YUZON, Danna Mae T.

May 18, 2017

Prof. Romylyn Metila EDL 231 Reflection Paper

It is no longer just unity in diversity but also productivity in diversity. Literary theories are like different types of lenses which
we can use to decipher a literary piece. Students in a class also bring with them different sets of beliefs, knowledge or schema which
can altogether create a rich plethora of ideas to process / deal with in a class discussion. It is the task of teachers then to provide
their students a platform by which they can exercise their critical thinking to unravel the wonders of any literary work. In my
demonstration teaching for a Grade 6 literature class, this is one big thing I realized. No more safe play. Conflicts (the relevant ones)
are actually good in class discussions. When teaching literature, you have to be make your students appreciate and realize the
relevance of a literary piece by leading them to a reading experience in which they will be engaged. Theres no need to spoon-feed
them on what they should know or understand about a particular literary piece but one must encourage them to freely and
intellectually explore a literary piece on their own. The teacher leads the students to such kind of moment when they will think
about a literary text, interpret it, make meaning out of it or create new things from it. When we used segmented reading for our
lesson, I think we were able to achieve this goal. It is good that even if they were not actually given the whole copy of the texts to
read (since we asked each group to read orally a certain part), their comprehension was not compromised. They were still able to
make sense of the story and we were able to achieve our value objectives as they shared their insights about the meaning of heroism
in the story and in real life. They were able to make connections between the text which they read and the world which they live in.
Because of this, the lesson part I am most satisfied with is the while reading discussion part. I was able to ask questions
which sustained a conversation with the students. Although I tend to do teacher talk a lot, still, whenever my students answer, I did
not just leave their answers hanging but I processed them. Also, that was the time when I was no longer afraid to explore my
students answers. I dared to further ask certain students with loaded answers, gave feedback to their answers, use them to enrich
our discussion and provide connections. I am least satisfied with the part when I had to make transitions from one part of our
reading text to the next. At first, I was able to make smooth transitions but towards the end, since I was in a hurry to finish my part
already, I feel like my transitions in the last ones were not that clear. To improve the outcome of this lesson part, I should be more
flexible and quick in terms of thinking about how I could make adjustments so that the class time will be maximized. I should not
have panicked but must have discerned well whether our discussion has made sense already or not yet so that some questions could
have been skipped.
Despite this, I was still able to perform well in the demonstration and I give myself a score of four because of my class
management and delivery / execution of my part of the lesson. I managed the class despite their naughty reactions and almost
uncontrollable noise. Another strength is that I was able to execute the while reading part fairly well because I know the logical flow
of my questions and literary concepts or possible insights that are embedded within. My points for improvement are my way of
speaking and personality because I know that I can make my intonation and words more appropriate and also, I can become more
confident so that my students wont intimidate me when they misbehave. I must not be swayed or intimidated by the students
reactions or inattentiveness but enforce pleasantly my authority as their teacher.
This demonstration teaching learning experience reminded me of a lot of things but the most important of which is the
importance of being attentive at all times in class. A teacher has to be sensitive of the students reactions, comments and even blurts
because those spur-of-the-moment utterances actually reflect their critical/ spontaneous thoughts, which means that they are
actually listening. And that is after all, one of our several multi-faceted goalsmake our students good listeners so they can be good
readers, viewers, writers, and speakers.