Teaching Competencies

Making teaching relevant to learners’ needs

For me, teaching is an adventure. My first step in the teaching profession started when I was hired to teach pre-service teachers from remote areas in a government-funded program from 2014 to 2015. Given my educational background in educational technology, my responsibilities were quite challenging – to help pre-service teachers to integrate technology (i.e., computer tools) into their teaching practices. During my first meeting and conversations with all the pre-service teachers, I and my team realized that the goal of this project was just a fantasy – we immediately thought that we needed to adjust our expected objectives and came up with creative ways to teach them. Almost all the pre-service teachers have not used or owned a computer before. At that time, since the government have provided a huge amount of funding to provide computers or laptops for schools in underdeveloped areas, they started training pre-service teachers to make the best use of the facilities through some professional development.

I remembered the curriculum of the program began with the introduction of office tools, such as word processing and excel. However, since they have never used a computer before, my team decided to start with some basic skills, such as how to turn on the laptop, how to charge the power, create an account, buttons on the keyboard, and how to navigate the operating systems. To make the process more fun and retain the information longer, we created a song about the step of turning on the laptop. It was a wise decision – not only making the class more fun, but we also found that it created friendship and trust between them and us as facilitators. Not all the topics in the program curriculum were taught. For example, due to the unavailability of projectors in their schools, the skills of creating presentations were not our priority. We prioritized some skills that were more related to creating instructional printed materials since most schools already had printing machines. We were hoping that the trainees were able to create some printed materials, such as worksheets or charts, to help them explain the lessons to their students later. Through this first experience of teaching, I learned that in every teaching activity, my first responsibility as an educator is to discover my students’ needs for learning and their starting point and to ensure that what they learn are valuable and applicable when they return.

This first principle of teaching is something that I always use at the very beginning of my class. I have used different types of assessments to find out my students’ preliminary knowledge and skills about the courses that I taught. In the Multimedia Learning course (KOM 2302), a simple technique that I used was to ask students to give a thumbs up or thumbs down for expressing how familiar they were with the list of topics that I asked them. Or in another class named E-Learning (KOM 3206), I used an online questionnaire to collect how familiar the content is to them and to collect their expectations about my course. In addition, for a more complex course, such as Statistics for Education Research (PTEP 630), I used an objective quiz to assess my students’ prior knowledge about the topics. I used this method since I realized that an objective quiz gives me more accurate information about my students’ knowledge of statistics in general.

Collaboration and shared responsibility

As an instructor, I always try to facilitate my students’ learning with activities that build and strengthen important knowledge and skills. In a world that relies strongly on collaborative work and teamwork building. In almost every class I taught, I made specific assignments that required students to complete in a collaborative way. However, I am also aware that collaborative work needs to be guided and prepared. My common approach to making my students grasp many advantages of group work is to split the tasks into small chunks and let my students distribute those to their group members. In the Photography course, when we worked on a photo project, I made a list of sub-tasks of the project, such as finding the subjects, researching the photo spots, managing the storyboard, preparing the equipment/properties, editing photos, scheduling the project, etc.

This division makes work more manageable and gives an opportunity for every student to contribute equally to the project. In addition, at the end of the project, I asked students to evaluate their team members. I asked them to write a short description of how each of their team members performed their assigned tasks/responsibilities. I usually provided a Likert questionnaire that asked about their performance and a few open questions. Most of my students were satisfied with these approaches. They mentioned that this division eased the completion of the project and ensured everyone is responsible for participating in the project. Most of the time, I made groups for them randomly, so they had a chance to work with other classmates. However, in very few cases, students came to me and expressed their inconveniences to work with their team and ask to transfer to other teams. In this situation, I usually convince them to give it a try working with their current team unless the situation was too urgent. I always expect my students to be adaptive to changing situations, however, on the other side, I also want them to feel comfortable working in a group.

Authentic Learning Experiences

I believe the isolation between what learners informally gain in their daily life to what they learn in the classroom environment is one of the factors that cause disengagement in learning. Connecting real-world problems or phenomena that take place around the targeted learners with the content being taught is an important approach to create more meaningful learning processes. In the cognitive context, it is proven that the transferability of new information will be more successful when the learners already have prior knowledge or experience related to the new information being learned. Thus, the authenticity of the context that the new knowledge will be used is necessary.

The purpose of the courses that I taught in my home institution is to facilitate students to produce media for learning. In these courses (photography and videography), project-based learning is used to improve students’ analytical, technical, and evaluation skills, as well as their collaborative and social skills. There are mini-projects and a final project for each course that must be associated with local areas or communities in each project. For example, the final project in the photography course is to create an essay photo about one specific issue that occurs in the local communities (e.g., street children and homelessness). Prior to conducting photo hunting, students collaboratively do mini research to decide the main issue and identify feasible locations that will be documented. By using this approach, students learn about their surroundings, build awareness about communities, and practice communicating their findings. The authentic cases in this project also satisfy the students as they are feeling that they contribute to the improvement of their communities.