First Session Shadowing
Introduction:
We visited Metropolia University of Applied Science in an electrical course at noon in the 17th of April 2012. The members of our group are Othman Fallatah, Khalid Alfaris and I Nawaf Almzaini, Othman Amin. Then we went to classroom where the session was held. We didn't have enough time to meet the teacher before the session started because he came five minutes late. It was a computer based electrical engineering lab. Unfortunately, the subject for this class was project, so, there weren’t regular lecture.That means, the attend for the students weren’t obligatory. The teacher started directly with explaining some electrical designing code. He wasn’t introduction in the beginning of the session. The outcomes of the subject were unclear to our group the beginning since it wasn't clear to us what the lesson is. We tried to figure everything out, but there was only some explanation for a code of an electrical design about 35 minutes. After that, he finished and asked the students to complete their work. So it seemed to us in the beginning that the session was typically a social.
In fact, the lab is well organized and has almost all the technological and learning materials the teacher and students may need.
After having enough time discussing the session's documentation with the professor, I noticed that he prepared well for the course in general. One of the things I liked about it is the grading system he used to evaluate each student.
The students have a project to accomplish by the end of the semester. They work as group of four students. There will be a grade of 40 for the group when they finish. So each student will have a grade of 10 if they get the full mark. But if one of them doesn't work or help the group at all they have to tell the professor before the grading takes place, so they would not lose the grade of the fourth member. But instead the full grade would by divided by three.
I want to add important notes. We surprised when we see lady that translated to special needs.
In general I have enjoyed the shadowing session and I think it’s not far from what we are doing in my home.
You say "Unfortunately, the subject for this class was project,". Metropolia on the other hand had thought that they wanted to show you just this course, because it is project work, not a traditional lecture! This shows, how important it would have been to tell you first the general idea of the course. Too bad the teacher didn't have time for that!
ReplyDelete"I noticed that he prepared well for the course in general. This is exactly the kind of reflection we hoped you'd make. Namely: teaching is not only considered to be the performance of the teacher in the classroom. It is mainly the question of organizing learning. In this project course student teams are given responsibility of their own learning. The teacher does give short "showers of instruction", like the one you observed, but his main task is in formulating the assignments so that learning takes place, when students carry out the project. They learn also valuable transferable skills like negotiating objectives, setting up schedule, dividing work, searching for information, evaluating information, evaluating their own results and so on. And of course they also learn the topic. The teachers task is to help the students in their learning, not so much by telling them the knowledge necessary for solving the problem, but by helping them find the right answers.
Of course, when you only see a glimpse of what is going on, you have difficulties figuring out, what is going on! Especially when the teacher didn't start by explaining the whole picture.
I hope the chat you had with the teacher helped you understand better, what the aims and methods are. At least when it comes to group assessment he seems to have been able to get his message through.
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Irmeli
PS Good idea to include photos!