Review #1
Lee 1
Miha Lee
Professor Rivas
SED 600
20 February 2007
Video 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 be
fully prepared with a detailed script and properties. In addition, unlike a play in which an actor
plays a role without any interaction with other actors or audience, teaching in a classroom
requires another thing to be successful: the good relationship between an instructor and his/her
students. Accordingly, I visited Rosemont middle school for two weeks to watch the 8th grade
physical science class and made a close relationship with its students before my teaching was
videotaped. I miss a lot those little kids who helped me.
During this time, I also collected information about what they had been learning, how the
lessons were carried out, and what kind of words was used in class. Sojin Kim, who is their
original teacher, had been teaching chapter 16. Compounds and Chemical Bonding that was
associated with chemistry. After talking with Ms. Kim, I decided to do an experiment activity
with red cabbage juice in which the property of indicators and the usefulness of the pH scale were
meant 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 2
6. Teaching objects
 Students can explain the property of indicators.
 Students can use the pH scale to determine and express the acidity of a substance.
To draw student interest to my class, I usually begin to teach with talking about everyday
life experiences regarding the topic of lesson to teach. In the class videotaped, I started to talk
about 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 of
chemical 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. The
students had learned which substance is acidic or basic from the previous classes. Building on
their prior knowledge, I had them to identify the colors of red cabbage juice in acid and base
solutions. Furthermore, I introduced the concept of acid rain as the ‘Going further question’ to
make a connection between the pH scale and our life. In short, one of my teaching strengths is
connecting 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 student
critical thinking and higher level reasoning skills. While many people think that doing
experiments or showing demonstrations is enough to help students to develop reasoning skills, I
believe 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 the
results of the experiment and drawing conclusions. In my class, to be specific, the original
cabbage juice was used as the control. I asked students to think about the reason why we need the
control so that students learned that they should control independent variables to isolate specific
variable that affect the results. In addition, both ammonium solution and baking soda solution
Review #1
Lee 3
were basic turning blue and green respectively. I challenged students to generate an idea by
asking a question: how do you know which one is more basic? The students didn’t give me an
answer, but they felt the need to know more. That’s sufficient to reach my goal to use questions
because 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 to
telling a story. I usually make my instruction a structured story, not giving isolated fragments of
information, so that I can help students make connections between their preexisting ideas and
new ideas. Some inexperienced teachers or teachers who are teaching outside of their discipline
don’t appreciate the organized structure of conceptions in a discipline, and thus just introduce a
new concept abruptly. In this case, students are so puzzled that they hardly make coherent
understanding of concepts. Therefore, I introduced a pH meter, a pH paper and the method to use
as a following story of the comparison of the acidity of ammonium solution and baking soda
solution. With a demonstration of pH paper strips, they came to know the function of indicators
and the usefulness of pH scales in determining the acidity of a substance. What is more, 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, I
failed to finish in the time that I scheduled and could not conduct a formative assessment to find
out if the students really understood what I had been teaching. However, during the instruction, I
asked many questions and analyzed their answers to adjust my teaching. Sometimes students
didn’t give me the answers they were supposed to give, which means they didn’t understand what
I said. Their physical motions and facial expressions also tell me a lot about their understanding
and participation of my teaching.
Speaking of question, I analyzed my videotaped lesson in light of pedagogical skills to
Review #1
Lee 4
improve my future teaching. The criteria used in analysis were the types of questions and the
levels of questions. (Johnson, 2007, p55~56)
The types of questions used were categorized into two: open-ended questions and closeended questions. The result is presented in the table following. A early part of discussion activity
was not videotaped by accident, so total number of questions that I asked in the videotape is 29.
The majority of my questions, almost 80%, were open-ended, which is a good pedagogical skill
to make students think by themselves.
Open-ended question
23
Close-ended question
6
With a long experience of teaching, I developed the pedagogical skill to ask open-ended
questions. However, when it comes to the levels of questions in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy, I am
still a novice teacher.
Level of thinking
The number of frequency
Knowledge
12
Comprehension
6
Application
4
Analysis
5
Synthesis
1
Evaluation
1
Review #1
The majority of my questions fell into the low level thinking categories.
Lee 5
I was merely
checking out students’ understanding, which means that I failed to stimulate students’ higher level
thinking skills. Actually, I have been thinking about this problem throughout my teaching. I need
to create questions that help students develop reasoning skills. Usually inquiry teaching
incorporates a theme that students investigate for a long period, but given the limited time
available for high school chemistry class, I just use a question and answer strategy to develop
students’ reasoning skills. To come up with quality questions, however, it takes not only
preparing time but also a lot of experience. In an effort to build my questioning skill, I was
keeping a journal of classes when I was teaching in Korea. I’ll do it again when I go back to teach.
Another thing to analyze related to asking questions was wait time that allows students to
fully process the question before calling on them. But in this instruction, I found something
interesting in regard with wait time. Usually I tend to speak Korean too fast, but I speak English
slowly to think before talking, and I used easy expressions to convey my ideas. This time my
weak point became a merit because my poor English gave students sufficient time to follow and
think. Also I didn’t know the names of students that I had to give a chance to answer questions to
only students who raised their hands. But I tried not to call on the same students.
In sum, this video project gave me a valuable opportunity to watch and improve my teaching
and to practice speaking English. But I still have a room for progress by integrating a variety of
teaching strategies that I have been learning. I really thank Sojin Kim for allowing me to teach
her class.
Reference
Johnson, A, P (2007). A Short Guide to Action Research (3rd edition), Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn
and Bacon.