My Reflection of School Experience in the 3rd semester

Well, teaching assistant program has been ended for this semester, and it’s time to reflect every moment that was exceedingly unexpected. Actually, I spent my time for two weeks for attending to MAN 11 Jakarta but it was a short time for me to be acquainted with all of students there. I only remember some of their names and I’m still in the process to acquaint what is their learning style but suddenly I have to come back to my university. It makes me little bit feel guilty because I think I just started to introduce some new methods in teaching to them and they was started to adapt with it, but it doesn’t take a long time and they should readapt to back to their usual methods.

By suggestion from my lecturer counselor, we should assist some teachers so that we should teach some different classes in MAN 11 Jakarta. I’m glad about that because I can learn more about those students but I feel I didn’t give my best performance even it has been my maximum efforts to provide an effective learning process. I got chance to teach 11^th grade in two classes of science and a class of social. I found that generally students in those three classes are really different although they are as usually as taught by Teacher Centered Learning. I think it was really nice to meet Social students at the first time because they likely try to respect to me but when I taught them by using Student Centered Learning method, some of them didn’t give a positive response. Grouping didn’t work for them because the discussion was not done well.

In the first Science Class, I was surprised because it was little bit different, the discussion was better implemented because most of students doing the discussion to solve the problems. Although they looked like getting to adapt to study by using Student Centered Learning method that my team provided, but I have not found that they feel comfortable to learn with us. They looked like to hardly study with high enthusiasm. Actually the best part of these teaching experiences is when I taught another Science Class. I am very thankful because my team got a positive response from those students. They can learn very well, do the activity enthusiastic, and all of methods that we provided as always we learned in SSE was implemented very well. Moreover, I am so glad because in fact the teaching aids that was designed by my team of TPTLM course which is BFG, is really can be applied in the real school.

In the second week, my team got a chance to interview our master teacher for giving some questions to know more about their teaching process and also to clarify the observation result that we get previously. By interviewing him I get that there are correlation between the observation result and what is he said. He said that he has been a teacher for many years and getting bored. Actually he has surely known what will be taught to his students so that he thinks he doesn’t need the lesson plan anymore. In fact, when we observed him we found that the teaching process was not really well organized because he didn’t manage his students to do the learning activity orderly. We also found that some students were busy with their activity which is chatting with another.

Actually I don’t agree with my master teachers’ opinion, lesson plan is used to help us in providing an effective learning activity for students. World changes every time and also the generation of our students, there will always a new development in every sector especially in technology. I think in order to provide the effective teaching and assessment for our sophisticated technology students we should provide a creative one, so that they will be interested to learn with us. Hence, for becoming a teacher even for many years later, I think it will be challenging because I should be creative and innovative in providing the learning activity.

Besides that from this teaching assistant program, I also realize that there are some points that have to be given more attention to create an effective teaching and assessment which are the prior knowledge, students’ needs, students’ learning style and students’ background. The successful learning process is affected by students’ prior knowledge that can make the process easier if the students really acquaint the previous material. Besides that by understanding students’ needs, students’ learning style and students’ background, we could provide the effective learning and teaching process for them by using the appropriate methods.