Journal with a BT - Week 4

Key takeaways

• Importance of Afl without reference

• Making videos are easier with Canva

• Starting initiatives

My learnings...

1) Assessment is important for student to get used to

Appreciate my HOD for reminding me of this. Sometimes, it is easy to get carried away by processes and routines, and we stop asking ourselves why are we doing what we are doing. Despite initial reluctance due to the syllabus time it takes, I decided to try it on my Sec 1 and man was it insightful. It made me realise the importance of such test, especially pen and paper to give me the feedback to know each and everyone of my students. While online platforms like Blooket and Kahoot are more fun for students, unfortunately, the final exam is a pen and paper one. Sometimes, it is good to add stress to students in school. This will give them a chance to function in a high stress, low stakes scenario, to train their nerves. I find reinforcing to my students that such tests are for their own learning helps to make it more palatable to them, especially when they find out how much they did not absorb from my lesson. This was also a good check in for me to see if my teaching method is effective.

2) Easy editing and captions with Canva

Editing is time-consuming and tiring, but...NOT with Canva. Super glad that I forced myself to try it to make a teaching video for my department. It made me realise how user-friendly it was, especially with the auto-caption function. However, I also discovered the need to work on my pronunciation. Canva actually detected my language wrongly and translated my whole video with Malay subtitles 🤦‍♂️. This also taught me a neat workaround. I actually selected the caption and clicked on translate to translate all of them back to English. While some words were lost in translation, it greatly reduced the amount of time I had to spend sitting down and editing subtitles. After doing it once, I am more confident of doing it again and helping others!

3) Starting initiatives need not be scary

Did something I never thought I would do - proposing to start a freestyle drill team in a CCA where there is no predecessor. This was essentially my first time building my own course, from chatting with experienced colleagues from other schools, to writing my own requirement test, marketing slides and lesson outline... Except, my marketing was a flop. Not too sure why, but take up rate was low. Was actually quite sad for a while, till I realised I never actually chatted with the cadets to find out why... Was it they are not interested, or could it be they were unsure of themselves or other things... This will be my challenge for this week - to find out the why! Still super proud of myself for taking the flop like a champ haha, and coming up with an entire course and training plan. At least, this was good training!

That's it for the week! Slightly belated post, but glad I churned out two belated post in a night :)

Do first, improve later

This is something that I remembered from Ali Abdaal's video that really resonated with me. Many times, I find myself stuck in analysis paralysis trying to make sure things are 'up to standard' before doing it. Doing first forces me to take action, and once I start, I don't stop 🚄 but this journal can act as a train station for me.. to check in every now and then to make sure I am heading to the right destination 🗺️.

This post was happily written by me on a Monday night haha, image is generated by ChatGPT. But one day... the image will be drawn by me or maybe my student!