PART 2: Critical Essay

The path to discovering the worth of your teaching is through process of

critical reflection. (Brookfield, 1995)
According to the statement made by Brookfield, teachers can discover the
quality of their teaching by doing critical reflection on their process of preparing and
how they conduct their microteaching session. Teachers knowledge, as explained by
Grossman & Richard (1988) is a body of professional knowledge that encompasses
both knowledge of general pedagogical principles and skills and knowledge of the
subject matter to be taught. To teach students, teachers must prepare themselves
professionally in order to deliver knowledge holistically to the students.
Before I proceed to prepare the lesson plan for the microteaching session, I
have discussed with my partner, Alvin Yap and we have prepared a one-week
scheme of work. Based on the scheme of work that we have prepared, we finally
decided to pick Listening and speaking skill as our focus skill in teaching and to use it
in our lesson plan for our microteaching session. According to domains and
categories of teacher knowledge (Shulman, 1987), a teacher must have the content
knowledge before teaching the students. So based on what Alvin and I have planned,
we have chosen Unit 6: Care for the Sea, from the English Year 4 KSSR text book
and adapt it to teach the 3R: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle for the students. We
emphasize on the 3R aspect because we want the students to practice 3R in their
daily life and this will encourage the students not to pollute the beach and the sea.
The microteaching session supposed to start at 11 oclock in the morning.
However, the students came in 15 minutes late due to their previous class, Physical
Education that took a long time for them to climb upstairs to their classroom. The
students were physically active due to the activities that they did in their previous
class and it took a while for them to settle down and focus on the English subject that
Alvin and I conducted. I have to raise my voice several times in order to control the
classroom and some of the students were very excited because they have new
teachers teaching them. To overcome this, I should have done further research on
the classrooms timetable on that day so that I would have a cooling down session
with the students to calm them down and to make sure that they do not have
excessive energy that was generated from their previous Physical education class.

Setting up rules is important for the students. This is ensuring that they do not
misbehave later throughout the lesson. I should have set simple rules first after they
have entered the classroom. Rules such as those who are misbehaving should
answer my questions about the pictures in the set induction could be beneficial in
controlling the classroom but only for a limited amount of time. Speaking about time,
there are 15 minutes lost because they entered the class late, therefore the stress on
setting up rules in such classroom is not practical but can be done if there are
enough amount of time given.
Some of the students in classroom year 4 Nilam also do not understand
simple English. This is because they are used to communicate in their mother tongue
and does not practice English language in their conversations. However, there are
some that can understand English well but they need to hear instructions twice and
added body gestures to make them understand better. Repetitions and clear
pronunciations of the instructions given to the students is a must so that they could
understand what the teacher asks them to do.
After the students have settled down, our lesson plan was supposed to be a
one hour lesson. However, due to the 15 minutes loss, we have to make an
adjustment which is to shorten each stage in our microteaching session. The time set
for the set induction stage was supposed to be 5 minutes, due to the lack of time, I
have shorten it to 3 minutes instead. The set induction was very simple as I use two
pictures of the effects of sea pollution towards sea animals, specifically jellyfish and
seagulls but it does make the students aware on the effects as they could answer my
questions of what could happen if these animals of the sea eat the garbage thrown in
the sea.
Next, for the pre-listening stage, I point the students about the 3R: Reduce,
Reuse & Recycle. Children learn effectively through scaffolding by adults. (Bruner,
1983) At first, the students could not guess what the meaning of each R is but as I
progress and scaffold them, I relate it with the old newspaper that I have and show it
to the students so that they could relate it with their previous knowledge. They do
know that by Reduce or using fewer papers, fewer trees are cut off. They can save
trees by Reusing the papers and by Recycling, they could make new items using the
papers. To make the students more aware, I should have brought more items that

can be recycled to show the students that not only papers can be recycled, but other
items as well. But due to time constrain, I have to shorten the time and progress
immediately for Alvin to continue his lesson.
I should have not wiped off the 3R concept on the white board because the
students have a very limited attention span and can lose their memory towards what
have been thought to them. To solve this, I should be reminding the students about
the 3R concept by not erasing the concept on the whiteboard for the students to refer
to when the lesson progresses. I should also learn the effective whiteboard
management because I wrote about the 3R concept that took most of the space on
the whiteboard. This will lead me to wipe off the concept that the students are
referring to because I wanted to use the white board to write new content. Teachers
should be expert at whiteboard management because by forming a linkage of content
on the whiteboard, the students would be able to grasp the knowledge immediately. I
should have write the concept of 3R on the left or right side of the whiteboard and
using smaller fonts allowing more space for new content of the lesson to be written.
As a conclusion, I have successfully delivered the set induction stage and prelistening stage. However, due to time constrains and excessive amount of energy
generated from the students from their previous class, it was not smooth as I hope it
would be and technical errors such as poor whiteboard management should be
improved in order to tackle the interest of the students from class 4 Nilam.