Teaching Planning – Professional Teacher training

Overview

10.09.2019

This is about the planning phase of teaching. The question my group needed to answer was:

How will you promote learning and competence using a classroom and virtual settings? 

Our group met twice online and in between we did our own research and collected data on Prezi. Our first online meeting as a group was bit chaotic and leaderless. All of us were trying to figure out our roles and discussing with each other on the roles that we can take on to move forward with the task.

The question was clear that we need to teach about planning a learning for class room setting and a virtual setting. Therefore after an hour of conversation online with the group over the bad sound quality and noises we managed to divide tasks among ourselves. It was decided that we will have four sections: Preparation, classroom setting, virtual setting and conclusion.

I took the role of editing prezi as everyone else send in their take on the topic. At first it seemed like information on prezi was not making any sense but eventually after the second meeting with the group things slowly started to make sense. I managed to prepare slides with enough information to cover 40 minutes of teaching material.

Another role that I took was to take care of preparation and virtual setting section. I managed to do my part and I also contributed in the classroom setting section as well. I am running a course right now in my University and I had to plan the whole course on my own. Eventually I got some help from the International relations staff member. As the information about planning was already fresh in my mind, therefore, I did not search a lot online about the planning phase.

I managed to edit everything on prezi and send PDF versions to my group members on Saturday morning. Which gave everyone three days to practice on their teaching.

Then came the teaching day.

I have already done so many presentations that now speaking in front of strangers is just a routine. I was together with my group member, therefore, we took turns in our teaching. It was a collaborative teaching as if I did not know something or left something to say then my group member chipped in and continued with the presentation. We got a lot of questions and admiration from the listeners and through out we were answering questions. At the end we had few more questions as well. Therefore, the whole time that we took to present was a bit over an hour.

In the universities and schools planning a course requires that we know thing or two about regulations and rules that are imposed upon us from education department, ministries and institutions. We must also know what theory we have to use to teach. Thus, the other two presentations covered laws and theories for planning a course. I learned a lot and even though I knew about these topics and their importance I really liked that I found some important links and information that I can use in the future planning phases.

Reflection

Group Work

Groups are different in nature, sometimes there is age difference, gender differences, cultural differences so on an on. My group is no different. We have gender, age, and culture in our group and on top of that we have very different ways of thinking. Then their is experience. Some have teaching experience more than others. It is easy to see that we all think differently and this can cause problems in the beginning. Members of the group slowly will adjust with each other and then they focus on the work. Every group will go through different stages of group development. Let’s just take a well know example of Integrated Model of Group Dynamics by Susan Wheelan IMGD. the first stage is getting to know each other and entrusting in a leadership and following a leader’s commands. The second stage is fight and getting to know each other better. In our group we had the same issue in the beginning. Slowly it will become easier to listen to each other and work collaboratively.  My group is now between stage 1 and 2. How do I know this? During our presentations I realized that my other group members are dealing with some issues that I can classify them as a fight. Not a physical or verbal fight but lack of trust and last minute notice of not being prepared. Which made some members of my group angry and they said it in our internal message group. The third stage is where we are heading and that is a stage where we know a bit more about each other and group works in better harmony. Roles can be divided easily and trust builds up even more. 

We have already planned about the next time we are meeting and I will know how to move forward in a less chaotic way. 

What I have learned is to always focus on the group work and trust in my group members and things will get better. If I have to give someone feedback I must remember that the feedback is for the group work and not towards a person. I will, however, wait to give feedback as not everyone is ready to receive feedback or the fact that some may not know what feedback actually is and will take the given feedback personally. 

I have trust in my group and they are all very intelligent people and once our group settles down and move on to the third stage things will get more productive. 

Teaching

I am going to just talk about my self here. Not being narcissistic but reflection means that I talk about my learning. 

First of all, if you have noticed I have used the word presentation instead of the word teaching. I felt like I am not teaching I am instead presenting a topic. Some might argue differently and will say that no it was teaching but this is how I feel right now. I know I had a lot of questions asked to me and it was not just a presentation but the feeling of teaching was not there. May be it is a teaching that I did but as I am not sure I use the word presentation for now. 

This might be because I used a lot of text in the slides which becomes a presentation during teaching online. I am practicing to not use slides when I go for teaching in a class. I make my students learn the topic by research and reflections. This I did not do in the first teaching. I know I cannot give reasons because I had to made my choices beforehand. This brings me back to the first stage of group development as I did not know much about others and I had to gather martial that was a combination of my group members’ contributions. I knew I will have a lot of text on the slides. Now that we are moving towards the second teaching and now that I have seen some of my group members in action I know that I can go with less slides and my group members will be alright with it. In case of less slides I will feel more like teaching than presenting. 

There was a question about the role of a teacher in our presentation and most of the audiences including myself agree that the role of a teacher is a combination of many different roles. Teacher sometimes has to be a coach, manager, psychologist, and facilitator among many other roles. I do agree with this and I see that the future role of a teacher is more or less as a facilitator. Or there will be facilitators like I are going to be employed in schools, colleges and universities.