OK, it's time to reflect on my experience so far. Now that I have been teaching for almost 2 months, I think it's time to relate back with my previous experience a little bit, just to compare and contrast the experiences of teaching in school and teaching in university.
1. Lesson Planning
In school, a teacher needs to have comprehensive lesson planning of what to teach daily. In university, the plan consists of topics to teach each week. While a teacher will have different learning outcomes for different lessons, in university the lecturer had to achieve the course outcomes by teaching particulars topics. The area of teaching will be big for a university lecturer as the scope of topics is wide. Teacher the other way around need to focus on the certain skills that the students need to learn and provided in the school syllabus.
2. Teaching and Learning
I found that there are a lot of similarities between teaching and learning in a school and in a university. The context and scope of the content will be different but the pedagogy that you use can be the same with a tweak and twist! I am still able to use and apply the ARM Model (Active, learning, Reflection and Modelling) in the university class. Moreover, you can do more things with the university students now as the time is luxurious as I will discuss in details later. Especially with my students who are taking a Bachelor of Education, I found it is important to model effective teaching and learning - with the hope that they will take and apply it in their future careers.
3. Time
In school, teaching hours will be short and succinct. I mean, instead of the class being combined together fr one session, the class will be chunked into several periods, throughout the week. For example, if you need to teach 3 hours of maths a week, then in a week the hours might be divided into 3 periods of 3 hours or more. Teachers sometimes need to rush to finish the topic to teach in school and need to limit the time doing some activities in the class, while in the university, you have the luxury of a bit more time to get your students to do some creative activities in the class.
4. Students
Of course in university your students will be young adults. Most of the time, your instruction to them needs to be simple and short as they will understand better. While in school, you might need to be even more precise and find other ways when telling your students what to do (clear instructions). The level of activity that you gave to your students in school needs to be taught through clearly as well; while in the university you sometimes want your students to come up with something new and innovative!
5. The attendance
Surprisingly, I have found that in university, students' attendance can become a big problem. Almost every time there will be some reason for them not to attend the class or to come late or to leave early. Sometimes I do not understand this situation...aha.... While in school, as much as there are sometimes problems with attendance overall, most of the time the class will be full, I guess parents are still able to check their children's attendance and help to make good choices and decisions, Whereas in university, students will be on their own. They make their own choices and decisions.
Okay, those are the five points for now. I think it is enough. Again, I am just sharing my opinions. They might not be all correct but that is how I feel for now. Open for discussion! Both involve teaching. Teaching means creative. Creative means awesome. Awesome means epic. Epic means happy! Okay this can go on and on and on! haha... don't scold me anyway! :D
PS: I miss my childhood time playing in the rain... My mom only allowed us to do that if the rain was heavy... Oh! What a nice memory! :D
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Superb! ;)