MOCK TEACHING (AO2) (Week 7)

Hello everyone.

This week, I will be sharing my experience about the mock teaching session which I had conducted in the class. It was an eye opening encounter for me as I had never done it before. This mock teaching was part of the assignment in this course. The purpose of this task was to give us a forecast of what will be happening in real classrooms when we go for our teaching practicum.

In this individual assignment, we were given two parts. The first part required us to create 3 lesson plans based on one school of thought that we could relate the most with. Then, we had to justify the flow of the lesson by explaining why we chose to do a certain activity and how it related to the theory we had chosen to base on. After that, in the second part of the assignment, we were given half an hour to conduct the class using one of the lesson plans as a guide. 

I had chosen the Humanistic school of thought as I feel that students' needs and feelings must be appreciated. In my lesson plan, I had incorporated a circle map and an informal essay writing activity which was done in the classroom itself. I prepared a circle map and informal essay template and gave it to my students as class worksheets. Then I asked them to describe their friends and write anything descriptive words in the circle map. Following that, I instructed them to write an informal essay to their friends using the words in the circle map earlier. In this way, the students had learned about adjectives, the format of an informal essay and how to brainstorm as well. Towards the end of the activity, they felt very happy and fulfilled when they read each others' letters. When I asked them to express their feelings, they said that they felt appreciated, loved and secure knowing that their friends will always have their back no matter what happens.

This was a wonderful experience to me as I could see how cheerful the students were after the whole activity. Their needs of esteem and sense of belonging according to Malsow's Hierarchy of Needs had been achieved and they also learned something fruitful that they can use to describe things and people. I could also understand the importance of the mental and emotional health of my students and when they felt secure, they tend to perform better. Their potential could be seen clearly and they did strive to achieve the learning objectives. Thus I would say that this mock teaching was a success, but there were certain issues that had to be polished. Those matters will be shared in the upcoming post next week.

Till then, thank you for reading this post and have an edifying day.