REFLECTIVE JOURNAL

 

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL

INTRODUCTION

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience”.-John Dewey

            Reflective practice in teaching is arguably one of the most important sources of personal professional development and improvement. Effective teachers are first to admit that no matter how good a lesson is, their practice can always be improved. Teacher reflection is important because it’s a process that helps teachers to collect, record, and analyses everything that happened in the lesson. It allows teachers to move from just experience to understand. If they don’t question themselves about what their experiences mean and think actively about them, research has shown that they won’t make any changes and improvement.

As a part of the University of Kerala B.Ed curriculum, in third semester 40 day school internship was provided for B. Ed students. But now the school internship on this pandemic situation divides the 40 lessons into 4 categories. They are peer to peer teaching, face to face teaching, Victers channel class observation, e-content lessons. The online teaching practice was conducted through Google meet platform.

Peer to peer teaching

            Peer observation is when a teacher observes another teacher in order to develop their classroom practice. A peer can be any colleague willing to support you. They may be from a different department or the same team. Peer observation is a two-way process that can benefit both the observer and teacher being observed, with the goal of improving learning and teaching.

            On 16th November 2020 we started our online peer teaching. All the optional classes are divided into small peer groups. For the purpose of peer teaching 10 topics were selected for 10 peer teaching classes. I chose 10 topics from 11th and 12th standard Business studies and Accountancy. The ten topics are:

·         Problems of small business

·         International Monetary Fund and its objectives

·         International business and its benefits

·         Retail trade

·         Fluctuating capital method

·         Qualities of good leader

·         Major difference between international business and domestic business

·         Government company and its features

·         Motivation and its features

·         Profit and loss appropriation account

I could chose topics on behalf of my comfort zone. So I was confident about content knowledge. My peer groups were very supportive and encourage to do the work. Teachers general as well as optional observe my class and point out their comments. Positive and negative comments make us to improve and increase our confidence level. At the time of the first classes of peer teaching my energy level was not sufficient to make a class lively. I improved this and use appropriate teaching aids for the suitable topics. Most of the teaching aids are ICT based because of online teaching. Black board and chart showing sometimes not visible properly because of the internet connection problems.

     Online teaching was a new experience for me. It was not an exact replacement for the normal classroom teaching experience. But it gave much improvement in my teaching practice. Classes were ended on 20th November 2020.

Face to face teaching

     Face to face teaching is an instructional method where course content and learning material are taught in person to a group of students. Basically, it’s through a traditional classroom. But now this was conducted through online. Google meet application was used for the online teaching. 10 classes were conducted for face to face teaching. All the students were allotted to different schools for online teaching practice.

     On 25th November 2020, I started my face to face teaching practice. I got 11th standard students from Government H.S.S Palayamkunnu. The teacher from this school provided the chapter to choose 10 topics for me. Chapter-2 of Business Studies subject on 11th standard was allowed to teach.

The 10 topics are:

·         Sole proprietorship and its features

·         Merits and limitations of sole proprietorship

·         Joint Hindu Family business and its features

·         Merits of joint hindu family business

·         Limitations of HUF

·         Partnership

·         Features and merits of partnership

·         Limitations of partnership

·         Types of partners

·         Types of partnership

This was a first experience to teach students through online. All the students were active in Google Meet application. I got good responds from students. It is different from peer teaching, I could clear all the doubts of the students. On 30th November 2020, last day face to face teaching I conducted a conscintization programme on the topic ‘social media abuse’. The topic has more relevance in nowadays. On December 2nd 2020 I conducted a test paper for the purpose of achievement test construction. Then on the same day I made a Google form with15 objective type questions. It was for the purpose of diagnostic testing.

            Overall face to face teaching gave a different experience for me. The major difficulty was a classroom management skill cannot properly develop through online teaching.

Victors Channel Classes Observation

            Kerala Government KITE Victers channel is conducting online classes for all school students

After the 20 lessons from peer teaching and face to face teaching, we had been watching 15 classes of victers channel. There were different teachers from higher secondary schools to take the classes. The teachers are Bineesh sir, Shivi Krishnan sir, Simitha.T miss, Ajith Kanthi sir.

 The 15 lessons are:

·         Planning process

·         Comparison of business profession and employment

·         14 principles of management

·         Scientific principles of management

·         Impact of government policy

·         Staffing and its features

·         Staffing process

·         Coordination and its features

·         Levels of management

·         Features of partnership

·         Importance of business environment

·         Functions of management

·         Management and its features

·         Economic environment in India

·         Features of planning

All the teachers were efficient in their profession. Teachers have had competent and structured skills enough to deliver the topic. Instead of black board here power point presentation was used to show the points to students. All teachers had mastery in their subject matter. Teachers were lively to present the subject like a real environment classroom. So they were using posing and probing questions to actively participate the students in learning. 

E-content lesson plan

            During this period, it was a new approach to teach students recorded class. We were prepared to record the classes and upload it to any platform that can be shared to students. The merit of recorded class is students can learn at self pace. Any time students can approach this class like to recorded victers channel classes in YouTube application. There were 5 lessons to teach through recording. I used the Xrecorder application for recording classes and made Power Point Presentation to show the topic and contents. For editing Inshort application was used. After recording the classes were uploaded to the YouTube channel and Google drive.

The five topics are:

·         Business environment

·         Causes of pollution

·         Internal trade

·         Partnership deed

·         Global enterprises/MNC

 

The topics were small because each e-content classes were taken for 15 to 20 minutes. Topics were selected on behalf of my comfort zone.

            It was nice experience to teach through recorded class. It improves my technological knowledge and encourages doing new things to adapt as teaching learning aid.

COCLUSION

            Online teaching practice was a new experience for all of us. It creates a new era in teaching practice. All the experience of normal classroom teaching practice was not getting  from the online teaching practice. This has a lot of limitations irrespective of its easy way of approach. I am satisfied with my way of teaching practice. I can correct my mistakes while teaching for the first time through the guidance of my faculty.

 


 

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