Focused Conversations
FC2
What happened?
My teaching practice did not get off to a good start at Dunman, particularly for one of my classes. After my first week of lessons, when I asked the class for some anonymous feedback, many of them responded saying that they did not learn much from my tutorials and that they missed the class discussions that they used to have with their previous teacher. One of them went as far as criticising me for “not doing a good job engaging the class” and told me to “work on people skills”.
What did I do? Why?
Initially, I felt that I had lost the confidence of the students in this class. However, I took their feedback seriously to improve the areas in which I was currently lacking in, and over time, I adapted to the profile of the students I was teaching.
It was certainly true that my facilitation and questioning skills were not good enough to keep a discussion going. Too often, discussions died down after a few exchanges and only in retrospect was I able to recognise missed opportunities that could have been exploited to derive higher order responses. Together with my CT and HOD, we spent a lot of time working on questioning and facilitation techniques. For example, when I first began, I tended to question by speaking only to individual students without keeping the rest of the class occupied. Through lesson observations, feedback and research, I learnt to redirect questions to the rest of the class, to make thinking visible by noting points on the whiteboard, to get the entire class to buzz on an issue, and to plan open questions ahead of time.
Additionally, I actively built rapport and trust with my students by getting to know them outside of classes. I also gave them greater autonomy over their lessons by explaining how I was planning their lessons, and invited students to suggest what they would like to learn in classes.
What did I learn?
I learnt that it was important to take all feedback, no matter how hurtful, as opportunities to learn and to improve my own teaching. I also learnt that first impressions count, and that we face an uphill climb to earn the trust of our students if we fail to give a good first impression of ourselves. This experience motivated me to become a better teacher in order to teach more interesting, engaging lessons that students would enjoy.