Introducing Teaching Journal to Teachers-to-be: What This Professional Aspect Reveals

The typical issue concerning teaching demo – a common requirement for teachers-to-be – is Lesson Plan making and Lesson Plan implementation. Having made a Lesson Plan, the teachers-to-be are required to implement it in front of their peer group. After the teaching demo, they are generally provided with comments from the lecturer. As implied above, after a Lesson Plan is prepared, the implementation follows. Does it end when the implementation is over? Is it time already for the respective teachers to feel satisfied as the plan is executed? No. There is in fact another essential thing for the teachers to go on. They are still faced with the aspect of professionalism. Professionalism is principally related to one‟s preparation to do a competent job through learning. This learning may take various forms. Some of them are taking presentation or in-service courses, having discussions with colleagues or performing a refection. Professionalism, briefly, needs introducing to teachers-to-be as early as possible. One way to introduce it, as implied in the previous paragraph, is by requiring them to write their teaching journal to experience a process of reflection. The journal is expected to give them chance to reflect critically on their teaching demo for self-development. This particular aspect of professionalism becomes the primary discussion in this paper. This paper is more specifically intended to reveal the idea of teachers (the students who become the teachers in the teaching demo – henceforth teachers) related to teaching demo. It is restricted to 4 points: the usefulness of their Lesson Plan, the success of their teaching demo, the unexpected things happening and the improvement for implementing the same LESSON PLAN another time. The data were taken from one TEFL class in the 2006/2007 academic year at the English Department of Teacher Training Faculty of Widya Mandala Catholic University. Besides learning the theories such as „Nature of Language, and „Factors Influencing Teaching and Learning‟, the students were given chance to implement the theory. They were given opportunity to individually teach their fellow students who acted as high school students. Each teacher had a 30-minute teaching demo. The teaching journal was written right after the teaching demo. The teaching journal indicated that none (0%) thought Lesson Plan was useless. About 66% teachers believed that they were successful in their teaching demo while the rest (34%) claimed they were not. Reflecting on their teaching demo, only 14% teachers wrote they did not depart from their Lesson Plan; the rest realized they departed from the Lesson Plan as unexpected things happened. Among those realizing the deviation, some argued the deviation made things better. Some were sad regretting its occurrence. Challenged to think of how they were going to improve their teaching demo, most teachers stated that they would make it more interesting by adding instructional games. It is worth indicating that this professional aspect being introduced to them, the teachers-to-be were aware of their teaching skill. The journal also revealed their personal teaching philosophy. Key words: teaching, journal, reflection