Running head: PORTFOLIO FINAL REFLECTION 1

Portfolio Final Reflection

Stephani Anugrahman

Universitas Pelita Harapan

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This semester was the most wearing semester, at the same time, I learned the most

from this semester. From reflecting from my own experience in class until making a 10-days-

unit plan, I found my strengths and weaknesses in many areas. Those areas influenced my

growth throughout the semester especially in Teaching Alignment Class and Practicum Class.

In this writing, I would like to explain the way I growth in this semester and the area that I

still need to work on. Two areas of growth I have are modelling the activity to the students

and be specific in making a unit. Meanwhile my area of weakness is putting in differentiation

in my lesson.

Giving an activity for every new lessons that we give to our students have been a

normal practices for a teacher, including me. In my practicum week, I tried to put as many

activities as I can in my class in order to check my students level of understanding. However,

there were always problems after I explained the activitys instruction. In the first week of my

practicum, I did not know that my students did not get my instruction every time I asked them

to do some activities. When I saw some of the students did their activity like what I mean, I

assumed that the whole class would also do the same matter. It turned out that most of my

students were actually did not get it. There were two classes where it became a mess, because

I did not show my students how they were supposed to do the activity.

One of them iwas my Mathematics class when we were talking about decimal number

in everyday life. I related the decimal number with how we used money especially dollars in

our everyday life. After I explained them about what is the difference between decimal

number and whole number and also the relation between decimal number and money, I

started to explained the activity to them. They would pretend to shop using fake dollar notes

and coins in a group of 3. I gave them a supermarket catalogue and they should choose things

that they can buy using the money. After they chose what they wanted to buy, they should
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write the price on a shopping list paper that I had given to them. Unfortunately, I did not

model how to do the activity, I just let them did it directly and it was not turn well. Many of

them still did not know how to relate the notes and coins with the price of the items;

therefore, the items they had chosen are mostly over their budget. Another problem that came

was not the entire group members got a chance to deal with the money.

My experience above made me learned a very precious lesson; always model the

activity that you want your students to do. Therefore, for the rest of my practicum days, I

always made sure that I modelled each of the activity. I successfully did it. My cooperating

teacher mentioned in my last two evaluation sheets that I finally modelled my activity before

I let my students do the activity. In my lesson about making life timeline, she wrote, You

used document camera and gave examples to the students. I could see that my students did

my activity better than before after I modelled them how to do it.

My next area of growth is being specific in making the unit plan. One of teaching

alignments assignments is making a 10-days unit plan. This is my first time making a unit

plan by myself and I decided to make a unit plan about Geometry for grade 3 since Math is

the subject I am confident the most and I have ever taught grade 3. At the beginning, I chose

to put fraction, decimal and percentage in my unit. My idea was to teach conversion from

fraction to decimal to percentage and vice versa. I started to plan everything on my unit plan

and submitted for the first unit plan check. I still felt everything was alright. At the next step

on writing my unit plan, I decided to reduce my lesson from fraction, decimal, and percentage

to only fraction and decimal. The reason why I reduced my lesson was because I found out

that percentage was too difficult for grade 3 and there will be no enough time to explain it to

grade 3. I learned that 10 days were not a long time. Therefore I made everything more

specific. I changed my objectives and my summative assessment. Then I started my lesson

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schedule and planned everything. I submitted my second revision for the second unit plan

check. After I checked over my unit, referred back to the math standards I chose, and looked

for a reference from the internet, I decided to cut my unit plan again; from a unit about

fraction and decimal to a unit only about fraction. I realized I was not specific since the

beginning. My unit is too broad and it seems like it lost its focus. Even though fraction,

decimal, and percentage are all related but it does not mean we need to teach everything

altogether. From all of this process, I have grown in making a unit plan and realized how

important it is to think about every detail we have instead of being too broad.

Even though I learned many things from this semester and have some areas of growth,

there is still an area of weakness that I need to work on; putting differentiation in my lesson. I

am a visual learner. I will not work well without many visual aids. Inadvertently, it affected

my way of teaching and making lesson plan. I tend to put many pictures, hand-outs, and

formula sheets in every of my lesson until I forgot about other kinds of learners. I rarely put

many activities for kinaesthetic and auditory learners. This weakness can be seen from almost

all of my lesson plans. Usually, my lesson plan contains 80% visual learners supports

because that is how I learn the best. There must be slides, drawing session, games and step-

by-step mini posters in almost each of my lesson. My plan for future lesson plan making, I

will try to research more to equip my lesson with more activities for kinaesthetic and auditory

learners or at least I will have one support for each kind of leaners in every of my lesson.

In conclusion, semester 5 was challenging and amusing. I learned how to fight my

weaknesses in order for me to become an effective teacher and also an example for my

students as an image bearer of God. I also learned that sometimes being too broad is not good

because it will make us lose our focus in teaching a specific lesson to specific grade.