The first problem I saw with the lesson was that while we were telling the students to read the book in turn, some of them could not see the book and thus could not keep up with the storyline. One way for us to improve this would be to photocopy copies of books for them to refer to, and another way was what we did during the lesson - we utilised the whiteboard so that everyone could see the words clearly and we could explain it with annotations. I personally feel that giving every two people a copy of the book would still work better as the books contain pictures that can help them to understand better if they do not understand the words totally.

The second problem was that our progress was extremely slow, and it was not close to what we had previously expected (we planned to finish a book a lesson, but only managed to explain 2 paragraphs in the entire lesson). We acknowledge that this was partially because our lesson was cut short (the students had a performance after the lesson and had to leave early). However, I feel that it should not be totally attributed to that and even if we had not ended early, we would still be unable to cover all the content. I think that one way we can improve this is to make the lesson more exciting by providing incentives for them to answer the questions that we posed to them. Regarding this issue, I believe that the research we will be doing on pedagogy will help give us new insights on how best to work around it.

The last problem was that the students were not exactly engaged in the lesson and did not seem to enjoy it. This, in my opinion, is the most troubling issue at this point of time. As students ourselves, we understand that if we do not understand the lesson, there is no way we are going to participate actively in it or pay attention. These are essential for learning and if they do not take place, we will not be reaching our objective of teaching the students in the first place. As I mentioned before, Ms Jey told us that relationship with the students has to built over time and I believe this will improve slowly as we go along. One way in which we could make the lesson more interesting for them is to occasionally chat with them during our lessons and not keep to teaching the content the whole lesson. Additionally, as mentioned before, incentives could be used to keep them engaged in the lesson.

To summarise, I believe that even though this start was not what we desired, it was not a bad start. At least, we learnt valuable lessons regarding how we can improve our lessons and move on from here. One thing we can look forward to is that the entire class will be here (including Vignes) and it should at least help to relieve some of the tenseness in the lesson as more casual conversations can flow.

Clarence

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