A Productive Morning in My Life
Teacher's reflection.
This reflection post is written by Abhilasha Rayamajhi, one of my colleagues at King’s College, Nepal and one of the participants of the workshop I had conducted on August 9, 2023. Posting here with her permission. Thank you Abhilasha.
Workshop on Overcoming Pedagogical Challenges
I have been teaching undergrad students for the past two years. The journey hasn’t been easy; I have faced several challenges in this short duration. But I have also realized that I like it. The best part about teaching is that I get connected to so many new and younger faces. One thing that a teacher needs is a space to discuss, reflect and share these challenges and work towards overcoming them. Finding such a space is rare.
“Overcoming Pedagogical Challenges” was a workshop focused on understanding teachers’ hurdles in the classroom and finding ways to navigate these hurdles. The two-hour-long workshop was held in King’s College and it was conducted by Umes Shrestha, Communications Professor at King’s College on August 9, 2023. The session was designed for faculty at King’s College teaching Bachelors’s and Masters’s level students.
The session started on time, there was a question on the board when I reached the venue, “How would you want the first day of your next session to be like?” I thought for a while about the things I would want to do on the first day. One of the participants had to be a designated reviewer for the session who had to summarize the entire session at the end. I volunteered to be the reviewer of the session. I am a natural hand-raiser and note-taker in classrooms or workshops. I like to make the most out of my time and being a designated reviewer makes me more attentive.
Then, the facilitator showed us nine different pedagogical challenges. Those challenges were:
Content depth
Student Engagement
Student/teacher motivation
Curriculum Assessment
Classroom Management
Different levels of students
Time and Resource Management
Using Technology
Teaching Methodology
We were given the first task to rate these challenges between 1 to 5, 5 being extremely challenging and 1 being least challenging. Then we needed to pick up three of the most challenging topics out of nine. I faced the most difficulty in these areas:
Different levels of students — 4/5
Classroom management- 4/5
Student and teacher motivation- 5/5
I rated student and teacher motivation the most because there are times when I find it very challenging to make students do their assignments on time, make them ask questions, or provide feedback. This makes me very annoyed and at times I lose focus and become unmotivated. Then classroom management, attendance issues, and other disturbances are also part and parcel of my classroom. In some classes, students are almost my age or even older than me. I feel there is a notion that a professor has to be older and has to look a certain way. There are some students from different backgrounds and age groups in the same class and there is sometimes difficulty in dealing with that.
We were required to discuss our outcomes with other participants from the same table. It was interesting to hear how the “use of technology” was an issue for others whereas it was not an issue for me. Challenges are different for different teachers at different levels, teaching different subjects.
Then we also had to come up with some solutions to the problems you were having in the classroom. To this, some said, “If I knew the solutions then this would not have been a challenge for me in the first place.” I disagree with this because I guess we know what we have to do. In my heart, I know how I can motivate myself and my students but I don’t apply that. We all know what we want but we don’t listen to ourselves so much.
Initially, we were just told to “discuss” our challenges. Just one person had spoken at our table then time was up. This was done intentionally to make us understand the importance of rules that we need to follow during group work.
Some of the group work rules provided to us were:
Don’t judge anyone
Only one will speak/share-others will listen and write
Don’t hijack/derail/invalidate someone else’s ideas
Make sure everyone gets a turn to share
Ask any clarifying questions only after everyone has finished sharing at least once
Umes Sir instructed to ABC to our challenges then, Add something to the discussion, then build on it and Challenge the ideas. I was the only female around the table. Someone told me that I should go first because, “ladies first”. But I requested him to start then I will speak on my turn.
We were also made to reflect on our learning and how we were doing so far. One of the most crucial parts of this workshop was understanding how learning objectives should always guide our activity. Many institutions and educators have been focusing on the “doing” part of learning without proper learning objectives. The learning objective of this particular session was not to “learn how learning happens” or “learn how to design the session flow” but to “learn how to design the activities”.
Then we listed the activities we perform in our classrooms. Then collected all the activities in one table and categorized them. Some of the categories were Group discussions, Presentations, Role plays, Free-writing, Videos, Situational questions, and Quizzes.
We also prepared the anatomy of classroom activity. The participants were divided into A and B categories randomly. Then all the A’s had to work creating a detailed “Goal/Purpose”, “logic-why it works”, “Process-how it works” and “when it won’t work” of group discussion.
Some of the key ideas that were discussed are:
“All” students have to get the opportunities to demonstrate, participate, and be cognitively engaged in the classroom
(Almost) every information can be converted into activity.
“Show, ask, and tell” instead of just tell
“It is not about fun, it is about learning”
“Putting the cart in front of the horse.”
“Don’t put activities before objectives.”
Towards the end, I summarized the session and we ended the session with a short reflection. In a nutshell, I enjoy being of such sessions where I can write, think and share. I consider a program successful when it starts on time and ends on time. Further, I wrote three full pages of notes during the session and now it is a blog — what a productive morning!