Teaching Day!

Hello all! How are you? I hope you have a great day.

While at UTSS, I had daily schedule like this:

Today I will tell you one of my experiences teaching chemistry in UTSS 2nd grade. The topic that I teach is about Osmosis and Osmosis Pressure. This learning is carried out in one hour of learning with contextual learning approache, POE (Predict, Observe, Explain) model, and methods as listed in the lesson plan below.

So that learning feels contextual, I associate this material with the phenomena of osmosis and reverse osmosis in everyday life. Like about someone who is getting thirsty after drinking salt water and why it is not recommended. I invite students to take part in thinking why it is harmful to health.

I used the POE learning model. POE was developed by White and Gunstone (1992) to uncover individual students' predictions, and their reasons for making these, about a specific event. Students are asked to predict what will happen to eggs left in a solution with a certain concentration based on their initial knowledge of osmosis.

After that students observe the phenomenon directly and then try to draw conclusions and explanations based on their observations. In this POE activity students work in groups to enrich students' collaboration skills.

In this study I designed a student worksheet to help students understand the material better. The contents of this student worksheet are adjusted to the important points and technical terms that students must master.

Reflection

The most challenging obstacle in this SEA-Teacher program is the language barrier between me and my students. Especially for my lesson - chemistry - which is full of technical and scientific terms. For facing this challenge, I have three strategies: 1) Use easy English words as the substitute of the "ideal" word, 2) Use pictures and demonstrations to explain my lesson, and 3) Use Japanese words for specific and important terms.

But this is not enough, as a foreign teacher I must also be able to understand the needs of students and adjust the rhythm of my teaching with student understanding. Actually students at UTSS are very smart, it is only the language barrier that is forced to make me teach more gradually.