Reflection Week 5 and 6

Reflection on the Presentation

                 On the presentation day, our group (group 10) presented a lesson plan on Past Tense Verbs. We had some problems with our laptop that caused the delay in presenting but they were settled down soon afterward. Our lecturer, Dr. Rozina made some remarks on our lesson plan.

                 First of all, she asked the group members why were there even a need to do separate evaluation sheets when we could get everything under one website. In our lesson plan, we stated that for drill activities, we would ask the students to open a link and play ‘Snake and Ladder’ game. That was it for the CALL lesson. To evaluate their understanding on the topic, we prepared a set of questions in evaluation sheets. This caused Dr. Rozina to question our motive behind it. To justify our action, we prefer this way of evaluating for few reasons. First, we wanted to see how well our students perform in Past Tense verbs. If it was being evaluated by the computer, the teacher would not get to see all the answers by the students. Second, the teacher was well-prepared with all sort of occurrence. For instance, if there was blackout, the evaluation could not be done on that day due to loss of electricity. However, we did agree with what our lecturer said. She said that “CALL lesson needs a lot of preparation and time. Find a website that has all you need -from exercise up to evaluation. Everything should be under one website.” We would be more careful in the future in choosing a better website that suits all the criteria.

                 Secondly, we noticed that we did not highlight teacher’s role in the lesson plan- as in we did not have a separate column just for Teacher’s Role. The lesson plan was created for the teacher to be clear about his or her role in helping students but we overlooked it. We would certainly add teacher’s role if there was any task involving lesson plan.

                Besides the comment given by our lecturer, one of our classmates also gave a suggestion regarding our topic. In our lesson plan, we stated that we would teach Past Tense Verbs without specifying whether we would teach Regular Past Tense Verbs first or Irregular Past Tense Verbs first. So, she recommended us to teach the regular form first (-ed) before the irregular one so that the students would get better understanding about the whole process.

              On Thursday, the same week as our presentation day, Dr. Rozina left general comments about the presentations from all 11 groups. Among things she said was almost all groups did not greet the audience when presenting. The first unspoken rule about presenting was the presenters needed to greet the audience (lecturers and student) to acknowledge their presence. The presenters must be so nervous to stand in front of so many people that they forgot to greet the audience properly. We would make sure that this thing would not happen next time.

                Lastly, Dr. Rozina gave us some tips on how to be confident when presenting. Firstly, we needed to practice speaking in front of a mirror to see how our body movements and facial expression look like. The mirror reflects how we would actually look like through the eyes of the audience. Secondly, one could build his or her confidence just by looking at the audience. How? By looking at those who smiled and were focused when you were presenting. They could give moral support to you.

Overall, these remarks made taught us to be more aware of how to be well-prepared when presenting.