Towards the end of semester , students were kept very busy completing their blog project and preparing for their oral presentation in the last week. Each group had a few consultations with me over their presentation and they conscientiously attended to my comments and suggestions for improving their powerpoint presentation. We had a session on the do's and don'ts of powerpoint presentation, and went through some pointers on delivery.
The presentation went well generally. All the students took it quite seriously , although there was a hitch with one pair of students. They realised their mistake in the way they approached the blog project rather late and so had to re-do their blog substantially at the last minute. Their topic was "The Best Education Systems in the World", but instead of relying on secondary sources of information, they just decided on their own native "intuition" which countries had the best education systems , and of course their choices were not informed ones. I had pointed out to them in an earlier consultation that I didn't believe their choice of China was appropriate, and had urged them to do some research on it, but they didn't seem to take me seriously till quite late, when I saw their draft powerpoint and questioned them about their criteria for their choice.
Throughout the project I had reminded the class the importance of making informed choices based on well-considered criteria, which they would have to arrive at after reading up on the topic. I gave my class topics that were different from what is suggested in the course file. I chose topics that I felt would give students an authentic need to do some research on, and which they could personally learn something from. The group that worked on "Inspiring Women" said they learnt a lot from researching on the women they selected, and that they had personally felt inspired by what they learnt. The other group chose to work on " The Best Cities to live in", and they clearly stated their criteria for their choice of cities.
Prior to the presentation, there was face to face consultation as well as consultation via email. They would send me their draft powerpoint slides for my comments. The email was indeed a very useful way of negotiating the challenges of time and place.
The blog reports were also conscientiously attended to by the students.
Although the summary quiz was over, I still attended to improving their reading .Since I felt that one of the problems was that they tended to read very generally ,without getting into deeper engagement with the sense and hence become quite careless in their interpretation , I had them work as a group on a jigsaw reading activity. Each student was given a portion of a sentence to remember, and together they had to work out the the entire sentence just by listening to one another's portion and positioning themselves in the sequence that their portions should appear in the sentence. What showed up was a careless understanding of the portion that was memorised, but the activity forced students to engage more deeply with the meaning of the text. I think it did bring home to them the importance of paying close attention to the meaning of what they read instead of just skimming with a very superficial understanding.
Before the final examination, all the SKPD students were given a past year exam paper to practise on. It was a very easy paper, which was probably a good thing - to give students confidence in doing the final paper well.
The last class ended with a few photographs taken of me with the class.
After the final examination, I was still on the email with the students, and I sent out a final evaluation survey. However, I received only 6 responses. All the responses were very positive, and I believe they were sincere.
I still keep in touch with my students via email because they had told me they still wanted to receive email from me, especially jokes and articles on current issues.
I have enjoyed teaching this class very much. Getting involved in this project has been a boon because it nudged me to pay closer attention to how my students were responding to my methods, and how they were learning. It allowed me to focus on encouraging independent learning. However,I would say that one semester is insufficient - and that's what my students said too .
