21 of My Teaching Experiments

Picture Credit: Primary Practice

 

I hated teaching as a career. I did my Bachelors of Education because I thought it was some kind of a professional degree which will help me in some way in my life.

I entered teaching when my mother pushed me into it.

From the day I entered, I have been experimenting and trying out new things in teaching. I thought that I experimented because I am an innovator. Now I realize I experimented because I wanted to keep the challenge alive in my professional life. It was because I had not entered the profession due to a choice. It was definitely not my passion. It was a compromise.

When I joined school, salary offered was good and I had very little work to do after I reached home. So it was a win-win situation.

That was the reason to say good bye to nine-to-five!

But my drive and passion were missing. So to make my work interesting I innovated and experimented.  I agree, I failed also but it did not stop me from trying out something or the other.

I used to adopt different teaching methodologies for different types of learners in the classroom. My mind used to question me constantly if anyone did not understand anything in my class.

Once I put up some difficult questions to the students of my class.  Some of them answered the questions correctly. I was surprised. I questioned the children who had taught them those concepts and they promptly took the name of the teacher who used to teach them the previous year. They said that she had taught them last year.

My blood boiled out of curiosity. I went to interview that teacher and asked her how she taught her students.  Then I observed her class for two to three days until she was fed up of me. I checked her notes. I went through her notebooks. In short I did everything to understand how she had become a successful teacher.

These crazy habits of mine have brought me up the ladder in all these years. I am proud of my habits.

They have taught me more than anyone ever did. So after spending many years in education I finally decided to note down all the experiments which I have done in the past few years in teaching and came up with the desired results!

Lesson plans used to torture me mentally. Why?

Because when I planned I had different ideas and when I was in the class, I again had different ideas. And I wanted to implement everything but of course my wisdom was wiser and I chose only one to act upon.

So here are a few of my wonderful ideas which I implemented in the classroom over the years-

v Taking the children under the tree to teach them.

v Recording advertisements from the television and asking the children to identify the brands.

v Finding the dictionary meaning of the brand of cars and identifying their mechanics.

v Writing poems on every child of my class.

v Writing a letter to the students and asking them to come at a particular place for a class.

v Creating a class magazine.

v Circle Time-Different topics of discussion.

v Parachute Games

v Role plays to teach them to express

v Taking colourful charts to class and make them write/draw/paint on them

v Writing certain qualities on chits and hiding them and asking the children to find them.

v Asking the students to write about their mistakes and then making them identify the emotions.

v Discussing the longest word in the class.

v Arranging talks of people.

v Making them learn and recite long narrative poems.

v Developing word walls to enhance their vocabulary.

v Making them write and rewrite certain sentence structures to help them write correct English.

v Interacting with students of other countries over Skype.

v Asking the children to write stories and then compiling it into a small book.

v Narrating half a story and asking them to complete it on their own.

v Recording a video of the students narrating a poem and then playing it in their classroom to help them develop confidence.

These are a few innovations/experiments which I did in the classroom to make my teaching interesting and to help the students learn. There are many more things which can be done on a daily basis.

But compiling this list gave me more pleasure than implementing it in the classroom. This small tricks were fun on the classroom and it kept me on the toes wanting to do more and more every time.

These are some of my creative instincts which I spilled out for you.