Blog Entry #1

Pardon the uninspiring title, basically, I am observing Secondary 3 Express and Secondary 2 Normal Academic classes.

For Sec 3E, they are doing Telltale:11 Stories and my CT's focus for these two terms is content knowledge. My CT does not provide any 'model' answers for the students. It is interactive: CT questions and students answer. It is something like Socratic questioning. In addition, students get involved in engaging personally with the stories. For example, students are tasked to film a video (the scene taken from the text, “Video” by Alfian Sa’at, is assigned by my CT) and they had to do a presentation by analysing the specific scene, as well as justifying their video representation. They also had to reflect on the whole process and how it helped them to make meaning of the text. 

For Sec 2E, they also did group work (group presentation on poem analysis as well as recitation of poem). In short, the approach to teaching Literature in my school is one where teachers play the role of a facilitator and students learn by engaging personally with texts.

Li Ying