My Reflection during MMSEL Project

Teaching the kids at Mufik Foundation was amazing. It was the first time for me to meet them face-to-face because I was not allowed to come until the last meeting. I pretended to be a foreigner who could not speak Bahasa Indonesia at all. My group planned that to see whether the students would be motivated or not.

At first when I sat around them, they were all quiet. They were only staring at me and smiled. I was trying to talk with them, and my friends were telling them not to be shy. Then they started asking questions to me in English. If they did not know the words, they would ask either to Martan, Ana, or Risma for help.

Apparently, they really wanted to know their guest teacher. Even one of them asked me if I know about the flood in Jakarta, and I was surprised! However I answered the question. They were having a good time, and I really had fun too! I was just so surprised and felt guilty when I read their reflection. One of them said that s/he would never forget that experience, studying English with bule. But apart from that, I could see that the students felt happy and really showed their effort to speak with me.

Violence and Aggression

As we may know that these days violence often happens in school, either teacher to student, or student to student. According to my experience before when I was teaching in a primary school, I had this student who did not want to listen to the lesson. One day during a lesson, when his teacher was teaching, he tore his book. His friends were trying to remind him not to do that, but he did not care. Then one of his friends tried to stop him, but apparently all of sudden he took a scissors to stab that friend. Fortunately the teacher could stop him by grabbing student’s hands. It was the first time I experience violence at school. At that time I did not know what to do because I was shocked.

However as teachers we could ask their parents to meet up and talk about it over. Actually I did that, but I never had the chance to meet his parents because both of his parents were very busy. I was hoping that I could meet his parents even just once, apparently I had no luck. I have learned my lesson through that experience. Since then, I always try to approach each student in my class personally so they can always tell or share everything they want to.

Communicating Effectively with Parents

Building relationship with parents is important. Moreover it is needed to communicate the progress of students to their parents. However, building relationship with parents is challenging since parents’ characteristics are different. If the parents are supportive and want to be involved in their kids’ progress, it will be a lot easier for teacher to communicate with them. Meanwhile it will be very challenging if the parents are distant to their kids and they tend to rely on teacher’s role to help their kids’ progress.

In this lesson, I learned that parents’ meeting in the first semester is really needed. It will be the first step for teachers to get to know the parents, and also to bond with them. However the relationship which is built between teacher and parents has to stay professional. If teachers can have good relationship with parents, students’ progress can be controlled as well.

Planning for Effective Classroom Management

I used to think that having the ability to manage classroom is a part of a talent. However I realized that it takes practice and it is also can be planned. As teachers we know that before teaching we need to prepare a lesson plan. Actually when we prepare for a lesson plan, we also plan for a classroom management through the activities.

According to my experience during School Experience Program (SEP), the teachers did plan to manage their classroom. Moreover they have been teaching their class for quite a while, so the teachers already knew the characters of their students. It is seen from the teaching and learning program in classroom. Students do not necessarily have to be quiet, but they can follow and understand the lesson delivered.

Classroom Opening

Opening a class is always challenging for all teachers I guess, because if it is not interesting enough students will not pay attention. However we can always observe and learn from other teachers’ ways in opening a class.

The previous MMSEL meeting reminds me to my experience in School Experience Program (SEP). I had to teach exposition text to eleventh grader. To open the class, I tried to think of a contextual topic which is also related to the material. I decided to teach them making movie review, so I open the class by asking whether they like watching or not. Apparently most of them said “yes”, and then I asked what the latest movie they watched. After that I asked them to make a list of the movies that they have watched, and I divided them into two big groups to have a “movie-title guessing game” by having a representative of each group. The students had to take turn, so all of them got their turn to describe a movie without telling the title which was told by me, then their friends would guess the title.

That was how I opened my class when I had SEP to teach exposition text.

MMSEL Third Reflection

                As we learned about Climate variables, I realize that there are some variables derive the climate or atmosphere in classroom. There are: order and safety, success, challenge and task comprehension. Order and safety is more into the rules which is made in classroom so that students will feel safe during teaching and learning process, but students are also included in making the rules in classroom. Success is related to the progress of the students, so it is not merely about score. Challenge is more into the task that teacher gives to students, whether it is challenging enough for them or not. If it is not challenging enough, students will get bored easily with the teaching and learning process. Meanwhile task comprehension is the understanding of the students in doing the task, when they feel challenged by the task given, they will be more interested in learning the lesson.

               During my School Experience Program (SEP), I taught eleventh grader. In the first meeting, we did make rules, but we also gave them freedom to speak. The students are motivated enough in learning and they could understand the task which I gave them, but I did not feel that they are challenged enough with the task which I gave them, because they could finish the task fast. However, through MMSEL lesson I could reflect to my teaching and evaluate myself.