my teaching experience is giving a worksheet for each groups, I did not provide for each student, it could be one factors which made them failed because they think copying the worksheet does not really important, so they just copied it at Thursday (the second meeting of Mathematics in a week). The second is I did not tell them if the second meeting they will have a posttest, I think if they were told about the posttest they will prepare it.

The third, my teaching-partner and I just provide the students 20 minutes to solve 10 questions because we came late to the class, and then reviewed the material quiet long, so some factors above could be the reasons why the students failed. The last factor is their thought. They thought that we just did teaching experience, so they did not think about the successful of learning that I did.

What do you think about my teaching? Did the students’ fail because of what I did? Or maybe it also their mistake because they did not prepare for learning math? That’s the reflection that should be my concern. Thanks for the great program teaching experience.