3rd reflection: Motivating environment, gear up the students to get success

During I conducted teaching and learning process at Regina Pacis Senior High School, I had a lot of new experiences.  One of them is how to motivate the students by creating an environment which is support them to learn. This environment was able to make them feel cozy, safety, and security to learn. They would feel that their classroom had positive climate.  To create positive classroom climate, teachers and students should take part to reach the goal of teaching and learning process as a community of learners (Palincsar, 1998; Rogoff, 1998).

Different class is different strategy to create motivating environment. The strategy was adjusted by students’ interest and students’ classes. I had four classes when I taught the students. It consisted of three topics namely narrative text, gerund and to-infinitive, and spoof text. I taught Narrative text was for first grade, while gerund and to infinitive and spoof text was for second grade majoring science class.

There are some steps to create motivating environment. I reflect these steps to what I have done when I conducted teaching and learning process. The first one is order and safety. This step reminded me to build rules and activity when I taught the students. I created the rules together with students as the agreement. They made agreement by themselves. At that time, the rule was the percentage to speak English was 50% and the rest percentage was they wanted to speak Bahasa Indonesia. Regarding to the activities, I created activities which had variation. It would begin from grabbing their attention in the first time, showing video, and showing pictures, games, and until lecturing and evaluation as closing of the class.

The second one is success. Through this step, I introduced the goal of learning process to them, gave their spirit by telling how important learning English for their life, and told them that to be able to speak English was not as difficult as they thought as long as they wanted to practice to speak, they would be able to speak English well. Again, it would help them to be respectful enough and made them to be more motivated to learn.

 The third one is challenge. I found some students who were naughty in my class and seemed ignoring my class. At that time, I gave them challenge to help me to spread the hand out to their friends or to take the speakers and cable to plug to overhead projector. They were not stupid, but in fact they were smart, since I knew that they had known what their friends did not know. Besides, I asked the others to be self-directed learners by doing exercise and group or pair discussion to challenge them. It would avoid them from spoon-fed learners.

 The last one is task comprehension. I explained them why they needed to the exercise in order to give them spirit and motivation to learn. They would get the exercise in writing essay either in individual or in pair, even they would make essay in group.

Jajang Fauzan Muhafidh-2010120045

Section C-MMSEL