Is was surprised this semester when my students didn’t fill out evaluations for my teaching, when there was no platform for them to say anything about the class. I asked them about this, and I collected my own, informal evaluations, but it still puzzles me. And then, after the semester was over, I got evaluation forms as an email attachment, forms I was supposed to fill out, evaluating my classes and my performance. I’m reproducing them verbatim, in the order I wrote them. I’m putting them here because I feel compelled to put in a blog entry, and I am tired (it’s been a long week) and because I think these evaluations offer a pretty good sense of my teaching this semester. And I will say, I like the idea of having to submit a written self-evaluation at the end of every semester, though I suspect it a reform that would die a quick and irritated death if I suggested it to my colleagues in the United States:
For Public Speaking:
1. What went well in your class?
In general, the best activities were the ones designed to get students to speak more fully in class. The thing that went the best was to see students developing a sense of confidence about speaking, and to see them developing a sense of how to be a better audience. I was also impressed that they began to think more fully about how to appeal to their classmates, rather than simply thinking of their teacher as their only audience. For me, that was perhaps the most important aspect.
2. What did not go well in your class?
It felt very rushed to me, with many speeches crowded on top of each other. I had a difficult time keeping up with the material we were supposed to cover, and on the speech days, sixteen straight speeches seemed to me too many in a row. I also found it difficult to know quite how to assess the speeches, and I don’t think that I did that fairly.
3. What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class?
I have never taught public speaking before, and it has been 20 years since I have taught a curriculum that I didn’t write myself. I didn’t do a very good job keeping on schedule. I also thought that perhaps the students didn’t need to be learning so many different kinds of speeches, For example, I still cannot see quite the difference between a persuasive speech and an argumentative speech, and sometimes I found the formulas for the speeches slightly distracting as well, difficult to follow and teach. Mostly, I attribute the lack of success in my class (because I don’t think I taught this class very well) to my lack of experience teaching public speaking as a course, and teaching a group of students whose first language was not English. I loved my students, however, and I was pleased to see them speak more by the end of the semester.
4. What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?
If I taught this course again, I would focus less on the types of speeches and more simply on getting students to speak about something. The speeches seemed pulled from a rhetorical tradition – my rhetorical tradition, I should add – that students were not wholly familiar with. I really wish I knew more about varieties of Indonesian rhetoric. What are the occasions that demand speaking and rhetorical activity in Indonesia? On Java? What are the cultural expectations surrounding things like argument and self-presentation? I didn’t understand that, and I think I’d start by exploring some of those issues with students. I think I’d get them out more observing and analyzing speeches. In all my classes, I struggled with what I was supposed to be teaching – is it the English language, or the topic? I always leaned toward the topic, but some of my students seemed to expect more direct language teaching.
For Critical Reading:
1. What went well in your class?
I don’t know, to be honest. I hope that I helped students recognize strategies for becoming more engaged and active readers. I spent a lot of time trying to get them to step back from the mania around correctness and to develop a higher comfort level with uncertainly and mistakes, both in language and in comprehension. For the students who were engaged and interested, I think this was useful.
2. What did not go well in your class? What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class? (I’ve combined 2 and 3 because I kept answering them both.)
First, I found it difficult to teach using the material we were given to use. It may because I have not taught critical reading to a group of students who speak English as another language; in that combination there were many aspects that I found difficult. But I found many of the materials, and the way they were presented, to be distracting from the work of critical reading I wanted my students to do. The test at the midterm did not go well, and I think demonstrates the difficulty of administering a common test for several separate classes. All of us have slightly different approaches and styles, which should be encouraged, I think, and I wish I had been able to plan my own curriculum, because I found myself doing this anyway, and I think my students suffered because of it (not, I should add, because my curriculum wasn’t a good one, but because it did not follow the sanctioned curriculum). I also talk too fast, even though I tried not to, and I had a difficult time getting students to speak in class, no matter what I did. I did, however, get better at that as the semester went on.
