How Difficult to Avoid "Twin Sins of Design"

After doing two microteaching practices this week, I more realized that the “twin sins of design” is such a big problem for teacher. I, as a student who accustomed to experience fun learning in SSE, wanted to apply it in the class I practiced. But then I found that it can’t always work everywhere.

I tried to make students excited by playing “Spy Racing” game at the beginning of the class. In this game—which is actually modified from running dictation—I asked 3 people in a group to “steal” the “secret information” that were spread around the classroom. After that, they memorized the information and reported it to a “boss” of each group. The boss, then, arranged those unorganized sentences into a good paragraph, which was a procedure text.

I played a video (where the sentences taken from) to check their answer, but shockingly, the video didn’t work! Fortunately, I had written the correct arrangement as a back-up plan. After that, I explained the structure and the language features of procedure text, and then I asked each group to make their own procedure text based on certain topic I gave. All of these activities took 2×40 minutes.

My master teacher’s comment made me realized that my teaching is not really effective, “Well, actually for a teaching simulation, you have done a good job. Everything ran smoothly with the right flow. However, if you become a teacher in a public school you can’t do it every time. You have to fulfill the curriculum demand. You have a lot of topics to cover in certain time. For the activities you have done, I think 80 minutes is too much. Moreover, this topic has been delivered before in my class.”

I realized that the class condition was not really suitable for the game, which required a lot of movements. Imagine when more than 30 students move around the class that full with table quickly. Therefore, in the following day, I omitted the ‘puzzle’ game that has been scheduled in my lesson plan.

In the second day, I asked them to present their procedure text in front of the class while my partner assessed them with presentation rubric. We used it since we want to assess them objectively and systematically.

After that, I moved to the next topic; advertisement. We distributed the ads taken from Jakarta Post and then asked them to discuss some guiding question in some small groups. We designed the questions that can lead them to identify things related to advertisements. After small group discussion, we guide them to conclude it together. I was amazed since we could cover a topic in less than 20 minutes. However, due to limited time, we asked them to do e-reflection by sending it via email.

From their reflection, we know that almost every one enjoyed those two days experience. We’re very glad since they showed enthusiasm during the class, either when discussed, presented their products, or when we explained. The classroom rules we agreed at the beginning of the class really help us to control them. Well, reflecting from my master teacher’s experience–and also mine–I know that it’s rather difficult to fulfill the curriculum and students’ demand at once , especially in a big class. As solution, maybe we can schedule some fun learning activities once a week since students like it so much. :-)