ILEP-SEMINAR: What I like about my Internship

The weekly internship at Seneca High School always brings new learning and fresh insights. Science teachers really exert effort in order to help students who find difficulty, particularly those who are lagging behind and those who are at risk of failing. I salute those science teachers who come to school an hour before the first class or stay behind for another hour just to be available for students who might come for tutorials. My heart goes out to the teachers because most of the time students do not appreciate the help extended to them but instead think that extra work are just to make things more complicated. Perhaps, high school students are all the same across cultures. I observed a class where the discussion was guided by a KWL chart. By facilitating students to fill out the three columns, lesson development and conceptual understanding seemed more organized. In another class, the teacher asked the students to come up with their own experiment procedures so that they would be able to test a principle. In another activity, instead of just asking the students to gather data, he asked them to identify the possible sources of errors if they were not able to get the data trends that they were expecting. These kinds of activities enhance the critical thinking and reasoning of students which is very important in science. But what I appreciate most is the Teacher Cadet elective class. Although not all the students who are in this class would take education in college, it is still a very relevant and direct effort to recruit students into the teaching profession. I hope this kind of elective would also become feasible in the Philippines.