ILS

WVSU

First Impression

The Integrated Laboratory School, or ILS, is the laboratory school located within the West Visayas State University campus. It serves as the training ground for WVSU's education students, the place where practice teachers carry out their in-campus internship before going out into the field. In many ways it functions like a school within a school, where learning happens on both sides of the classroom.

My first impression walking in was that it felt warm and welcoming right away. There was a friendliness to the environment that made it easy to settle into. But what stood out most throughout my time there was the students. They were engaged and genuinely curious, especially toward me as a foreign teacher. You could see it in the way they looked up when I spoke, the questions they asked, the small interactions in between lessons. Teaching students who are curious about you as much as they are about the subject is a different kind of experience. It adds a layer to the classroom dynamic that you don't always get, and it made every session feel a little more alive.

Observation

Observing the WVSU practice teachers in action was one of the most valuable parts of the entire exchange for me. What stood out was not just the techniques they used, though those were genuinely creative. Some came in with games, some with props to make abstract concepts more concrete, and there was even one who incorporated singing into the lesson, which I absolutely did not see coming. But more than any single method, what impressed me most was the overall energy they brought into the room. The way they carried themselves, the enthusiasm, the way they made the class feel alive from the moment they started. That kind of energy is hard to teach in a methodology course. It either shows up or it doesn't, and these students had it.

Watching them made me feel several things at once. It made me want to bring something similar into my own teaching right away. It also made me reflect honestly on my own style and where the gaps are. And somewhere in between those two feelings was something a little humbling, in a good way. Seeing people your own age teach with that much confidence and creativity is a reminder that there is always something to learn, always another level to reach for.

That said, there was one thing I noticed that I think is worth mentioning. In-class formative assessment was sometimes missing from their sessions. No quick checks during the lesson to see who is following and who is quietly getting left behind. It might seem like a small thing but it is actually one of the most important tools for making a classroom inclusive. Formative assessment is how a teacher catches struggling students before the gap becomes too wide to close. A lesson can be engaging and creative and still leave some students behind if there is no mechanism to check understanding along the way. It was a reminder that good teaching is not just about energy and delivery. It is also about making sure everyone in the room is actually with you.

Group Teaching

Before my individual teaching sessions, I first went through a group teaching experience alongside practice teachers from the mathematics major at WVSU. Shoutout to Ma'am Glecy, my partner for that session, and to Ma'am Lou who was incredibly helpful throughout the whole preparation process.

The way it worked was that we divided the lesson into two parts. Ma'am Glecy handled the first half and I took the second. Her team actually sent me the teaching material two days before the session, which gave me enough time to prepare my part reasonably well. So while I didn't bring my own lesson plan or materials, I wasn't going in completely blind either.

But I was nervous. Very nervous. The first ten minutes I could hear it in my own voice, it was shaking and I couldn't fully control it. Then the PPT projector started having trouble, and suddenly the classroom went quiet while we waited for it to be sorted out. That silence was the worst part. Standing in front of a class with nothing to fill the gap and not knowing what to say is one of those moments that feels much longer than it actually is. Eventually things got back on track and the session found its rhythm, but those first few minutes were a real test of holding it together. Looking back it was probably the best possible way to get the nerves out before the individual teaching began.

Lesson Plan Preparation

One of the first things that struck me when I got the lesson plan template was how simple and clean it was compared to what we use in Indonesia. Back home, lesson plan documentation tends to be very detailed, sometimes to the point where the administrative work takes over. There is also something called P5, Proyek Pengembangan Profil Pelajar Pancasila, which is a character development framework that needs to be integrated into lesson planning. It is not a bad idea in principle, but in practice it adds another layer of complexity that can pull your focus away from the actual teaching design. By the time you finish writing everything, you have spent more energy on the paperwork than on thinking about how to teach. The WVSU template cut through all of that. It was focused and practical, which meant I could spend most of my energy actually designing the lesson and practicing it.

My topic was linear inequalities for Grade 7, and working through the template properly taught me something I didn't expect. I noticed there is a section in the lesson structure that I think many Indonesian teachers, myself included before this, tend to underestimate. The bridge between the Motivation part and the Analysis part. Motivation is where you ground the concept in something familiar, not the mathematics itself yet, but the general idea behind it, something the students can already relate to from their daily life. Analysis is where the mathematical explanation begins. The challenge is making sure those two parts are genuinely connected and not just sitting next to each other on the page.

I designed my Motivation activity from scratch, which was the hardest part of the whole preparation. What I observed from watching WVSU students teach was that they executed this bridge flawlessly, moving from the familiar into the formal in a way that felt natural. That was the standard I was trying to reach, and it pushed me to think more carefully about lesson design than I had in a long time.

Individual Teaching

When it finally came to teaching on my own, something interesting happened. I expected it to feel harder than the group teaching since there was no one to fall back on this time, but it actually felt better. More in control, more like myself. The preparation was mine, the decisions were mine, and that made the whole thing feel cleaner somehow.

That said, the first five minutes were still rough. The nervousness was there again, sitting right in my chest, affecting my voice and my focus. But then the activity part of the lesson began and everything shifted. We did a clapping activity that involved smacking the table, and I just went for it. I hit that table harder than probably necessary and something about that one moment broke the tension completely. The nervousness just left. Like it got knocked out of me along with the sound.

After that the lesson found its rhythm and flowed better than I honestly expected given the rough start. The students were following along, the transitions between parts worked, and I could feel myself actually teaching rather than just surviving the clock. It was not perfect, but it was real, and finishing that session felt like something I had genuinely earned.

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