Community Engagement Activity

On the 8th of September 2012, the Monash University Foundation Year(MUFY) programme organised a Sharity Day event. This ia actually a fund raising project and the proceeds collected are for the purpose of donations to the underprevilaged. This year the proceeds collected was donated to the Paediatric Oncology Unit of University Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC). It has been a tradition for the MUFY programme to organise this activity every year as a community service.

Every year I participate in this activity as a means of doing my part to the community. On the day of the event, we the MUFY committee members and students who have voluntereed to help would sell various types of food, drinks, accessories and other services such as as nail art, henna drawing etc.. Of course before the day itself, there's a lot of preparation done in terms of sourcing out for food and services.

This year Esther and I were incharge of selling pastas, pies, pizzas and curry puffs. We managed to get student voulunteers to assist us in doing the sales. Although it was tiring, it was also fun as we manage to interact with the students outside class and it did not involve discussing about economics.



Pre-sales event!!!



It was a successful event!!!!!

 The projected collection from the event was RM13 500. This Sharity Day event is a community project  carried out by MUFY programme. This activity helps to create awareness amongst students in terms of the importance of serving the community, helps to develop their organisational and planning skills and etc....



Sales of food!!!



Students enjoying themselves on Sharity Day!!!

rationale for using various teaching materials and techniques

In today learning environment a lot of emphasis has been given towards student cnetered learning. It is no more a scenario where the lecutrer walks into class and talks for two hours while the students just listen. Nowdays, lecturers have placed a lot of importance on creating a two-way interaction in class. Lecutrers are merely the facilitators and students are required to do a lot of self-learning.

In relation to creating a student centered learning environment, I use various teaching materials and techniques in my classroom. One method used is group discussion and presentations. Since I teach Macroeconomics, I ususally require students to select an article from the newspaper in relation to the subject. Students are to discuss the article and write out a commentary on the article. In writting the commentary, students should relate the article to the economic theories which they have learnt. During the next lesson, students are required to do a power point presentation on their media commentary. This is one way of making studnets realise that all the economic thoeries that they have learnt is applicable in the real world. This helps to create an interest in the subject.

Besides that, I also use Elearn in my teaching. I upload tutorial questions and solutions, past year questions, notes and others on e learn. Students are required to print the materials and bring it for class. This gives students the opportunity to excess the materials at any point in time.

Another technique of eaching which i use is the internet. Sometimes I look for videos on youtube in relation to macroeconomic topics like unemployment and inflation and I play it for my students in class. This helps to create a better understanding for the students. It also helps students understand what happens in the real world and how the economic theories are related in reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gad5RmCeKI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLXhqME809E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjlY1Sk8d-Q&feature=relmfu

This are amongst the various methods used in my classroom as a means of creating a student-centered learning environment.With all this improvisation in my teaching, I have found that students actually preferred this method especially the group discussions and watching videos. It gave them something different to do instead of always referring to their reference books.a student evaluation was done for last semester and the results are as follow:

Overall, by using various teaching methods it has helped to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom. It helps to create students eagerness to attend classes and participate in teh learning process.

Innovation in teaching and learning

Training Session 1:

One of the trainings I attended was on Critical Thinking: Implementation and Strategies for teaching which was facilitated by Dr. Choy Siew Chee. It was a two day training session. This training involved learning on how the brains work, the psychosocial theory of development and how it relates to brain development, gender differences and also incorporating critical thinking into lesson plans. It was an interesting workshop as it did not just involve theoretical information but also required the participants to engage in role plays. In my opinion it was a reflection on how student centred learning should take place.

One particular area of interest to me was on gender differences which indicated that boys and girls learn differently. According to the facilitator she claimed that girls usually acquire their complex verbal skills as much as a year earlier than boys and they are able to multi-task better than boys. This was an interesting piece of information for me as I have both male and female students in my class.

Besides that, during the training we were also asked to do a role play on how we actually conduct our classes. The aim of this role play was to ensure student engagement in the classroom. The participants were put into groups and were given time to brainstorm on how are we going to create a student centred learning environment. Then each group was required to conduct a lecture in front of the audience. Each group had to come up with strategies to ensure that the audience who were the students were kept engaged at all times. This role play took a whole day as there were about five or six groups. I enjoyed this part of the session as it made me feel more active and I was able to focus better.

Overall this training session was informative for me and it gave me a break from my lectures. When I went back to my routine lectures I felt more refreshed. Besides, I also had the opportunity to meet other colleagues from various other programmes. This gave me the opportunity to widen my network.

Training Session 2:

On the 8th of September, Sunway College organised a pre-university conference for all pre-university staff. the purpose of this conference was to allow all educators to share their knowledge and expertise in teaching and learning in higher education. It was held on a saturday from 8.30 to 5.00pm.

There were many research papers presented and each lasted for about half an hour. Amongst the papers that interested me was Relationship between the full range leadership and students’ educational satisfaction: A Gender Comparison by Ms. Jessica Ho sze Yin.  this research was done based on students’ preference of leadership. The presenter went on to explain how students view their lecturers as leaders and what are their expectations of their lecturers. the presenter concluded that lecturers who stimulate and challenge students to think were  more preferred compared to passive lecturers.

Another research which was interesting was Engaging students through coaching in the classroom by Ms. Shereen. This paper was about the challenges faced by students in college. it also emphasised on the role of the lecturer to engage the students during the lessons. there were various strategies presented. this gave me an insight on how coaching helps in engaging the students in classroom.

Overall there were many research papers presented which was very informative and interesting. However I found that there were some papers presented which seemed a little boring.  for instance a research paper called Dare to Share. Based on the title I thought that it was going to be an interesting presentation but when I listened to the presentation I did not find it very informative. there were a lot of shortcoming to the research.

ENHANCHING TEACHING AND LEARNING

It's unsettling to give up control, but we've learned that a student-centred learning environment is more effective. A traditional lecture digitized as a "talking-head" video stream is even less compelling than its real-life counterpart. Learner-centredness means especially taking advantage of the collaborative possibilit

It's unsettling to give up control, but we've learned that a student-centred learning environment is more effective. A traditional lecture digitized as a "talking-head" video stream is even less compelling than its real-life counterpart. Learner-centredness means especially taking advantage of the collaborative possibilities of computer networks.

ies of computer networks.

The current methods used to enhance teaching and learning are:

vE learn

vGroup discussions

vGroup presentations

vGrade Center

vTutorials

vLectures

In the Monash University foundation Year, lecturers’ are encouraged to use e-learn as a tool to enhance teaching and learning. For economics, past year questions, articles and other information are posted on e-learn. Students are required to download the articles and past year questions from e-learn. This tool is used in class, whereby the articles are discussed by logging on to  e-learn.

 

vPhotos of students doing group discussions during tutorial sessions

 

vLater they were required to do a presentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Based on my learning styles assessment which I have conducted, I found that students preferred doing group work as they get the opportunity to interact with their classmates. They seem to have fun doing presentations as well!

Thus, I have leant to change my teaching style to a certain extent. Nowdays, I try to incorporate a lot of group work in my lectures. I find that students have more fun in terms of learning and they also seem to understand and remember things better.

I am moving towards creating a more student centerd learning rather than teacher centered learning environment. Although it is time consuming but at the end of the semester I know that learning has taken place.