. Determine students’ learning needs in terms of prior knowledge and language for learning.

The topic that I’ve taught this week is on “Physical and Chemical Digestion in human” which ideally should have been done in at least three lessons (3 x 60 minutes) but I’ve compressed it into two lessons (2 x 50 minutes). This was a request by my mentor explaining that I should cover as much as I possibly can for the exam. Thus, I am thinking that how could I teach this huge and important topic in the time frame given while not sacrificing student’s learning experience. A very difficult task but I’m willing to take the challenge.

Most of my classes are weak classes. During my observation class with my mentor, she was doing correction on the test the students had. Only for class 9A, she explained to the students on why the answers were wrong and a short discussion before giving them the correct answer. However, for other classes she just wrote down the answer on the board and let them copy without any explanation or discussion. When I raised the issue, my mentor pointed out that weak students tend to forget what they have learnt in the class, so there is no point to even discuss their mistakes in test and assignments. I was also showed the test score of the weak students and found out that a lot of them failed biology. So, I decided to find out possible reason why the students failed this subject and request my mentor to allow me to mark their assignments. The assignments consist of structured questions. From the students’ answer, I could see that language is one of the problem. For some questions, students copied the definitions off the notes and for others that require their own answer, the words used are not suitable and difficult to understand since the structure of the sentence is similar to Malay sentence structure although I can see students’ attempt to include the appropriate key words. Confirming with my mentor, we agreed to code-change. However, for words or sentences that we say in Malay, we would need to translate it to correct English.