Susi Dariah's Reflection #2nd meeting

It was really nice for getting the second meeting of PETA which was opened by watching a video. Moreover, I could watch an activity of elementary school classroom. Watching how the elementary students learn and also watching their innocent face when the camera were going to shoot their activity, make me being full of yearning to visit the elementary school and doing the observation such as my school experience in the first and second semester ago. I hope in this semester I also could visit the elementary school, but unfortunately refer to the announcement, in the 3^rd semester the program of school experience in my university is going to visit and do teaching assistance in secondary school. Hence, I could not look the amusing elementary students and being excited talking with them again.

Besides watching a video, there’s also an activity to analyze 4 vignettes and we are asked to decide whether they are considered as activity focused design or coverage approach. When I read the first vignettes, I was surprised and just being able to show my sheepish smile because the situation is some of my last experience. The vignette sketches someone who easily to memorize the material but also easily to forget it after the exam gone. Suddenly after I read it, I reflect on my own high school experience that I ever could memorize many textbook to face the written exam of entrepreneurship subject, but after the exam gone I forget many of it. I realize that last time, I just memorize it without trying to understand and analyze how those materials can be applied in my real life problems so that I easily to forget it. I only thought that I should memorize all of the materials in order to be able to do the examination very well. That assessment was not well structured, because the questions only assessed the low order thinking skills like as bloom’s taxonomy point out.

Refer to that experience, as a teacher candidate, I should have known that conceptual understanding is really needed in learning process, like as Grant and Wiggins (2005) propose the understanding by design can be used to solve activity-focused and coverage approach problems. Hence, when I teach later, I will try to make the effective teaching and assessment to facilitate my (future) students’ understanding. J