3. What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?
I am a newcomer here, and I hesitate to sound like I am critical; I don’t know enough about how things work here to be comfortable offering suggestions for changes. I will say that as an experienced teacher with several years in basic literacy and teaching, I have a very different approach to teaching critical reading than the textbook uses. It could be that I am not experienced enough teaching this sort of group of students, and so less aware of what they need; to some degree this is certainly true. As a teacher, I wanted my students to read and engage, directly, with as many kinds of texts as I could find – I wanted them to raise questions, get confused, make guesses, struggle, find personal and emotional connections, and reflect upon all that. I have a very difficult time teaching reading as a set of separate activities – this week, drawing inferences; next week, drawing conclusions; and so forth. Instead, I want to get students engaged in the process of being active readers who are bringing their own ideas and backgrounds to bear on the reading of a text. I tried to do this, but it didn’t work very well, because I felt too much conflict with the other material, which I also didn’t teach very well. To be honest, I found this experience to be extremely interesting and provocative, for me, but I don’t think it was very helpful for most of the students, and I regret that a little. I really think that there should be other methods of evaluation besides a common test; I don’t see how that can be a productive way to assess more than 200 students at once.
For Academic writing:
1. What went well in your class?
I think that several of my students surprised themselves with the process they experience and the writing that they did. I also think that several of my students actually enjoyed the process of discovery they went through when they wrote their papers. For me, what went the best was watching students draft and revise and rethink their paper. I enjoyed that a great deal, and I think my students learned, at least at times, that to be successful writers they had to begin with something that interested them first.
2. What did not go well in your class? What are possible factors which influence the lack of success of your class?
I hate sounding like a broken record - this is the third evaluation I have written – but I just cannot teach with a curriculum someone else has prepared for me, especially in a topic that I have been teaching for 20 years, and that has been at the center of my pedagogical and scholarly work. I should not have followed the text, or the rhythm of the class as it was pre-ordained, at all, and if I had it over to do again I would not. More than anything else, my students needed an occasion to engage as writers, to discover a topic and a idea that excited them, and to use writing as a way of doing that. Some of them did this, but a good number of them came up with topics that were bland from the beginning, and that they were clearly not interested in at all. (I am still confused at how many students chose to write about methods of teaching English vocabulary – most of whom expressed no interest in becoming teachers.) I also was surprised at the expectation students had that I would correct every error in their papers, which I did not. In some ways, more than any other class, I wish I had this one to teach over again, because I think that I could have had a lot more fun, and that my students would have gotten a lot more out of it. There are a several ideas about teaching writing in the academic writing textbook that I simply disagree with – outlining, structuring the writing before you know enough about what you want to say, worrying too early about the structure of paragraphs and the right ways to organize. If students want to write well in English, they have to approach the task as writers, not as grammarians or template fillers. I think the over-focus on organization and correctness from the beginning of the course is a great detriment. Also, my students had absolutely no idea about how to use the databases available through Satya Wacana, and they are too late into their academic career to not know how to use those.
Also, I discovered on the first day that the classroom where I was supposed to teach, the bright sunny one with the modern computers, was occupied with another academic writing course, and I was moved to a dark and noisy classroom with classrooms that were impossibly slow and that made the computer classroom a nuisance instead of a benefit. I could not hear my students unless I turned off the air-conditioning, which made it unbearably hot. I could not teach in that classroom, so after about five weeks I had to request a new classroom, even though access to fast and reliable computers would have been very useful throughout the semester.
3. What do you think the possible strategies to improve the teaching and learning process in the future?
First, their needs to be some direct and open-ended instruction on using the databases for research. Students need time to play around and explore in them and to learn how to use them, and they need this early on in their life as students – I would recommend it in their very first year, in some structured and not too challenging way. Without such instruction, students will do what students all over the world (in my sudden global experience) do, which is “google it” for research. My students, in this course, treated Google as the fount of all knowledge, the tree of life, the peak of wisdom (I’ll stop mixing my metaphors). They couldn’t Google enough; and I was surprised to learn that there is no one at the library who will take the time to sit down with them and teach them how to do use the databases. I should have done what Ibu Heny did, and brought in the librarian she recommended. But this is an issue, I think, that should be addressed well in advance of their time in academic writing.
As before, I think the pre-ordained curriculum might be useful, and necessary, for a new teacher, but for teachers with experience and creativity, such curricula are a distraction. If I had to do everything over again, I would have ignored it all together, right from the beginning, and structured the course according to the ways I have structured my writing courses for years. I am not saying that the curriculum used at UKSW is a poor one; it is simply not the way I teach writing. I will say that some of the ideas in the textbook, from the point of view of someone trained in writing pedagogy in the United States, seem considerably out of date and in some cases counter-productive to helping students learn how to write. But I understand that I am in different context here, and that there is more here that I don’t understand than I do.
No comments:
Post a Comment