Reflection on Act of Teaching (Chapter 8)

This chapter provides other options regarding of teaching strategies. The first one is

cooperative learning. The objective of this strategy is to put students into groups regardless of

gender, race, ethnicity and achievement level to demonstrate teamwork, all for one, one for all

philosophy. In this mode, high achievement students can also assist their peers who might need

help so that the teacher can work with students who need more help or can work on other

important things. In relation to this, in my last teaching practicum, one of the formative

assessments that I used was group poster project. There were five groups of four students. They

had to choose one topic from what they were learning and made a poster. I did this for the

purpose of enhancing group work, for the students to help each other learn and present what they

had learned and discovered. Although some students did not seem to like each other, I could see

their teamwork on the presentation. They knew what they were saying and they even added more

information from other sources.

The second one is discovery learning. This is to provide students opportunity to think and

figure out for themselves, help to discover, promote higher order thinking such as analysis,

synthesis and evaluation. I did not have a chance to apply this in my practicum. If I had to teach

one more time, I might ask the students to do research, think, analyze and come up with their

own evaluation along with their own ideas. Proceeding to third one constructivism, this is to

engage students in active social or group learning, sharing. I also applied this mode. Students

were partnered with someone (next to them) or they would get into groups and shared what they

read. After they had shared within their groups, they again would have classroom discussion

including both students and teacher. I really like using this method as each group would provide

their opinions to the class.

 Moving to the last mode direct instruction, the one that used the most. The chapter

suggests that, the teacher who uses this method would need to provide strong academic

direction, have high expectation, monitor and control the class. The overall purpose of using this

mode is to maximize learning content of the students. Since I only got one night for each topic,

I literally did not have time to prepare for content knowledge that much. To be honest, there was

no Byzantine Empire in my countrys curriculum and I had little time to look for different

sources. Actually, when we use direct instruction mode, we should familiar with the content and

master it so that we would be able to help our students learn more with rich knowledge about the

content.