Teaching Practice

By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn.

The lesson plan is done, the learning materials is done as well, now I am ready for my final demonstration.

I went to TCES early in the morning to prepare my instruments, learning materials, and the classroom that would be the place of my final demonstration. I cleaned the class, checked the monitor that I would use for showing my Canva Presentation Slideshow, and put my copies of lesson plan on the observers' table. After I made sure everything was fine and ready, I sat for a moment, focusing myself while waiting for all the observers, teachers and my CAPSU Tapaz friends to arrive.

After waiting a while, they came and I could start teaching. I had 50 minutes for teaching. I divided the time by three, 15 minutes for opening activities, 30 minutes for core activities, and 5 minutes for closing activities. I prayed first, then started teaching.

It started with greetings and praying together. I chose one pupil to lead the prayer. After praying together, I took pupils attendance. After that, I asked how they are doing, and continued by inviting the pupils to sing math song together to raise pupils' enthusiasm for receiving lessons later. Don't forget, so that all pupils felt invited, I always went around from the front to the back of the class to make sure they were focused on my class. This is my way of managing the class. Sometimes, if the teacher just stands monotonously in front of the class, the pupils sitting in the back corner feel like they are not invited and the class is not important to them. That's why I went around the class while teaching.

After singing together, I continued to the next activity, namely preparatory activities. This is done to ensure pupils are ready to learn by preparing them with several activity. The first one is drill with multiplication flashcards. I want to make sure all pupils are involved in this drill thus there is an interaction between pupil to pupil. So, my strategy here was to change flashing cards rule which previously I am the one who always flashed the cards, becomes the pupils who take turns flashing cards. I will flash a card and choose one pupil, and then if the pupil answers correctly, the pupil will go to the front of the class, flash another card, and choose other pupil, and if the answer is correct again, the other pupil will go to the front of the class and do the same thing, and so on. By this strategy, I will make sure the drill will be interactive between pupils.

So I started flashing a card and followed my strategy. And it worked. Pupils were so excited to wait their name to be called. They even sometimes shouted to get their names called. And because I kept walking around pupils' tables, I could easily manage the class to remain calm.

The next activity was reviewing last math lesson about multiplying decimals with factors up to 2 decimal places. Just like before, to make pupils feel involved in the class, I packaged this review activity in the form of a game. I prepared three balloons with one question each in them. Later, I will ask pupils to stand in a circle and play song. While the song is playing, I will give a balloon to one of the pupils who will then pass the balloon continuously to the pupil next to him. When the song stops, the pupil holding the balloon is the pupil who must answer the question in the balloon on the board. This will be done as many times as there are questions, in this case, three times. So there will be three pupils who will be selected to answer the questions on the board.

So, I asked the pupils to stand in a circle, and did the game. After three times playing the song, I got three pupils to answer the questions on the board.

This is where I used the reward method. After the three pupils finished answering the questions and all answer were correct, I gave them rewards in the form of snacks as appreciation for those who had answered the questions. Apart from that, I did this to motivate other pupils to stay focused, active, and participate in class. After they got their rewards, I allowed them to sit back down while the other pupils applauded.

The last activity in opening activity was motivation. So, I gave them motivation with agriculture context regarding the values of learning in my lesson plan which was helpfulness. 15 minutes of opening activity was done, and then we jumped to core activity.

Started with showing a problem about the topic on the monitor, I explained the way to solve the problem step by step. I also let pupils to ask questions if they are not understand about the explanation yet.

After this, I gave three questions for fixing of skills regarding the explanation that I had explained and asked pupils who wanted to try to answer. Actually, the problem arose here. Pupils who are active and diligent in participating in class always offer themselves to be volunteers, while other pupils are just silent and not actively participating in class. So, to prevent this, I chose another pupil who had never participated and explained to the pupil who participates frequently to give a chance to his other friend who had never tried answering a question. This way, all pupils get the same opportunities. I also did the same reward method in here after the pupils answered questions.

Afterwards, I allowed pupils to generalize what they had learned in their own language. In this way, pupils' understanding will become more flexible, not rigid regarding the explanations or sources they read.

The next activity is group activity. In this group activity, I divided class into three group, and the rest was I did the same thing I explained in "Teaching Plan" blog, such as showed standards in doing group activity and rubrics for participation in group activity, gave them their work basket, and asked them if there is anything that does not clear. And then, I told them the time for work and let them work.

During group activity, I walked around each group to see how are they doing and maybe help them if there are difficulties doing the group activity. I also told them to check their work again before finish. During the discussion, I observed each group to grade and assess them according to rubrics. So basically, I did observe, organize and manage each group in this group activity section.

After all the groups had finished, I opened presentation section. I asked each group to present their results. During this presentation, I also assess their work for their grade according to rubrics. After each group had finished presenting the results of their work, I also did reward method by asking the other groups to give applause. And after all of group activity things, I showed the grade to all pupils.

The next activity was exercise. I showed 5 questions to pupils that they had to work out on their own. Once I told them time for work, they started working on their paper. After time was up, I asked them to exchange work papers and corrected together. I showed them the answers to each question and they studied the answers while also correcting their friends' work. This makes the job of correcting much easier. After that, we jumped to the last activity which is closing activity.

In this closing activity, I just gave them assignment and waited for them to copy the question shown on the monitor. Then, we prayed together and say thank you and goodbye.

After my class, I received applause and congratulations from observers. I also received constructive suggestions and input from them. So, I would say that my final teaching demonstration is a success.