Get your lesson study forms in the PLC Toolkit here:
On 22nd June 2016, the
Open Classroom Project was carried out in SK Putra Utama. 11 coachees from 5
schools were invited to carry out observations in the classroom. I initiated this
project as a way to enhance the teacher’s capacity. There were 4 stages in this
project.
- Teachers from the hosting schools collaborated in designing the lesson in their Lesson Study team. The lesson plan was discussed and debated over to iron out certain issues. This was done in our PLC sessions. Activities were proposed and amendments were made to meet the final product. The team worked together in preparing the materials for the lesson.
- The respective teacher from the hosting school tried out a few activities with her pupils to familiarize them with the strategies. This is the crucial part whereby the teacher would be experimenting on the techniques and choosing the most appropriate ones. This was done in a few sessions with the class.
- The teacher carried out the lesson, with the presence of the observers who were also the Lesson Study team members from the hosting school, plus a few other observers from other schools.
- Post-counsel session whereby the team and the observers sat together to give their feedback. This is where the strength and the areas of improvement were discussed.
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| Balloon Buster- Fun Learning |
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| I Have, Who Has? |
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| Developing Higher Order Thinking Skills using Bubble Map as a thinking tool. |
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| Post-counsel with the observers. |
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| Other teachers were really interested to learn something from the lesson. |
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| Classroom environment: Pupils sitting in islands. |
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| Classroom environment: Reward Chart |
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| Pupils colour the objects based on the audio they listened to. |
I have always encouraged the teachers to practice the Fun Learning Activities, Cooperative Learning Strategies (I've been conscientiously reading up Kagan's cooperative strategies) and also the use of Thinking Tools (iThink maps). The experience of the power of Kagan Structures was offered first-hand at our PAK21 workshops, and the teachers ended up giving a teaching epiphany. They immediately see the power of Kagan Structures. They ask, “Why didn’t we learn about this sooner?”. It was a great satisfaction when they realized that it is "Structures" that make the teaching and learning experience much more fun—not just for students, but for teachers as well. Many teachers who are regularly using structures are appalled to walk by classrooms in which students are all quietly sitting in rows facing forward—some listening to the teacher, but many bored, tuned-out.
It was quite challenging to convince teachers of the power of cooperative learning structures by talking about the structures or your positive experiences with the structures. To become convinced, teachers need to experience the structures.
Thus I have advocated two ways of convincing teachers:
1) have them experience the structures in a workshop and have them derive the rationale from their own experience;
and
2) do demonstration lessons in their own classroom, with their own students, working on their own regular academic content. When teachers see how engaged their own students can be, and how well they retain the content because they have processed the content using interactive structures, they become convinced.
Get your lesson study forms in the PLC Toolkit here:
