Group Reflection on Expositional Teaching

It had been an interesting experience to be involved in such an activity, be it pretending to be a student or a teacher in the class.  Throughout this entire week, everyone of us had benefited a lot from each other in a way or another. This could be seen in two ways. We were able to know the common mistakes which we might made when teaching the class. For instance, the expression of –b(a+c). Many of us would have told the class that it is “minus b” instead of “negative b”. Without this expositional teaching, probably we would not have realised it.

Furthermore, we are able to learn the various approaches used to bring the different concepts of algebra across to students. Be it through the use of whiteboard or powerpoint or even the way that we try to engage the students. All these are good points that we are able to learn from one another. Don’t you agree?

Working as a group is different from working in a group in order to reflect the links within a common overall approach adopted by the whole team. For instance, some of us might want to call the distributive law as umbrella method while others might want to call it the rainbow method.  In order for the whole team to be able to show consistency in their teaching, the team members have to communicate well and come to a conclusion on the way which they would like to present to the class.  If we are just working in a group, we might only just come together and fix our “jigsaw” together to present instead of sharing personal views to result in the group to show consistency in the way to teach the class. As such, we guess this expositional teaching had introduced an element of collaborative learning. On a good note, all of the 6 groups had achieved that! Great job guys!

Just to summarise some points which we might want to take note for TP..

1.   Negative vs minus sign. Example: -2a(a+b) should be seen as negative 2a instead of minus 2a

2.   Always have to follow through with checking of solution. For instance, the part on solving simultaneous equation.

3.   Have to take note of the writing of  on whiteboard or even the use of powerpoint to prevent confusion with the multiplication x.

 And the list goes on... ....

- Group F