Assalamualaikum and a very good day...
How are you guys doing? I hope that everyone is in good health and also in good mood as well because I am in the mood of writing my personal thoughts on this whole PGCE thing.
So, what is PGCE?
PGCE stands for Postgraduate Certificate of Education. Basically, it is a program that mainly focuses on developing and expanding teaching skills but not the subject that you want to teach. In order to enroll in this program, you have to at least have a degree in any subject. I think PGCE is the same thing as KPLI (Kursus Perguruan Lepasan Ijazah) in Malaysia.
As for me, I'm a graduate Chemist from University of Birmingham. I would dare to say that I'm expert in Chemistry subject up until the degree level. But my main focus is not on Chemistry alone, I want people to experience what I already experienced (is this the right sentence?? haha). That is when I decided to be a teacher.
I would like to express my gratitude to the sponsor of the PPC Matriculation program, Ministry of Education (Malaysia) for giving me once-a-lifetime opportunities to be here (UK).
Back to the main point.
Let me introduce you : PGCE Nottingham Malaysian Cohort =) (this picture taken together with my tutor, Dr Len Newton)
Our group only consist of 13 students, which comes from different expertise such as Physic, Biology and Maths. However in this program, although we do learn different subject during our undergraduate, here, we are being taught on how to teach effectively and so and so.
We also had series of different presentations. At the beginning, I mentioned that I was nervous to stand in front of the crowd because when people stared at me, my confidence level will decreased. But now, here I am. My confidence level is increasing from time to time. What I am trying to say here is that you cannot develop skills when you just first doing it. You have to learn it step-by-step. And of course throughout the journey, you made mistakes but that is OK. What you have to do is planning for the next step and move forward and try to not made the same mistakes again.
Some of my friends said; "Bestnya PGCE, mesti banyak masa!", "Apa yang korang belajar?", "Tak aci, PGCE senang. Confirm lulus punya!". For them, PGCE might looks easy because what you have to do is read the journals or past reports and then write the essays. But when the tutors start to give me some of useful journals that they thought might be helpful for me to think and reflect, I was frozen for a second. The language of the journals are quite high and complex. I had to read several times in order to fully understand what the authors are trying to say. But the good thing when reading academic journals is that it tell you what already done. Thus it will give you ideas on what to do next. In other words, it stimulate your brain to think about applying new things and share the outcome with the world.
The challenge for me is that for social science, they do not have the kind of 'wrong' or 'right' answers, which is opposite to the science stream because scientists always want the 'right' answers. I find it really difficult to adapt with this kind of environment. But that does not matter to me anymore. My concern now is how am I going to achieve my goal to be a good teacher.
So, thats all from me this time. Sorry for the grammar mistakes and unstructured sentence. what matters is the content..=)
Peace be upon you.
