As spring turns into summer, online teaching and learning has already lasted for over two months. Although teachers faced many difficulties while teaching online, they still tried their best to overcome various challenges and gave wonderful lessons which were student-oriented, innovative, and interactive.
To improve the quality of online teaching and motivate teachers to explore, practice and exchange online teaching techniques, an online open class observation activity was launched in the Middle School, with the theme of “student-oriented, innovative and interactive”. A total of twenty-three teachers participated in the activity, each of whom brought us wonderful open classes by carefully designing lessons, catering for students in their own classes and guided by the characteristics of quality online teaching.
Stella’s Chinese class
Ms. Stella’s Chinese class was about a Chinese poem — Deng You Zhou Tai. In class, students actively participated in different tasks such as creating a cartoon based on the poem, deepening their understanding of the poem and the poet’s feelings. The following picture is an example of one student’s cartoon work from the activity:
Ms. Liu’s Writing class
In Ms. Liu’s writing class, she showed her travel journals to students and integrated her own life perceptions into the teaching. After reading Ms. Liu’s travel journals, one student named Huang Shiyu made a beautiful video and sent it to Ms. Liu, a special effort that made the teacher incredibly happy.
Mr. Albert’s Mathematics class
In Mr. Albert’s mathematics class, he conducted a size comparison of line segments to a “ratio rise” in our daily life, so that the students could learn to use their existing knowledge and experience in order to explore new knowledge through analogies. In addition, he also used the example of visual illusion to emphasize the preciseness of mathematics.
Ms. Yuki’s Mathematics class
In Ms. Yuki’s mathematics class, she guided students to independently explore the quantity and position relationship between the trapezoidal median line and the two bottom lines through several different steps, such as observing, measuring, hypothesizing, reasoning, and demonstrating. During this process, students gained an understanding of the basic methods used for analyzing problems.
Mr. Gary’s English class
In Mr. Gary’s English class, students were asked to preview the writing template in the lead-in part and then to create personalized learning objectives. By reviewing the previous lesson, practicing sentence patterns and reading comprehension, students gradually understood the logic of the writing and then used it in the final part.
Mr. Bradley’s English class
In Mr. Bradley’s English class, he skillfully created a variety of group activities in class, which increased interactions between students and thus motivated more students to participate in the class.
Ms. Lana’s English class
In Ms. Lana’s English class, she created many open questions for students to imagine vividly, which cultivated their critical thinking abilities in an efficient way.
Ms. Julie’s Physics class
In Ms. Julie’s Physics class, she explained the structure and working cycle of the combustion engine through videos. She related the simple phenomenon of how water vapour pushes a cork to the combustion engine, showing a similar structure and the same energy conversion process between the two, thus making it easier for students to understand the essential principle of a combustion engine.
Mr. Nicolaas’s DT class
Mr. Nicolaas gave us a highly creative Design & Technology class. In his class, the teacher guided students to make dynamic toys with available materials, motivating students to think and practice in class.
Ms. Meera’s PE class
In Ms. Meera’s physical education class, considering the limitations of online teaching, she effectively combined theoretical knowledge with physical exercise, including the following parts: basic theory learning, physical exercise, interactive games and homework. First, through theoretical learning, students learned the importance of physical exercise, and then selected video clips were played to deepen students’ understanding of the knowledge. Finally, students worked to put the knowledge they learned into practice, following up with some exercising.
Ms. Ilse, together with her co-teacher Ms. Lori
Ms. Ilse, together with her co-teacher Ms. Lori, brought students an engaging art lesson. They encouraged students to search for objects at home as materials for creating artworks. Items such as kitchen utensils, cereal, spices, and clothes were used to stimulate students’ creativity through the use of artistic elements found in their daily lives. To make it easier for more teachers to observe the class, they thoughtfully set up open classes twice.
As soon as all the open classes were completed, each subject group had a meeting to talk about them. During the meetings, teachers discussed the lesson plans and gave each other feedback. Teachers also actively shared their own online teaching tips, which further improved everyone’s online teaching ability.
