The Challenges In Being A New Teacher, Fatimah's Unfamiliarity With Her Students?

Question 2
Case Study 1
Being a new teacher, Fatimah’s unfamiliarity with her students and their parents presents various problems. She might not be aware of the students’ preferences and abilities vis-à-vis learning modes and early childhood education domains respectively, thus possibly leading her to carry out less effective or appropriate teaching methods. As an educator, she might be unaware of parents’ priorities as well – they might, for example, want Fatimah to focus on language and literacy skills more. This is related to the cultural and socio-economic background of the students and their families, as well as to the kindergarten’s educational priorities.
By creating a conducive classroom environment, Fatimah aims to promote independent
This is known as mess finding. The challenge in Shi Hui’s case would be to effectively help her child care centre in time for the SPARK accreditation process, and is relatively straightforward to identify.
The next step is data finding. It encompasses the gathering of information from multiple sources in order to obtain a holistic view of the entire situation. For Shi Hui, it would mean talking to the principal to better understand the requirements and timeline of the entire SPARK accreditation process, communicating with the less experienced K1 and K2 teachers to identify the areas in which they feel they need her help with (if at all), observing her graduating K2 students to see if it would be appropriate to spend less time with them, as well as holding discussions with their parents to obtain their opinions on the academic progress of their children.
Problem finding is the final stage in the problem understanding component. Here, problem statements are formulated. For Shi Hui, it could be: “How can I effectively support the less experienced teachers to bring up centre quality without adversely affecting the primary school preparation of my K2
In solution finding, the ideas from the previous process of idea finding will be evaluated based on a set of criteria. In this case, some of them would probably be: ease of implementation, practicality, time frame of proposal and effectiveness. This facilitates prudent decision making to adopt the best idea as a solution for the problem at hand. Finally, acceptance finding is carried out. In this step, a detailed action plan will be developed to reify the proposed solution. Shi Hui has to take into account the parties to be involved, the specific actions to be taken by everyone (including herself), the rationale for each action, as well as all the potential sources of aid and complications she might encounter. Just as other teachers might be able to help coach their less experienced counterparts, peer-teaching of complementary strength and weakness areas could be carried out. Her students’ parents might also oppose the division of her attention from the primary school preparation