I must admit I am still exploring myself as a teacher. I revise my beliefs on learning and what teaching should be like to meet those beliefs, constantly. Until few years back, I had a different understanding on how learning works, based on how I was taught, and one of them was learning by coercion or ‘conditioning’ based(Torre, Daley, Sebastian, & Elnicki, 2006). That sounds a bit harsh, but in fact fear has always been one of the ways of teaching, still followed in many schools. Fear of grades, fear of failing, fear of parental disappointment, fear of society, its all been there. I cannot …show more content…
This is based on two reasons; firstly, on student assessments of my lectures I have received best feedback for were the ones where I had the students engaged and involved in teaching process; second, I myself learnt best when I was ‘doing’ something. I believe that students must be engaged in discussion or problem solving activity in order to grasp a concept better. I agree that, in order to be fully involved, students must engage in thinking tasks such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of the material being taught. This facilitates scaffolding of the new information into what students already know. Several studies have demonstrated that students in fact prefer strategies that promote active learning as compared to traditional lectures(Stowe, von Freymann, & Schwartz, 2012; Wolff, Wagner, Poznanski, Schiller, & Santen, 2015). I also try to include discussions, about why they are learning what they are learning in the lecture to build a stronger association with the taught course material. I encourage collaborative learning by assigning small group activities and discussions which can then open up bigger discussions on the subject (Johnson, 1998). Most of my teaching belief revolves around students participating in the learning process where I serve as a facilitator of knowledge. I try to engage in feedbacks to evolve the teaching strategies every year to meet student needs …show more content…
I include pre-assessments in my class to understand the prior knowledge that the students carry with them. I often use media or videos that make the subject being taught understandable and visually absorbable(Shyu, 1999). Using such a method also facilitates any further lecture that I have on the subject as a ‘build up’ over the previous knowledge. Along with the instructional methods I include modelling by showing how to perform specific tasks such as dissection during laboratory sessions, then allow the students to do the same followed by inter-student learning by discussion over the performed activity and feedbacks to know if there was a better way to do things. I then take their understanding into account and try to clarify any ideas that I feel may be better seen differently(Fan-Ray, Hwang, Szu-Chuang, & Chen,