The “Motivation” Challenge

If you have been following this blog series, you would have known by now that I prepared lesson plans assimilating Philippines’ and Indonesia’s educational stucture. That alone is already a challenge for me as an intern. Moreover, the language nuance, as was previously mentioned, is another roadblock in a successful teaching and learning process. Having all of these difficulties at hand, I couldn’t afford to have myself teach a lesson with minimal preparation.

But, you know, things happen. I wasn’t paying much attention to the schedule I was given. For some reason, I thought one lesson plan is good for a week on all programs as I may have heard that some of them only meet once a week. However, that doesn’t apply to all classes. To cut the story short, I have to meet again with students I already have met for the week and that we should have a new lesson to discuss for this meeting. Following their textbook, this day’s lesson should be all about Adjectives. I asked help from my Cooperating Teacher Mrs. Emy to print out some pictures with which I had the students describe their observation of and write it on the board as part of my motivation to the topic.

As a future educator, I should know that situations like this arise but it’s how you improvise and think fast that can help you patch up little hiccups like this. After the motivation, we checked the sentences they wrote on the board and process it with questions for analysis. How did you describe the pictures? What are the things that you say about the pictures? Do they help you identify which picture someone is talking about? What do you call the words that we use to describe a person, place, object, etc.? Then I revealed today’s topic and reviewed the eight parts of speech with the students. The discussion went on about adjectives and sentence structures in creating descriptive statements. The class participation rate was overwhelming as most of them are eager to learn and are very enthusiastic during the interaction. For my next class, I had the previous lesson plan I prepared the last time which talks about the Simple Future Tense. It may be a different topic for the new class but both the previous class and this one have the same amount of energy and level of motivation.

Taking a break…