My Process of Teaching A-Level

In my process of teaching A-Level, I don't use any slides and prefer to write the notes on the whiteboard or dictate the ideas of understanding certain topics and answering past year questions to the question.  There are pros and cons to such an approach.  The pro is that I will not be restricted to the information presented on the slides.  The second benefit is that I do not have to spend time to construct the slides and use this time to focus on writing sample answers for analysis and discussion which I feel will have more impact.

One reason for my my aversion of using slides is that students may not often write their notes down.  Personally, I believe when writing the notes on the whiteboard it will force the students jot down the note and thus help to reinforcement their learning.  Yet in this day and age of modern technology, some students would most likely take a snapshot of what is written on the whiteboard than to spend time taking down the information onto their notebook.  I do allow this because I understand that at certain occasions and for certain people, it takes time for time write the notes into their notebook.  Nevertheless, I see the act of actually copying the notes and taking snapshot of the notes elicit some form of active participation.  However, the effectiveness of such action needs to be assessed.  Will probably need to do some reading on education psychological article of how useful is such approach?  I do believe some will argue that how effective will note taking and taking snapshot of the things the lecturer has written on the white board will strongly depends on individual on what will they do afterwards.

The other problem that the use of slides may result is during the assessment they may merely just look at the slide information rather than reading the textbooks or relevant articles to prepare themselves. I think whether this is useful will depends on the nature of the assessment.  If it is highly open-ended and demands some creative thinking on the student parts, then reference to slides will limit their ability to answer the questions competently.

Though in some occasions, I do use slides to teach some other subjects.  I find this can be highly essential when students want (or demands) for a more structured learning.  However, I would always remind myself and attempt to make the teaching interesting by engaging in a multimedia approach, meaning I would also show videos or provide students with articles such as from The Economist to refer and discuss rather than merely referring to the slides.