There is no one magic potion in improving one’s teaching practice. It requires conscious awareness and act of improving (it contains series of stages). I have a discussion with one of my juniors. One of the things that she has experimented with in her Philosophy of Education class is using comics as a tools to “spark” discussion.
She presented her findings in a conference about that. She also presented her teaching experience using oral assessment to replace final examination. It is a rare practice to use oral examination for final examination, but she did that. Practically, her students were not as many as I had. So, it was possible for her to conduct oral examination.
Retrospectively, it might take me the same amount of time to assess my students using oral examination as compared to normal written examination if I have a small class (less than 15 students per class). However, if I use oral examination with more than 40 students (like I had last semester for my Psychology of Personality class), it might take me more than a week to complete the oral examination. Let’s say I allocate 30 minutes per person. If I have 40 students, it means that I have to allocate 1200 minutes = 20 hours. I can only do let’s say 2 hours of presentation per day. Meaning, I have to spend around 10 days to complete the oral examination for 40 students. It is too time consuming.
Since majority of my students are teachers, so, the only free time that they have is on weekends. Weekdays? There are so many things going on with the preparation of home-based schooling (PDPR). I must consider this aspect as well.
In short, in improving one’s teaching practice, one should take into consideration about students’ needs, situation and condition. For my junior, upon taking all of that aspects into consideration and discussion with her students, she did oral examination to assess her students’ knowledge (PLO1). Good job! I just wish that she gets the appropriate recognition and appreciation. Well, sometimes people like “fake” stuff over “original” gems (tongue in cheek remark!) It is their choice. It does not downgrade the value of the original gems. Indeed.