This post was supposed to be giving you my WOW moments in professional development and teaching on the whole (inspired by Barbara Sakamoto, nudged further on by Mike Griffin), but it had to make way for the following revelation from today’s classes.
I might be a control freak teacher (pardon my language, I am combining words the way I like. I feel in full control). At least I seem to be showing symptoms.
Task:
(1) Read these quotes and discuss with a partner what the context might have been.
“We’ve all understood that you have a perfect sense of humour. But we won’t be able to write this quiz in 13 minutes.”
“Why have we just done this task? I guess you wanted to share with us something that had happened with you earlier today (misfortunes) and so you made us do this activity.”
(2) Answer the following questions:
– What did the students say? What did their words imply?
– Would you have an uneasy feeling after such conversations? How would you react?
– How does a teacher stop taking up the whole of the class’ attention/energy, etc?
It’s NOT about TTT. It’s about me being TOO much for the class.
Ann Loseva's Space 
I wish I could do this. Make a point and share something so powerful like this, a self-reflection, using so few words. With a lot of words or just few, you have already spotted your personal challenge to work on. Remember what John says, make a small change to what you already doing, observe, reflect, record, analyse… and keep making small changes.
For me it implies that in the moment you allow yourself and your students room for discussion on learning, lots of conversations like this will happen. It is a journey sweetie for all of us.
Another thing I realised about Ss is that they will do happily what they are used to and react to what they are not. Now it is too late in some cases to turn around and I won’t beat myself up for that, but next year I’ll start each group by understanding what they are used to and then making small changes towards what I belief to be more effective for their learning, although I also need to keep in mind that some learners do well or even better in the way they actually like learning. As long as learning is taking place, I’m fine on keeping that, but it is also important that Ss and I understanding that we are exploring different way of learning and we (they) need to discover what works better for them as well not to rule out the ones that do but they are so used to something else that can’t see it.
Indeed a WOW moment for you!
I hear you on this. Being set on the routine ways is typical for us all, in most activities, and probably making small change in learning ways is the simplest way to start feeling the driving force of change!)
Thank you for your comment, kind and sympathizing as always, dear Rose. It’s good you remind me of John’s ideas! I am so lucky to meet him soon. I feel the need to get back to my notes I made during the course, and from reading his post. It is also true that it’s so hard to be organized and scrupulous about my learning for me, I keep losing track and diverting my attention. I guess I am greedy for ideas, for different ways, but in the end it only makes my knowledge and understanding superficial. Good point to work on, again. Change is all about understanding your own character and developing it..for me..
[…] dealing with casual student remarks about our classes (I wrote about some of the most recent ones here). It meant a perfect chance to see myself through *some of* their eyes, which is painful but […]