ReferenceReview #1 Lee 1Miha LeeProfessor RivasSED 60020 February 2007Video Review: How to improve my teaching?The action of teaching is a kind of performance for me. To do well on the stage, I need to befully prepared with a detailed script and properties. In addition, unlike a play in which an actorplays a role without any interaction with other actors or audience, teaching in a classroomrequires another thing to be successful: the good relationship between an instructor and his/herstudents. Accordingly, I visited Rosemont middle school for two weeks to watch the 8th gradephysical science class and made a close relationship with its students before my teaching wasvideotaped. I miss a lot those little kids who helped me.During this time, I also collected information about what they had been learning, how thelessons were carried out, and what kind of words was used in class. Sojin Kim, who is theiroriginal teacher, had been teaching chapter 16. Compounds and Chemical Bonding that wasassociated with chemistry. After talking with Ms. Kim, I decided to do an experiment activitywith red cabbage juice in which the property of indicators and the usefulness of the pH scale weremeant to be taught.1. Unit : Section 16.2 Acids, Bases, and Salts 2. Students : 8th grade of Rosemont Middle School 3. Date : 18, January 2007 4. Instructor : Miha Lee 5. Materials for lab : red cabbage juice, vinegar, baking powder, ammonium water.Review #1 Lee 26. Teaching objects- Students can explain the property of indicators.- Students can use the pH scale to determine and express the acidity of asubstance.To draw student interest to my class, I usually begin to teach with talking about everydaylife experiences regarding the topic of lesson to teach. In the class videotaped, I started to talkabout the possibilities to use indicators ‘at home’ such as ‘red grape juice and red cabbage juice.’.To emphasis the relevance of chemistry in our daily life, the red cabbage juice instead ofchemical reagents, such as phenolphthalein, BTB and methyl orange, was used in the experiment.Also, baking soda and ammonium water as bases and vinegar as an acid were employed. Thestudents had learned which substance is acidic or basic from the previous classes. Building ontheir prior knowledge, I had them to identify the colors of red cabbage juice in acid and basesolutions. Furthermore, I introduced the concept of acid rain as the ‘Going further question’ tomake a connection between the pH scale and our life. In short, one of my teaching strengths isconnecting chemistry with daily life to make my teaching interesting and useful to my students.Another strength that I have is using an inquiry method in an effort to develop studentcritical thinking and higher level reasoning skills. While many people think that doingexperiments or showing demonstrations is enough to help students to develop reasoning skills, Ibelieve that discussion is the most essential part of teaching with a lab activity to reach the goal.Discussion should engage students in the thinking process of interpreting and evaluating theresults of the experiment and drawing conclusions. In my class, to be specific, the originalcabbage juice was used as the control. I asked students to think about the reason why we need thecontrol so that students learned that they should control independent variables to isolate specificReview #1 Lee 3variable that affect the results. In addition, both ammonium solution and baking soda solutionwere basic turning blue and green respectively. I challenged students to generate an idea byasking a question: how do you know which one is more basic? The students didn’t give me ananswer, but they felt the need to know more. That’s sufficient to reach my goal to use questionsbecause at least they learned that evidence is required to make a scientific decision. While I was planning the lesson, I realized that I like teaching a lesson that is similar totelling a story. I usually make my instruction a structured story, not giving isolated fragments ofinformation, so that I can help students make connections between their preexisting ideas andnew ideas. Some inexperienced teachers or teachers who are teaching outside of their disciplinedon’t appreciate the organized structure of conceptions in a discipline, and thus just introduce anew concept abruptly. In this case, students are so puzzled that they hardly make coherentunderstanding of concepts. Therefore, I introduced a pH meter, a pH paper and the method to usethem as a following story of the comparison of the acidity of ammonium solution and bakingsoda solution. With a demonstration of pH paper strips, they came to know the function ofindicators and the usefulness of pH scales in determining the acidity of a substance. What ismore, my story-telling like teaching helps students retain the learned things in their memory.On the other hand, I am regretful about many things that I failed in the instructions. First, Ifailed to finish on in the time that I scheduled and could not to conduct a formative assessment tofind out if the students really understand understood what I had been teaching. However, duringthe instruction, I asked many questions and analyzed their answers to adjust my teaching.Sometimes students don’t didn’t give me any the answers that they were supposed to give, whichmeans they don’t didn’t understand what I saysaid. Their physical motions and facial expressionsalso tell me a lot about their understanding and participation of my teaching.Review #1 Lee 4Speaking of question, I analyzed my videotaped lesson in light of pedagogical skills toimprove my future teaching. The criteria used in analysis were the types of questions and thelevels of questions. (Johnson, 2007, p55~56)The types of questions used were categorized into two: open-ended questions and close-ended questions. The result is presented in the table following. A early part of discussion