REFLECTION : MEETING WITH MR. ALI JUFRY (PEARSON)

I would like to say that meeting face to face with Mr. Ali Jufri from Pearson is like one and a half hours worth one and a half years online. Why did I say that? Because it happened with releasing all the burden in our mind and heart about Pearson's material and the methods of teaching.

As new things both teaching materials and methods from Pearson that are applied in Puhua School now need lots of reassurance, encouragement, motivation, guides, and also role models for me and maybe for other teachers. We need more guidance in applying all the new things.

Mr. Ali's presence at school was kind of a great moment that we are waiting for. So that we provide lots of questions that bear in our mind due to some problems we are facing in the class before his coming.

And that would be something when the first thing he gave in the meeting was asking a kind of question like what in your mind is about Active Learn? So, we released all of our burden buried inside of our mind and heart.

Regarding his question, I told him that the Active Learn materials are so great since they provide very deep reading and writing skills. I’ve never had experience before in using any kinds of materials. However, those materials are also our problems too since there are no obvious guides to make sure of our answers of all activities in the book. We, as teachers, try to grab our own ideas and perspectives dealing with the answers of those activities in every section. And in the meeting Mr. Ali gave us a kind of illumination that teachers should not be worried about the book. As he tried to explain all about our problem he just showed us how to overcome our problems. Mr. Ali told us that the book doesn’t provide the key answer in order for teachers to find their own creativity in answering the questions of each activity. There are many possibilities to develop student’s answers to every question.

Besides, he also played a role as a teacher and we played as students. In this role playing, he gave us ways to teach using Inspire English in an easy but creative way by asking the students to find out the synonyms of adjectives, adverbs and other kinds of words. This way can be done by a teacher in teaching to save time with an abundance of materials.

He added in his encouragement that teachers should not teach all the activities in each section but we can make it short or simple but creative without getting out from the topic of the discussion in the activities. We can also use power point presentations to sum those materials to make students more active in the class.

To end the meeting, Mr. Ali asked the teachers to plan a meeting for teaching the next meeting with students. That was a kind of challenge for us to practice how to plan a simple and creative teaching using the book. It was all done great since Mr. Ali also gave us more encouragement to the teachers in handling the next meeting with the materials from Active Learn. He suggested some tips too.

I really hope it will happen again in the future since it could drive us to make the best ways in teaching the students using Pearson’s material. #ReflectionofMeetingwithMr.Ali

x