The SMC had a meeting with our Superintendent joining us at the beginning to help us with identifying strategies that will help our school move forward and improve. Initially many of us thought our heads were going to roll as the O level results were so bad, esp. for Math results which is the worst in AI history, never before we had such drastic bad results. But, supt did not reprimand us at all. Instead she asked us questions to make us think and reflect, and even gave useful advice to some of us.
After some thoughts, I realised these 2008 batch of pupils were in Sec 2 in 2006, the year in which I was just appointed Acting Head of the Math Dept. That year was also the year which we had to make a lot of adjustments to the SOWs due to the change in syllabus. New topics were not included in the textbooks as we were still using the old texts. Some lower sec topics were shifted to upper sec and some upper sec topic shifted down. This batch of pupils was also the batch which we started math foundation which occured during curriculum time so that minimum remediation was carried out after curriculum time as teachers always feedback about bad attendance for remediation. Had the math foundation not worked for the weak pupils as when this batch of pupils came to upper sec, their lower sec foundation was not there? Or was it due to my new management that had failed? (I was not very confident of managing the dept then.)
When Supt mentioned about analysising the O level questions which will help pupils prepare themselves well for their Os, I thought have we not done that? Maybe not all teachers did but I know that some teachers do analysise the O level papers. We could have done things in solo. I feel the sec 4 teachers might have done too much for their pupils that pupils did not take ownership of their learning. Hence, for this year's batch of Sec 4, the sec 4 teachers must come together to discuss on how we should involve our pupils in analysing the O level papers rather than teachers doing it alone. We have to change our old ways of revising work with them too as the type of pupils that we have now is different from the past.
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2 comments:
Good insights you have from the session.
We must now work out together the strategies that can enable our pupils to learn better. The keyword is "together". Some teachers might have good practices but others are not adopting as best practices. Best practice means that ALL must practice unless someone has a better practice which then becomes the new best practice.
Learner ownership is the only guarantee for life long learning and success. Teachers' task is to enable pupils to learn skills:
how to analysise questions and distinguish between "basic" and "applied", between "recall" and "higher order thinking",
how to take notes,
how to organize their notes,
how to memorize.
Teachers often fear that pupils lack these skills and thus take protective actions where teachers take over these very tasks that belong to the pupils.
We must never let teachers work harder than their pupils.
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