K & R

Hi hi,
Whenever I see Ken, I am reminded of the Can? vs Ken misunderstanding that cropped up a couple of times during our micro-teachings thus far. :) The poor guy. I think I was guilty of that during my microteaching as well. Oops. :(
It also reminded me of the time I was rather traumatised by something similar when I first attended school in Pri 1. My Eng teacher loved to go "Shall we?" every few minutes. And having come from a traditional Hokkien family with almost no Eng speakers at that time, it was so stressful for my young heart then because I could never tell if a teacher was calling me or not. :( Of course, I have outgrown it. But I recently resolve to introduce my name as 'shall we talk' from now onwards if people have problems getting my name right or remembering it. :D


2 micro-teaching sessions

We have 2 similar micro-teaching sessions today by Ken and Raksha. They are similar in terms of the topics, the mode of instruction, and most importantly, both teachers come across as being really confident, knowledgeable, quick-thinking and very very sharp to what is happening around them. :)

Ok, down to Ken's micro-teaching.

The handphone incident + student who simply walked out of class was rather scary but Ken did not waver in his confidence when he handled it. Cool man!
But I am not so sure if it is a good idea to make the 2 students continue doing pair work together. Both of them probably need to cool off first.

To students who asked questions (although not all of them intelligent questions), Ken addresses all of them earnestly. Just that a nodding student is not equivalent to a student who understood a teacher's explanation.

The graphic organiser was a good move. Except that I don't know how much to copy down. I ended up copying almost everything and not listening to what was said.

And it's a pity Ken did not have the time to get down to the activity for students to apply the least-cost model. I think that is a terrific idea!

Raksha's micro-teaching.

I think it would be good if case studies come with a map of the region we are discussing, especially if you can point out to students things like where the airport is situated, where raw materials are obtained, where HEP stations are located etc, in relation to Bangalore or the 'Silicon Valley'? Or am I terribly outdated? My Geog teacher used to make us draw the map of the region we are studying, marking out some important infrastructure tat we would talk about in our essays. It probably should not be as drastic as this but some knowledge of spatial arrangements of the factors would be great.

The jumbled-word quiz was not helpful to me in testing knowledge gained because I was not reading the sentences. Instead I was focusing on deciphering the jumbled words.

I like the notes with the blanks. Made it easier to take down so that I can listen to the teacher better. But I think that for the different factors (eg govt, rm, mkt land etc), arranging them in the style of a mind map would be more useful.
A combination of Ken and Raksha's pluses for the notes would be great.

I wonder how Raksha got to video clip. Was it difficult searching for it? It shows her resourcefulness by using such a clip for this topic, as it was not a clip tailored specially for this topic.

Okie, got to go zzzz…..

SW