Reflection

Whenever I asked my PGDE and BEd students how they felt about their teaching, the majority of them seemed to find it hard to respond to my question. I remember one of my PGDE students asked me how she could get a distinction and one inquired how she could get a pass in the next observation. Sometimes, as a frontline teacher, we should learn how to evaluate ourselves. It shouldn't be appropriate to wait for others to tell you how well or how bad your performance is. I guess we are the only one who knows better than anyone in the world whether we have taught the lesson well. If we do not know how to reflect upon our own teaching or performance, how can we train our Ss to do so? Learning how to learn is a very catchy slogan in the recent educational reform. However, learning how to reflect is equally significant as this is what everyone needs on top of 'money'. Think about when our Ss grow up and work in society, they are constantly expected to reflect upon their performance and learn how to improve accordingly. I would say teaching Ss to reflect upon their own learning should start as early as possible. If possible, we should start coaching Ss to do self-evaluation in the formative years of their schooling such as Primary 1 to Primary 3.

Peer Observation

On Monday, I invited my mentor Marc to observe my BEd Yr. 4 class which was the second last class in this semester. Marc is very nice and gentl guy as he actually got the recruitment duties overseas from 11 - 13 April in Nanjing. It means that once he came back from Nanjing, he would be in my class for three hours first thing in the morning. More than that, he wrote me a detailed report for my reference. I felt so elated to have him to give me feedback. Being a teacher educator, I bet I still have room for improvement and should be reflective towards my own teaching. If one always thinks he/she is good enough, he/she would never have any progress in their teaching careers. After the lesson, Marc had lunch with me and we had some small talk. He praised me to have good classroom management and the flow of the lesson was very smooth. Here, I need to take this opportunity to say thanks to my Yr.4 students. First, they are patient and they are nice student teachers. Though someone always got a wrong impression that IEd students are not good, they are totally wrong. With this group of students, they make my teaching different and much easier. I'm very proud of them. They are motivated and willing to learn. This is exactly what Marc told me. After a month, these students will graduate and I wish them all the success in their future career! In the mean time, I need to say thanks again to Marc as he told me how I can do better in my lessons.

PS Last but not least, Marc, your blog is very sentimental and I'll read it regularly. Your Chinese is beautifully crafted and very moving.

Teaching and School Visits

Unlike in CityU, working in HKIEd requires me to pay school visits for both in-service teachers and pre-service student teachers. If you ask me which responsibilityI like most, I will answer 'teaching'. Of course, for each responsibility, there are always pros and cons. For teaching, I need to do a lot of preparation and reading. Also, before the day I teach, I study my lecture notes and tutorial task like a hardworking student because I don't want to teach unprepared. In addition, I am a professional teacher. Therefore, I have to give an impression to my students that I am rather familiar with the content knowledge I am preaching. If I cannot do so, how can I motivate them to learn effectively. My BEd students are very motivated and intelligent and they are really willing to learn. For school visits, it is interesting as I can travel to a lot of places and schools to which I haven't been before. Also, it is essential to keep myself 'informed' how my students, be they part-timers or full-timers, are doing in the classroom. The only good thing for doing school visits is I don't need to prepare at all. In that case, what I am involved in is to have the output - conferencing with my students after they finished their teaching. But for me, I still prefer teaching as I like it and sometimes it is really rewarding to see students take home with what I taught them.

Writing Assessment

Today, I have taught a professional development course on the New Senior Curriculum. When the participants and I talked about how to motivate students to write English, we had different answers such as using e-Forum to help students to express their opinions on some current issues, writing blogs, writing journals and so on. Then I asked some of the participants how many pieces of writing they need to mark in a year. Some said their marking load was up to 12 full-length essays plus bi-weekly reading logs. I felt very shocked. It seemed that the more essays students can write, the more progress they will make in English writing. Of course, this is the belief most Hong Kong writing teachers possess. I don't think so. In the first place, we should focus on the quality of writing rather the quantity. Second, overmarking is another issue we shouldn't overlook. How much do students understand our comments? Do they respond to our feedback? How do they act upon our feedback? These last two questions seem to be neglected as principals and panel chairpersons are too carried away with the number of essays students need to write. But other than asking students to produce a large number of 'low' quality essays in order to fulfill the quota set by English departments in each school, do school administrators think about how to work out some effective strategies to enhance students' writing development? The answer is no.

Why do panel chairpersons consider adopting genre-based pedagogy, process approach, portfolio-based approach, peer response groups and so forth? These methods or approaches are effective to help students both affectively and cognitively in one way or another. Though some argue these strategies are only effective in the L1 context, a number of research studies conducted in Hong Kong has proved that some of these approaches could also benefit students writing (e.g. Lee, 2004; Lee, 2008; Lee, in press). Do Hong Kong writing teachers have to burn the midnight oil to mark students' compositions? Why don't panel chairpersons adopt focused marking? We do it not because we are lazy, but we believe that focused marking does play a role in helping students to build up awareness towards their own mistakes over time. Also, we may implement focused marking piecemeal. There is no need to change our current practice overnight. I think it is the high time to reflect upon the current marking practice in the local context.

A Warm Evening

Last night, I worked in my study and my wife also worked on her master thesis in hers. When she felt bored, she played a very old CD which featured a very famous international pop star - Leslie Cheung. Though I am not a fan of his, I do like his songs as he could sing with intense feelings and no other singers can be compared with him. We listened to a few old pop songs of his and then hummed the songs naturally. On track 8, the song is a duet. We decided to sing to the music (as we could turn the CD player to karaoke mode). As I had very poor memory, I had to study the lyrics when I sang but my wife could sing without referring to the lyrics. The song only lasted for about three and a half minutes. We had so much fun and were a bit nostalgic. No doubt, singing is an effective way for us to relax. Afterwards, we sang few more songs before we hit the sack. Yes, it is so simple! My wife and I spent a warm evening just simply making our own 'vegi' supper and singing a few oldies.

A Colleague From Brazil

Yesterday, I received an email from Brazil. The sender is an EFL teacher in Brazil who shared with me how writing portfolios can be implemented in her classroom. She asked me a few questions to which I hope I could really answer. Since in different contexts, students would have very different responses to the pedagogical appraoch we intend to carry out in the writing classroom. I guess Karla is a very energetic teacher who doesn't feel frustrated even though her class is a bit difficult to teach. I guess as English teachers, we have to develop positive attitude towards our students and have faith in our teaching. I am not saying that English teachers are God who is omniscient to change whatever he likes at his fingertips , but I always believe that we do teach with a purpose - it is to help and support our students to learn better. Like Karla, she is willing to try many different methods even in face of a lot of difficulties in her teaching context. Karla, keep going and you can do the best.