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MATC

Synthesis Paper


In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Teaching
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University






Junhua Zhong
PID A48863630
June 1st, 2016

Effective Teaching at Different Positions


Introduction
I dont know if I am teaching effectively. I heard such voices very often from my
colleagues, I struggle with students motivation and engagement so I dont know if
trying another approaches would help. One of the facts about teaching is that
teachers are always seeking for effective instructions regardless whether they are
first-year teachers or experienced ones. The education system is also making more
efforts on funding technology installment and professional development meetings.
The question is, what is the key to effectiveness? Is there any particular
instructional strategy for teachers who are at different teaching positions?

From my own experience, I learned that the effectiveness of an approach differs in
different environment. As a result, a teacher should always consider which approach
would make sense in the context of their teaching environment. When I first started
my teaching career, I was a Chinese Language and Culture teacher in a public

elementary school. I taught students from kindergarten to 3rd grade and I planned
lessons 30 min per class, 8 classes per day and five days a week. I was highly
stressed back then. The age groups in the class various, so does their language level.
A 30-min lesson could be very short if I spent too much time on classroom
management or working on big projects. Also, I found it is ineffective to have
long-time whole group instructions, as I couldnt monitor students learning at the
same time. Things changed when I became a 2nd grade Chinese immersion
classroom teacher in the second year. I had longer instruction hours and students
are better getting involved in whole group activities, as they were familiar with the
content they were learning. Therefore, I believe that there is definitely a difference
in effective teaching methodologies when teachers are at different positions.

Compare and Contract Effective Teaching at Different Positions
Before I go head and analysis my teaching experience at the two positions. I want to
define effective teaching by using a quote from the book Explicit direct instruction

(EDI): the power of the well-crafted, well-taught lesson (2009) the instructional
approach is effective (students learn) and efficient (students learn quickly), P9). In
order to reach the teaching goals, teachers must be able to engage students so that
they are able to learn in the environment, what is more, teachers need to find out
the most comfortable way for students to learn quickly. Accordingly, students
engagement and the most appropriate approaches to direct groups matter the most
to effective teaching.

As a matter of fact, the Chinese language and culture position and Chinese
immersion classroom teacher position share quiet a lot similarity in teaching. First,
both positions involve teaching Chinese language. Students learn the second
language taught by native speakers so that they would get fair opportunities to
experience authentic language and culture. This could be boring to certain groups of
students when they have no interests at all. Fairly speaking, in Chinese immersion
classrooms, most of the students are more motivated in learning since the program

involved commitment of learning the language for years. Second, teaching with
inquiry is always a great approach to keep students engaged in the learning
environment, which is helpful in eliciting students curiosity about new things. Since
Chinese is not an alphabetic language, students will always have why for how this
language was formed and being written. For instance, I had a discussion with
teachers on TE 894 discussion regarding if it is necessary to encourage students to
learn radicals. Some teachers believed that radicals would confuse students since
one radical could form thousands of characters and is too abstract to memorize
while other teachers believed that radicals are useful to visual learners since
students would be able to connect the characters with images with concrete
meanings (Artifact 1: TE894 Group Discussion). It turned out, students from my
language and culture class and immersion class all love to learn more about radicals.
They shared with me that since most of the characters are pictographs, it made a lot
of sense after learning the radicals.

In some situations, teachers job responsibilities may limit their abilities to motivate
students. Plus, students motivations vary in different classrooms. First, according to
the job responsibilities, classroom teachers have sufficient time to work with
students, and design the lessons flexibly. But being a language and culture teacher, I
only had 30 minutes with a class. When there was a classroom management issue, it
could throw up all my plans. For example, Eniya was a student in my case study
when I was her language and culture teacher (Artifact 2: CEP891 My Own Case
Study). I ran into lots of classroom management issues with her, as she appeared to
be aggressive, low self-esteemed girl due to her family issues. When she felt
embarrassed by wearing flip flop to the school because those were the only shoes
she had at her moms place, she had a huge melt down in the classroom and I had to
comfort her for 10 minutes till her classroom teacher came back from the office. As a
resultI couldnt finish my lesson as I expected. Second, academically speaking,
classroom teachers involve much more academic content in the instructions and
students understand the high expectation better than learning from a special

