Being Positive

Recently, after going through a personal identity crisis, I had been searching high and low for a meaning of our purpose being alive.

In the Stop Workplace Drama:

The author explained that when we are lost in fog, we need to ask “Who we are” and “What we are committed to”.

In the Energy Bus:

One story told by the Author brought me the eureka moment:

A man goes to a village and visits a wise man and says, “I feel like there are two dogs inside me.  One dog is this positive, loving, kind, and gentle dog and then I have this angry, mean-spirited, and negative dog and they fight all the time.  I don’t know which is going to win.”  The wise man thinks for a moment and he says, “I know which is going to win.  The one you feed the most, so feed the positive dog.”  This is very true of the spiritual battle.

While we think, we need to differentiate between thoughts that need us to address to (real problems to be solved) and negative thoughts.  Once we are consciously making an effort to cut out the negativity and to think positively more frequently, while we solve problems. 

And when we make any decisions, we need to review them based on “Who we are” and “What we are committed to”. 

Yes!

How to confront undesirable behaviour?

As teachers, we constantly need to ensure that our students are learning the correct values but on the other hand we were taught not to judge a person based just on his/her behaviours. 

However, if a person did something wrong once, twice and over again - that behaviour would become a habit.  With one bad habit, the person picked up another and then another, soon these bad habits would form the person’s character.

How should we approach behavioural issues?

According to Kerry Patterson in the book: Crucial confrontation …, there is a systematic approach – think CPR.

• C: The first time you encounter the bad behaviour, talk about the Content.  Eg “You were late from class and missed the important part of the lesson. …”
• P: The next time, talk about Pattern. Pattern issues acknowledge that problems have histories and histories make  a difference. Eg “This is the second time you were late from class.  You agreed it would not happen again and I am concerned that I cannot count on you to keep your promise. …”
• R: Future occurrences of the problem have an impact on Relationships. The focus is now on us. The attention has shifted from disappointing performance to the effect on the relationship. “Ah Meng, I don’t like how this is affecting how our relationship as teacher and student. I am afraid that I may not be able to trust you to follow through on your commitments. …”

By communicating the correct issue and not going back to the same content over and over again, the authors believe that our performance will improve.

Let us give it a try!

Keeping the classroom clean and tidy

This is one area that new inexperienced teachers tend NOT to focus on.  However, personally as part of my routine, I put high emphasis in getting students to be involved in keeping their classrooms clean and tidy. Regularly, I would also set good examples by going into the class slightly earlier to tidy the class up before the students arrive.

According to Malcolm Gladwell “Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference”, he listed “three rules of epidemics”:

1. The law of the Few
2. The stickiness factor
3. The power of context: Human behaviour is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment.

On the topic of “the power of context”, Malcolm brought out the NYC’s Broken Windows Theory, which states that monitoring and maintaining urban environments in well-ordered condition may prevent further vandalism as well as escalating into more serious crime.

Applying the power of context into the classroom context, the little thing of “keeping the classroom clean and tidy” may actually have a greater impact on the overall vandalism or major crime rate in school.

Personally, I would involved the students in maintaining the classroom so that they themselves have a sense of ownership and by doing so would give them more motivation NOT to litter in class.

It is little things that count (provided the fundamentals are already taken care of).

Attributes of Great teachers

Being teachers, we teach and get feedback to improve ourselves. 

Recently, I decided to poll my ex-students to find out the most important attributes students nowadays are looking for in Great teachers.

The question is “Which one of the following attributes is most important to be GREAT teachers?”

The results are listed below:

The two attributes that stand out from the rest are “Are passionate or committed to improve student learning” and “Get to know their students individually”.

If we do not have the time to be the best teacher, at least try to improve on these two attributes.

For now, let’s ponder a little longer on these two attributes for a while.  I will blog about them in another blog/s.

Using ICT technology to improve learning for students that are weaker academically or with poor attendance

While I was teaching IT and Games related modules, I had the following problems managing the learning progress of students, especially for the academically weaker students and students with poor attendance rate:

1. For many lessons, there many steps to perform using the software program in order to complete a task. The weaker students would not be able to follow the same pace as the rest and I need to repeat the steps again for them, sometime more than once.

2. For most of the practical lessons, they were not stand alone topics and it was not possible for students not to complete the previous lesson, before they moved on to the current lesson. For the students with poor attendance, they would not be able to follow the subsequent lessons when they returned to class after their absentee.

The problem led on to bigger problem in student motivation and management: after not able to follow the lessons, these students lose their interest in the module, turned up later for lessons and may subsequently led to frequent/long absenteeism.

Analyzing the factors that were within my control and evolved my solutions based on tried methods as shared by other teachers on a few teachers network website, I started to blog my lessons with step-by-step tutorials and to make the tutorials interesting, I have embedded images, online slides, pdf files and videos.

During lessons, students that were not able to follow the same pace conducted in class, they were able to refer to these blogs on their own pace to complete the lessons. For students that were absent from previous lessons, I would able to give them an initial briefing of what they have missed out and they would be able to catch up on their own, using these blogs. If students still not able to follow after using these blogs, I would revise the blogs to include additional instructions or mini-steps.

As a reflection, I feel that my efforts in using the blogs are beneficial to the academically weaker students as well as the poor attendance students: (1) students were more motivated as they were able to perform regardless of their speed and speed of the class; (2) students were trying to find their own answers to their queries via these blogs, they became more independent learners; (3) as the teacher, I had more time to focus on the extremely weak ones (about 1-2 students per class) to help them with their unusual problems encountered due to their misunderstanding of the steps.

Summary of blogs created:

Blog	Highlights
http://tpitvb.blogspot.com/	- Online Tutorials
http://tpitwad.blogspot.com/	- Videos Tutorials
http://mpgddgld.blogspot.com/	- Videos Tutorials
http://mpgddspf.blogspot.com/	- Online Tutorials
http://mpgddmgd.blogspot.com/	- Embedded pdf Tutorials - Online solution to problems

Lesson Planning

Lesson planning is a special skill that is learned in much the same way as other skills. It is one thing to take a ready-made lesson plans and adapt to our needs. It is another thing to have the skill to develop our own lesson plans. Acquiring this skill is far more valuable than being able to use lesson plans developed by others. It takes thinking (thinking more about student engagement & student learning and less on the content delivery) and practice to hone this skill.

Think of lesson plan as a way of effective communication. Lesson plans help teachers to organize content, materials and methods of delivery. Like other skills, we get better by thinking of ways to improve our teaching and lesson planning based on feedback from the students and other teachers.

Effective lesson plans communicate, students are engaged and they learn.

Step 1: Think of what the students need to learn, what they must be able to do after the lesson.

Step 2: Think of what the students already learnt, how to use their prior knowledge and lead them to the new topic.

Step 3: Think of the methods to be used to engage the student and assist them to learn the new topic

Step 4: Think of at least one way to evaluate the learning outcomes of the students.

Engaged Conversation as a Learning tool

My reflections after reading “Investing in Your Life: Your Biggest Investment Opportunities are Not Necessarily Financial”:

Yes, I have missed it all – being one that is very obsessed with efficiency, I have in the past view conversation as very superficial and tried my best not to be too personal or engaged. But after reading the buy-in portion of the book, I GOT IT and realized how much learning opportunities I have missed by being NOT in engaged mode during conversations with others. To my surprises, just by putting effort to be engaged during one of my conversation with a Security Officer for a private building, I learnt at least one to two things I have never known before from that conversation!

A good start but let me continue this learning journey.