Friday, September 17, 2010

Review on Peer Teaching

Today, my peer teaching group consisting of me myself, Sheila and Min Hau, had conducted a peer teaching session with the ES2007S Professional Communication Group10 class. Our topic of peer teaching regards to designing survey questionnaire and interview, essential skills which will be needed for improving our effective communication skills. Designining survey questionnaire and interview will also have to be learnt since all reserch groups will require these skills to complete their research projects and proposals.

The experience of conducting a peer teaching session can be summarised in one word: enlightening. Why do I say so? This is because it feels so much different when I myself is the one who is standing in front of the class, conducting a lesson to everyone. Although this is not my first time making a presentation in front of the class, I can still always feel the mounting pressure on my shoulders when I stand in front of the entire class, knowing that the class will be paying full attention to me. Everytime when I stand up in front of the class to present, I will always have this form of mentality in my mind that I will be evaluated by everyone in the classroom, hence the stress will always be there, no matter how prepared I am.

Talking about preparedness, frankly speaking this preparation is quite rushed in my own point of view. Although the first peer teaching session in this class took place 3 weeks ago (so theoretically speaking we have 3 weeks to prepare), we only started carrying out plans 2 weeks ago, before finalising everything last night. The reason why we took so long to prepare our peer teaching session is because we had been gathering reference on how the other peer teaching groups conduct their own peer teaching sessions. As the fourth group to conduct our session, we are one of the last groups to conduct our session, and after we had witnessed the excellent peer teaching session on creating wiki pages by Forrest's (sorry if I have mispelled your name) group, we know that expectations on our presentations would be very high. Hence, alot of time and effort had been taken by our team to prepare this presentation in hoping to make it fun and enlightening to everyone, not just to the rest of the class, but also to our team as well.

From what I have learnt about peer teaching, I can say that peer teaching is one very effective way of learning, not just to those who are being taught, but also to ourselves too. As the person responsible for teaching others, what is the best way of preparing a presentation other than learning deeply about the topic that I have to present to others? Sometimes, stress and expectations can be a good motivator for learning, and after experiencing this peer teaching session, I cannot help but to agree with it.

I believe that our skills in conducting peer teaching and presentations can be further improved. Although we believed that we had been fully prepared for our own parts of the entire presentation, I think that the overall duration planning for the presentation is a little screwed up. Initially, we had planned this presentation to be only half an hour long. In the end, however, the presentation ended up to be almost forty-five minutes long. Due to the time constraints, we had to shorten the duration for the activity session. Maybe in the future, such error can be avoided through rehearsals and careful planning.

That is all I have to say about our peer teaching presentation. I hope everyone there had enjoyed our presentation.

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