school has decided to encourage teachers to perform biweekly reflection (in an pre-assigned google sheet) this year, and below’s my piece posted to the YI PD Lounge @workplace instead:
two weeks of teaching (& learning) have passed, and as we consolidate our experiences and pen some reflections, there are two possible avenues to do this. the first convenient way is to use the assigned Gsheet template, which is good for those of us who believes reflection is private or perhaps we’re “shy” abt it. the second way is to post it here in our PD Lounge; this is suitable and encouraged if you (too) believe that professional learning is a social phenomenon. after all, all ideas are good and improvable, and therefore, all reflections are good reflections that can only become good-er through our social discourse.
in this reflection, i’ll write abt a phenomenon instead of focusing on a specific lesson (you could do the same too, for freedom of choice is key in adult learning). the phenomenon is that of “sec 1 students”. having only taught sec 1s during my practicum and first year as a bt, it’s absolutely refreshing to get to teach sec 1 again after 20 years. compared to the sec 3-5s that i had been teaching (and graduating), the sec 1s are extremely high in energy level, highly enthusiastic, and highly impressionistic. this is the first time in my career that on just the second teaching day (i.e. T1W2D2), two students walking passed said “陈老师，我们喜欢你(的课)”, and i was caught off-guard and didn’t know how to react to this evidence of the 3-highs.
harnessing the 3-highs, with the vision of developing Leaders for Tmr, i have invested considerable time to teach and negotiate classroom routines, lesson expectations, and what learning is about, including possible habits of becoming a more effective learner (cf. syllabus contents). take my IQ form class students as an example, i have (attempted to) impressed upon them the importance of asking “Why” from day 1 and reinforcing it (through teacher modelling, which is a powerful approach) on different days for the past two weeks. Asking Why is not only in-line with the Inquisitiveness spirit, but more importantly, it activates the mind to think deeper, even if the Whys are not verbalised (oh yes, when to verbalise and ask, and when not to verbalise and ask during lessons, is something to be taught in the future; communication is after all an art). in the meantime, i must apologise if you are teaching 1IQ students and they are disturbing you with Whys more often than expected. so how well my “investment” would return is gonna be a longitudinal study. will monitor and report back as time goes.
how’s your experience with our pioneer sec 1s? are they the same, different, or same-same-but-different in the first two weeks? feel free to leave comment(s) to interact and share/add-on your experiences, for learning is in the discourse 
thanks for reading!
permalink: https://onepublicservice.workplace.com/groups/yipdloungewp/posts/4151763408259981
#biweeklyreflections #4ideaimprovement