I’m tasked to do a 5-min sharing at Staff Contact Time next Monday to entice my colleagues to sign up for a workshop next Wednesday. So I thought I would write my speech since the words are kinda ruminating in my head.

—- Thank you for coming to my TED talk. [Pulls out my TEDTalk book] If you don’t give me a standing ovation at the end, you won’t be allowed to enjoy your Hari Raya lunch. Anyway, I will be running a Student Learning Space (SLS) workshop, along with JY and R. So I will like to tell you 2 things I have learnt about my form class, 2T6, as a result of designing the workshop for you all.

Why the focus on my form class? Because we design SLS lessons for our students, so it’s important that we keep in mind who they are. I have the perfect story to illustrate them. Last year, a group of four personnel from MOE PSB came to observe my lesson. I noticed that my students were getting restless though. So I asked them, “Do you guys want to dance to Baby Shark?” Being thick-skinned myself, I wouldn’t have danced in front of complete strangers, so I was expecting self-conscious teenagers to decline my offer. But boy, was I wrong! 4-5 boys really came to my table and danced to Baby Shark, oblivious to my visitors. I was surprised!

In a nutshell, my class can be divided into two kinds of people: outgoing vs soft-spoken. So, usually the outgoing people get a lot of airtime. SLS allows the soft-spoken students to respond in ways they wouldn’t have, so I like how it facilitates individual voice. For example, Rayn came up to me with his laptop twice to ask if he was on the right track. Yat told me an anecdote about saving $500 for a Nintendo Switch. I told Saiful that I was replying to his comment, and moments later, he informed me that he had already replied to me. Normally, these students might be sleeping in my class. But here they were, engaged with the subject material.

The thinking routine “I used to think that…Now I think…” that was used as the exit ticket also provided useful feedback about whether I had achieved my lesson objective. During the first SLS lesson, I noticed that some quiet students actually exhibit pretty astute thinking. Hisham wrote about the need to focus - that’s a deeper introspection than the comment his classmates wrote.

One reason why I was keen to try out SLS was the provision of the AI chatbot called SALiS. I think that as a language teacher, I need to find opportunities for my students to work with AI tools. However, my students’ first encounter with SALiS wasn’t very fruitful. Jim, the most serious-minded student in class actually confessed to typing rubbish for the chatbot. He said that he got annoyed, so he just typed random stuff.

So, I realised that 2T6 peeps are not good at asking questions yet. For my second lesson, I chose a different function and got SALiS to provide questions for my students so that they could just click on the question they liked best and carry on a chat. Hopefully, they found the interaction more meaningful the second time.

When you attend the workshop, I will show you how I used:

More importantly, I will share with you unreservedly my intentionality, why I chose to design my lesson in a particular way, and also, whether I managed to achieve the desired outcomes.

Thank you. Now do I get the standing ovation?