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b. Reflect on your teaching practicum so far: What have you learned from your experience during TP? What kinds of challenges do you foresee as you develop as a Literature teacher in your specific school context?

Practicum has been an interesting and challenging experience so far. There are many (different) challenges each day, and I am thankful for encouraging CTs and for peers who can sympathise/empathise/are going through the same thing as I am. 

There seem to be quite a few learning points from practicum, but the key points that I have taken away are

1) The need to rationalise and provide reasons for the lesson through telling the students your objectives for doing this lesson.

Students in my school tend to be more cooperative when they see the point of doing something. By stating the achievable lesson objectives at the start of the lesson, students will be able to see what the teacher hopes to achieve through this lesson, and how achieving the objectives would benefit them. In addition to stating these objectives, the objectives have to be achievable, if not the students would give up entirely and not try to listen at all.

2) The need to engage students.

Without engagement, students will be bored and will start to do other things, tuning out of the lesson. This, in turn, causes disruptions in class as the students who are bored will start to talk and distract their classmates. Hence, there is a need to engage the students so as to manage the class properly. In addition, engaging the students will get them interested and facilitate learning, thereby achieving the lesson objectives.


3) The need for routines and discipline in class. 

All the classes that I take are N(A) classes. In these classes, there has to be a fixed pre-lesson routine or routines to follow, in order to let students get used to the order of events in class and to lessen the time taken for them to settle down. The routine also prepares the students for the lesson, and signals to both student and teacher that the student is ready for class. With fixed routines, it becomes much easier to carry out lesson, which in turn facilitates students' learning.




Possible challenges in the future:

1) Voice Projection

My voice is soft, and the people at the back of the class have problems hearing what I say. I have borrowed a mic to help with this problem, but I hope to be able to improve and work on my voice projection.

2) Discipline

Discipline is a key issue - once the students are settled down and behaving well, the lesson can be carried out very easily. However, it does not seem easy for me to reinforce discipline, and I have to work on being firm and fair, emphasizing my routines and rationalizing the concept behind this.

3) Homework submissions 

I foresee that there will be many people who do not hand in their homework on time. However, there is a need to collect the homework and mark it properly, so that the teacher can check on students' learning and give feedback accordingly. I will need to think more about the different strategies that can be used in class and how to make it more interesting.

4) Getting students to read their texts

Most of the students in my classes do not like to read and this is a problem because they need to know the text in order to know what is going on in class. I have tried enticing them, rewarding them, and even 'punishing' them to get them to read, but these strategies have limited success. There needs to be more work and thought on this issue, as with issue 3, on how to deal with it.