B 5a: Reflections: My mentor’s observations……

Reflections: My mentor’s observations………….

A good mentor is capable of making a significant and positive impact on one’s learning journey by facilitating and guiding the learning process. In the first module of the PGCHE, I was lucky to have two such mentors. Tarun Panwar is my lead mentor and Tripti is his understudy. Both of them have been immensely helpful in helping me find my feet as a student once again. They have answers to all my doubts and queries and are encouraging in all my experimentations with my ‘new’ learning.

Tripti observed my teaching as a part of the mentor observation cycle and her observations and comments on my teaching are insightful and have been helpful in improving my teaching strategies further.

I do agree with her that if the handouts given to the students had been done during the class rather than at the end of the session it may have helped as an interactive tool and the class could have made further notes on the document. Giving the handout at the end of the class probably meant that half of the class may not even read it later, as students do have a tendency to not look at notes and handouts unless they are directly related to the evaluation or assessment. Therefore now I would have to keep in mind when I am evaluating the cohort at the end of the term, in my formative feedback to include references to the hand-outs that are given during and after the class engagement to ensure better application of the knowledge content shared.

Like my peers, my mentor too commented on the lack of a break in the session. After my first peer observation cycle I did introduce short breaks in my session plans. However, I noticed, that when there is a break in a highly interactive session (as in the case of class being observed) there is a tendency in the learners to lose the momentum of learning and application. Many a times I have had to waste time trying to get them back to the level of involvement in the lesson as was before the break. Because the PG programmes at Pearl are very intensive, application oriented, problem based learning and the contact learning sessions are limited , ‘break-less’ classes in the module that I teach are the norm. In my post observation I did mention this to my mentor, but she still feels that a break may lead to better assimilation of learning.

I am continuing to experiment with that……