Please Regard Them as Human, not Robots!

Every teacher must agree that assessing student is a must but not all of them know what must be assessed and how they should assess. As we have seen and experienced during primary and secondary school, teachers mostly focuses merely on the final result, without considering the process students do to get it. In many cases, the result only shows students’ cognitive ability—which is the little piece of their ability. Meanwhile the bigger parts of their understanding are shown in the learning process, and it ‘s seldom assessed until it buried under the surface . Just like an iceberg.

In my opinion, if a teacher just concern on this kind of treatment, then s/he cannot see the students as a human. Students are seen as robots, who are just given some orders to be finished and then s/he will recognized them by looking at the result. If they can’t do the test successfully, then they will not be regarded as a good robot. –( This is happened in our country—I bet you realized it—especially in the national examination)—

Whereas actually, if the teachers have a will to dive deeper in to The Ocean of Students Soul, they will see a lot of hidden potencies that are buried because they never give attention to. There are many aspects to be assessed since students are diverse human, so not of them can be treated as the same. I remember a story about a teacher who used to assess her students simply using worksheet, and when there is a student who can’t answer it, she evaluated her teaching way. When she changed the model of assessment, the miracle happened; the students who are weak in answering the sheet can show better performance in another task, e.g. exhibition or presentation.

Well, if we want to regard students as whole human, we shouldn’t use Iceberg model to assess them, yet a house-building process—borrowing Yosea’s term. We shouldn’t use summative assessment only, but also formative and diagnostic ones.

The proper application of those assessments can be analogized as the process of building a house. The diagnostic assessment is used at the beginning of the learning period so that teacher can use the result to determine the appropriate treatment for students—a strong foundation. The following process is also important, how to construct and combine all elements needed to build the house. Teacher should give a lot attention in this stage because students often show their real understanding here through their cognitive, affective, and psychomotor ability. And by seeing the result of formative assessments, teacher can give them feedback which parts of the lesson still need improvement. Finally, to finish the process, we put roof on the top of the building. This is the time when summative assessment needed; to cover what students have learnt during a period of lesson.

If we use this analogy, we can see that when we build a house, the proportion of each part is not same. The height of the wall is not same with the roof. That’s why a teacher should share a fair proportion among those kinds of assessment. Just like in SSE, we are assessed by using many variation of assessment, and the final exam is not the only decision. I feel be regarded as a whole human, with all characteristics, uniqueness, and talents. How lucky I am...

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. :-)

PETA???

These images came up into my mind at the first time I came to PETA class...




I was thinking, were all of them related to our future as a language teacher? I'm not studying history or geography!, shouted my mind at that time. Ten minutes after the lesson began, I started nodding my head; yes, this is what I need to be an extraordinary teacher. I have to pay attention to this course since I need many knowledge about PETA. Not Pembela Tanah Air or map, but Principle of Effective Teaching and Learning.



From the first meeting, Ms Tika showed us an original song made by Pak Iwan that motivate us to be an awesome teacher who never stop learning. Unfortunately, she didn't want perform that song for us :( . That song became such an eliciting that bring us into the next activity, describing the characteristics of effective teaching. The most interesting part is, we didn't have to look at a long list listed by the experts; we decided by ourselves what the characteristics are. Our previous experience helped us developing the list. By doing this, I can know what are the effective teaching according to my friends. Since our age is not far from Senior High School students, the answers can help me identifying what my students want later on. Some of them are:

• consider students' need
• well-prepared and complete resources
• supporting students' potencies
• focus on the basic objectives

As the course title, this is not just about teaching but also how to assess students effectively. We were introduced to that since the second meeting on October 4, 2010. Ms Tika gave us a brief explanation how to make lesson design by using Backward design. Set the goals of the subject, design some assessments to see the students' understanding, and then elaborate them into learning activities. Since she only told us the technique at a glance, I think it's fair if we still made such a confusing lesson plan. However, from this activity I notice that most of us still do 'twin sins' of design. Sometimes we only focus on designing fun activities and forget about the goals we want to achieve, and vice versa. But when we are too stick into the curriculum demand that we have to finish all of the topic, it can be boring for students. Yes, interesting lesson is not always effective lesson but this is the challenge for us as the next generation of teacher. Can we make a lesson design that cover the topics yet fun at once? It's another role of teacher: we have to be an awesome designer!