Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Learning from Teaching a Research Lesson



Every now and then I am reminded of how lucky it is to be a teacher. The insights that we get and the access to students' thoughts that sometimes even their own parents do not have make the job of teaching so much fun.

I taught a 30-minute lesso with a group of Primary 1 children as part of a lesson study symposium in Singapore. The research theme is to develop confidence amongst students.

Based on my role as the research teacher and listening to the observations of the participants present at the research lesson, I now see a differntiated way to deal with different students. With struggling ones, the concrete materials and the structured guided practice was a great help. There awas a case of a child who struggled with the lesson at the start. However, after I showed him how he could use the cubes and egg tray I gave them, and after several examples, he was able to perform subtraction without concrete materials by the end of the 30 minutes.

For the students who are better in the skill, I develop their confidence by repeated questioning their method. As they grew more confident, some were increasingly more passionate in defending their methods.

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