Reflections - by Mei San

Dear all,

I taught General Paper for a year at Serangoon Junior College (SRJC) although my CS1 is Economics (JC) and my CS2 is English Language (Sec). It has been a good learning experience for me as I find that I learn most when I teach. I also realise that there is an application question in the Comprehension paper, which is entirely new to me.

I was assigned 1 GP class last year and 2 GP classes this year. Although discipline problem is generally not much of an issue in a JC, there were occasions when I had the same 2 to 3 students who fell asleep during my lessons. I was quite disturbed by this occurrence as I took it to mean that my lessons were not engaging enough.

We have a culture of sharing teaching materials and resources in SRJC and this is very useful for new teachers like me. Content packages are prepared by various teams and we stick to the same format so as not to confuse the students - overview and content notes on the topic, extra readings, essay outlines and comprehension passages. We also made it compulsory for our students to subscribe to "Broader Perspectives" in the hope that they will read this monthly magazine on their own to gain better general knowledge.

The Scheme of Work / Lesson Plans for GP lessons usually dictate that we introduce a topic by helping students do a mindmap. We encourage students to read their content packages before the class and the first lesson is usually spent eliciting responses from them just to ensure that they have done their readings. Subsequent lessons will be used to work through essay outlines and comprehension passages.

One new initiative of the department in Term 3 this year is the R2D2 (Read and Reflect; Discuss and Demonstrate) approach to teaching/learning. Every week, one teacher will be tasked to source for an article of interest for students to read. After this reading, they are supposed to reflect on some questions which serve as potential application questions in the Comprehension paper. Teachers are expected to discuss the issue in the article with the students and to demonstrate how the examples can be aptly applied to other colleges' preliminary exam questions as well as past GCE 'A' Level exams. This activity is beneficial for the students but we often find it a challenge to carry out this discussion because it has not been factored into our Scheme of Work.

To be a competent English Language/General Paper teacher, I believe that not only must lessons be engaging enough to sustain students' interest in the subject, but more importantly, we must also be able to strike a good balance between fun lessons (e.g. videos, role play, debates) and those which allow students a chance for time practice as well as to hone their exam skills. Based on the quality of teaching survey feedback from students, I would need to engage them more and come up with more interesting lesson plans because after a while, my lessons have become very predictable. I hope to achieve this objective for this QCE520 course.

Thanks.