teacher. For example, when I was doing a mini project for TE 894, I did a research
on guiding immersion students searching key information on computer (Artifact 3:
TE894 Analysis of Technology in Task-Based Instruction). When the students
were using Baidu Baike (known as Chinas Wikipedia) to search descriptions of
celebrities. The students were able to locate key information such as Chinese names,
nationalities, careers, family history and etc. Even though there were lots of new
vocabulary and long paragraphs to distract the students, they learned quickly in
applying the target language and did an excellent job finding the correct information
and summarizing the information into a short paragraph. However, when I first
tired this learning approach with my language and culture students, they were not
able to find out anything even though they had already learned the key words
before. They told me that they were lost in the long descriptions and had no
confidence in finding out any information from a Chinese website. Therefore, what
works for immersion students does not necessarily work for other students to also
learn quickly. Last but not the least, I strongly agree with what Best Practices in

Literacy Instruction (edited by Lesley Mandel Morrow, Linda B. Gambrell; foreword by


Nell K. Duke. 4th ed. P184) points out, students are more likely to do well if the task
they are working on has relevance to them (Artifact 4: TE842 Reading material).
In Chinese language and culture classrooms, students need more hands-on activities
to stay focused and engaged in the lesson. On the contrary, in Chinese immersion
students can easily be productive in speaking and writing down their ideas in target
language. For instance, when I introduce new vocabulary to the class, my students
from language and culture classrooms prefer games such as hide and seek and
Simon says that allow them to stand up and move around while they are learning to
speak out the vocabulary. My students from immersion classrooms, however, enjoy
interactions with smart board when they are able to solve questions in Chinese.


Conclusion
As I compare and contrast difference between teaching as a Chinese language and

culture teacher and Chinese immersion teacher, I found the instruction settings and
structure variety has a critical impact on the effect of different teaching approaches.
the effective learning happens mostly with the whole group that students are highly
engaged in Chinese language and culture classrooms while Chinese immersion
students perform much better during individualized instructions such as small
groups and one on one practices. Accordingly, Chinese language and culture
teachers would prefer to cooperate more game-based learning methods in order to
engage the whole group while Chinese immersion classroom teachers would focus
more on small groups and individualized attention.

As it says in the journal Exploring Elementary-School Students Engagement Patterns
in a Game-Based Learning Environment, students involvement and participation in
learning activities should be constructed based on positive interactions between
students and their learning environment (OBrien & Toms, 2008). Teachers at

different positions should cooperate with the most appropriate approaches into
effective instructions.

I miss the time when I was a Chinese language and culture teacher. I played together,
laughed together and tried a lot of games together with my students. We built lots of
teamwork with the classes and they were able to recognize lots of Chinese cultural
events as well. I also enjoyed being a Chinese immersion classroom teacher since I
got more time and chances to work with individuals and focus on their strengths
and weaknesses specifically.

The essence of the MATC program helps me develop the methodologies of


instructions and the best practices in classroom management. As I am finishing up
with the program, I believe that I have benefited a lot to grow as a professional
passionate teacher who can also be flexible at different positions. As stated in the

article Teachers are learners with a little help from a critical friend, A situation
taken for granted in every classroom is that teachers strive to create conditions for
student learning. However, it is not taken for granted that the same scenario is put
into action when teachers create opportunities for learning among colleagues,
teachers are also learners, we still have a long way to go with collaborative learning
from our communities.

Reference

John Hollingsworth; Silvia Ybarra (2009). Explicit direct instruction (EDI) : the power
of the well-crafted, well-taught lesson. Corwin Press.

Edited by Lesley Mandel Morrow, Linda B. Gambrell. Foreword by Nell K. Duke


(2011). Best Practices in Literacy Instruction. The Guilford Press.

Hsieh, Y.-H., Lin, Y.-C., & Hou, H.-T. (2015). Exploring Elementary-School Students
Engagement Patterns in a Game-Based Learning Environment. Educational
Technology & Society, 18 (2), 336348.

Ann-Christine Wennergren (2016). Teachers as learners with a little help from a
critical

friend.

Educational

10.1080/09650792.2015.1058170


Action

Research,

24:2,

260-279,

DOI:

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