Instructional Variables

Instructional Variables

Desri Fitriana

When I did observation at the first week of SEP, I observed my master teacher teach about If Clauses. He started the lesson with giving “Bingo” Worksheet for all students. . He did not explain more about those materials and did not give brainstorming activity to the students, because according to him the students have already known about those topics. He just explained and did that worksheet the whole of lesson, without giving any other materials, only “Bingo” worksheet about If Clauses and did it together with students until the lesson finished.

The teacher did not give any introductory focus, involvement and feedback to the students. He just implemented personalization which links to students’ life, because he asked about students’ daily life using If Clauses. In addition, to create a good climate classroom, we as teachers should use good instructional variables to our students. Instructional variables consist of some parts are introductory focus (to attract students’ attention at beginning of lesson), personalization (links to students’ lives; contextual), involvement (trying to make students involve in teaching and learning process) and feedback. Unfortunately based on my observation, the teacher did not implement all those things, even at beginning of lesson he did not give any open-ended question or hand-on activities to grab students ‘attention.

So, when I taught I always try to grab students’ attention first with open-ended questions to stimulus their mind and to introduce what is our topic for today. I asked to them “What did you do last night?” when I taught for Simple Past tense.  Then, I found many mistakes from students’ answer, because they did not understand enough yet. Through that activity, I knew how far their understanding about Simple Past Tense, so it makes me easier to teach them because I have already known their schemata. In addition, when I taught for Simple Present Tense at beginning of lesson, I asked “What activities that you do every day, please mention 3 different activities that you always do every day?” Again, I found many mistakes from them. So, actually their background about various of tenses really low, so I try to enhance their understanding and awareness towards tenses and how those tenses used in daily life (contextual).

Source pictures: Google Image.