Rene's ESE Reflection

Apologies as I do not have a microphone and thus was unable to record my ESE Reflection.

Here goes my reflection. I was attached to Bukit View Secondary School for a year and I had the opportunity to observe as well as teach students from the Normal (Technical), Normal (Academic) and Express level from Secondary One to Secondary Five. As such, I would say that, in a nutshell, I had been exposed to observing as well as teaching all levels across all streams in the school.

Although the school would be what one considers as a neighbourhood school, the environment was very encouraging. There are countless programs for the students to better themselves. For example, the students were given the opportunity to go through Adam Khoo’s workshops as well as various workshops that help them to hone their artistic as well as technology skills. Students are often encouraged to take on leadership positions and almost everyone would have the opportunity to take part in some competitions be it at a school, inter-school or national level.

Although my first CS is Elements of Business Skills, I was deployed to mostly EL lessons. As such, I had to work very closely with the other EL teachers. In fact, I have had the opportunity to set part of the final year examination paper for the Normal (Technical) Stream. I was also involved in formulating the assignments for the Secondary 4/5 students to aid them in honing their comprehension skills.

I shadowed 2 senior teachers very closely and have learnt a lot from them. Both of them had excellent classroom management techniques and they were able to control each class that was assigned to them. They were strict yet approachable and they were well-liked by the students (so much so that almost every year, they would win one of the Teacher of the Year award as voted by the students). They were able to hold the attention of their students, and thus were able to engage them and got them to participate in class successfully. I believe their sincerity and earnest desire to teach the students were very apparent and thus, the students opened up to them. This quality of theirs is something that I aspire towards.

With regards to areas that I feel that I need to work on to be a confident EL teacher, I guess it would pretty much be in the area of understanding the nuances of the English Language and learning how to incorporate them into teachable bite-size content for them to absorb. In terms of building rapport with the students, I believe I have successfully achieved that during my stint. However, I would like to improve on being slightly sterner and stricter with them as in hindsight, I believe that it is probably best to set a high standard in class and gradually slack on them rather than the other way round.

All in all, I am looking forward to teaching EL to students and helping them to become more articulate in expressing themselves.

Cheers,

Rene