QED526 Reflections (Week 4 - Classroom Environment)

After going through the material on Blackboard, I felt that my most significant takeaway from this E-Learning lesson was the importance of the classroom environment in not just fostering a positive learning space for students, but in enabling them to develop social-emotional skills.

As a student, I never really paid much attention to my classrooms - I generally felt that my learning was more dependent on my teacher and peers rather than the physical space I was in. However, looking back, I realise that some classrooms definitely did engender more positive attitudes towards learning, and these tended to be the ones that veered away from the traditional configuration of horizontal rows and bare walls. My favourite classroom was the one I had in Secondary 2, as my school organised a classroom decoration contest and gave each class a small budget to buy paints and other decorative materials with, and gave us free rein to work as a class on a design that we could call our own. The result was a bright and welcoming space, and each of us even got to paint an icon that we felt represented ourselves as individuals on the back wall. While this contest was only carried out once (logistically, it was a nightmare - the school wound up having to hire professional painters to repaint the entire building at the end of the year), I really felt that it helped to foster camaraderie amongst the students, and our "personalised classroom" created a sense of pride and symbolic identification in us. To this day, it remains one of my most cherished memories of my secondary school years.

Moving ahead to what I as a teacher could do to nurture a sense of class culture and develop social-emotional skills in my students -- I think my best teaching experiences took place in classrooms that were lively; not just in terms of my students' behavior, but in terms of the space itself. I like having my students sit in interior loop arrangements, where they can move quickly from sitting in rows (during the times when my teaching strategy is direct instruction) to groups (when collaborative learning methods are used) by simply turning around or joining their tables together. This ability to quickly transit from a teacher-focused to a student-focused environment reflects my own personal pedagogical approach. I feel that these arrangements naturally allow for camaraderie to be built, since students are always aware of the co-dependent nature of their learning, and frequent group work helps to build social ties. Furthermore, in terms of social-emotional learning, students will quite naturally develop skills such as social awareness and relationship management through collaborative learning. I would thus hope to design my future classroom as such.

QED526 Reflections (CJC Video)

3 things I have learnt from the video:
- Need to be observant to students' needs and understand where they are coming from
- Tolerance and understanding is key, no matter how difficult the student or the situation
- A problem child never exists alone; need to engage the rest of the class in your management strategy (e.g. laying down rules for the class as a whole and enforcing them across the board consistently)

2 things that I hope to apply in school in future:
(this somewhat overlaps with the things I have learnt from the video, so I selected just two that I really wish to be able to do)
- Maintain a calm and firm demeanor no matter the situation
- Always wait and assess things over time, don't jump to hasty decisions or actions

1 thing that struck me:
- "Every day is show time" -- how true! One of my favourite quotes is about how teaching is essentially a performing art, and this quote from the video really reminds me of it.

QLK520 Reflections

• To what extent do you think you will be able to apply what you have learned in this course to your future teaching career?

1. Please answer in terms of the communicative skills you have learned as well as the "blended aspects" – the online and F2F elements of the course.
2. Support your answer with examples if possible.

Prior to this QLK520 course, I considered myself as an above-average communicator, especially in the area of written communication. Years as a Humanities student have made me comfortable expressing myself in writing, and since English is my first language, I have always been fairly confident of my ability to communicate verbally as well. That is not to say, however, that the course has not been useful for me - on the contrary, I found the modules to be rather enriching on the whole, and found the section on oral communication particularly helpful. By getting a chance to prepare short speeches on topics relevant to my future teaching career (such as matters of school discipline) and then deliver them to the class, I felt that I was able to improve on the essentials of oral communication, such as tone, pronunciation, and pace of delivery. The feedback from my tutor and peers was also useful, although I would say that the most eye-opening experience was being able to watch my own speech on video, since that really highlighted the nuances of my communication style that I previously wasn't aware of. This included my posture, physical gestures, eye contact, and even the pitch of my voice. I've now realised that I tend to speak rather quickly and use fillers in my speech, and that my physical gestures can sometimes convey a lack of confidence, particularly when I am unable to make eye contact with the audience. These are some things which I will definitely bear in mind and do my best to avoid while in the classroom in future.

As for the "blended aspects" of the course, I felt that it was a good idea to offer students the freedom to choose whether they would prefer to take certain modules online or face-to-face. However, I feel that if I were to do the same with my classes in future (i.e. upload materials online for their independent study) I would centralise all their online module requirements on a single web-host to avoid confusion. While students are indeed becoming more IT-savvy, I feel that easy access of course material and submission of assignments remains imperative, and I would therefore restrict the number of online platforms to just one.