REFLECTIVE ENTRY 6

Critical Incident: The teacher’s voice

In this reflective entry, I will be focusing on my own While Development micro-teaching video. My
lesson was a non-textbook based lesson incorporating the people and culture theme focusing on
listening skills. The topic of the lesson was ‘The Heart of Kuala Lumpur’ which focuses on the main
highlight of Kuala Lumpur’s tourist site which is the Dataran Merdeka. This stage started with me
passing the students a map based worksheet where students had to fill in the empty boxes on the
map with the names of the building stated in the listening audio based on the understanding of
prepositions of place learned. Students will then exchange their worksheets after the first listening and
check each other’s answers based on the second listening. After the peer-checking, discussion with
the teacher is done as a class.

Based on my observation, I will be self-reflecting a main critical incident which will be my

voice throughout the lesson. Voice is the most important aspect when it comes to communicating and
delivering a lesson. Throughout my lesson, I realized that my voice projection was clear but it was too
high of pitch. This is what led me to reflect on this critical incident. The issue here would be that my
voice pitch was very high throughout the lesson and it did not vary. When watching my video, I myself
felt very annoyed as the voice was piercing through my ears for the entire lesson. It was also difficult
to grasp what was important or should be paid more attention to in the lesson as there was no variety
in the pitch or tone.

From this incident, I learned that I should start trying to vary my tone and pitch when teaching
in order to avoid students from not being able to grasp information from the lesson. For instance, I
could increase my tone or pitch when something needs more attention. The pitch and tone of a
teacher’s voice have a huge influence on the teaching and also relationship with the students. The
lesson was laid out perfectly and the execution had no major issues but due to my high pitched voice,
students may not have been able to connect to the lesson. It is important to know how to play with my
voice when teaching. I should learn how to slow down and have different volume levels to emphasize
things. As long as I am able to make my voice sound more expressive, students will find it easier to
comprehend the lesson.

In conclusion, a teacher’s voice plays a very important role in the teaching and learning
process. According to Cherepanova (2002), voice of the teacher can improve the quality of education
and the achievement of educational goals.