I am Mohana Ram Murugiah. I am teaching at Methodist Secondary Girls School at Ipoh. I’ve been teaching for 20 years. I started teaching in 2003. My first posting was in Bintulu, Sarawak from 2003 until 2012 and then I came back to Ipoh in 2012. I was born and bred in Ipoh, Perak. For my first degree, I did it in Universiti Utara Malaysia and for my Masters, I did it at University Nottingham Malaysia. 

Many teachers in Malaysia who are doing project-based lessons in their classroom are left to fend off by the themselves. I believe there is no proper exposure for teachers in Malaysia. Teachers in Malaysia explored the concept of PBL themselves so they do not really know the real steps or the real tenets of project based learning or the implementation. Some teachers think that PBL is just coming out with presentation and have students present in the classroom. That is actually just one part of PBL but there is more to it. There are actually several processes and one of them is involving the community. So teachers rarely get these exposures and many teachers tend to explore PBL all on their own. The same goes for me. I didn’t get a platform to learn or training given by the MOE on how to go about doing PBL using our Malaysian textbooks. It is stated in our SOW but in terms of how to go about it, teachers usually explore it themselves. That is one of the challenges. Many teachers have a vague idea of what PBL is so they tend to carry out these projects on their own which is something that I appreciate but if these teachers are given more training or more exposure on how PBL can be actually carried out with the right processes, I think they can do a wonderful job. 

Another challenge is the lack of support from the school administration who are still driven by wanting to prioritize exam-based practices in the classroom, even though we are trying to move away from that. School administrators tend to discourage the use of PBL if it is implemented through an extended amount of time. Some schools do not even allow PBL. When I asked teachers why they are not doing PBL it’s mainly due to time constraints and they had to complete the syllabus in the classroom. 

Funding is also an issue as some projects require funding. We can get the funding from the head of panel but if we don’t have the support of the administration, this will be a bit challenging. All of these challenges apply to other subjects as well.

A complete PBL that I did with my students was in 2021 during the pandemic where I followed the entire process such as identifying problem, how to go about it and involving the community where I identified several social issues. So it has several topics for example animal abuse, sexual harassment, women empowerment. Since it was the pandemic, it was an online project-based learning. I gave the students a layout of the project of what they had to do first. First of all, I asked them to do an online survey about what the community think of these issues. Secondly, I asked them to start a blog and document their journey throughout their project. The reason I did this project was based on an issue that I identified. I wanted to improve my students language skills. Listening skills was very minimal but there were a lot of reading, writing and speaking. The online journal was the writing part, for speaking was the interviewing part. 

The group that did a topic on women empowerment was the success story. It involved 6 students. This group of students, at the end of the project, they organized an online conference involving 50 people and they actually invited some notable and successful women, about 6 or 7 of them from various countries from Indonesia, Thailand, and Brunei. They managed to get them from Instagram and Facebook. They managed to organise the conference involving from that school as well as students from other schools in our district. 

I didn’t identify these people for them. As a teacher I only identified the problem and I laid out what I expected them to do. So all the groups followed the steps that I instructed them to do. Which means starting from the blog, carry out interviews with the community, and do the surveys, coming up with solution regarding the concerns of the community. They had to document all of these and finally they had to upload  Youtube videos where they shared the entire journey of their project and the outcome and the solutions. 

That year, when all the 9 projects were completed by my students. It took 3 months to complete all these projects and sent to Melta project based learning competition. Out of these 9, one of them received Top 5. All of the 9 projects were selected to be showcased for the MELTA project based learning competition.

Currently I’m doing a project based learning with my students but the topics are going to be based on the topics in the textbook. Hopefully we can submit another project for MELTA showcase again.

First, you are the resource person for your subject matter. For example, if you are the master teacher for the English language, most of the time you will be the resource person for people to refer to. As your grade goes higher and higher as Guru Cemerlang, you not only become the resource person for your subject matter but also the resource person for a lot of things that are related to teaching and learning. For example, people refer to me for 21st-century teaching and learning, not only for English but also for other subject language teachers from my school.  Apart from that you are also the resource person for documents related to the school, for example, the use of SKPMG documents. You need to understand that. And as a Guru Cemerlang, you also need to understand the policies. 

As a Guru Cemerlang at my school, my concern is the teaching and learning of English. I always give suggestions to teachers on how they can give their lessons creatively and I also empower teachers at school besides empowering students. For example, we created our own mini-conference for our English language teachers. I also organized an innovation competition for the language department at my school as some of the teachers may have never participated in one. So it’s a platform to share and when we share we learn from one another. It’s not a one-way interaction. 

For the students, as Guru Cemerlang, admins expect our school to perform better than other schools. There is always an expectation in terms of performance such as improving the school results. I come up with modules and strategies to improve proficiency and come up with interventions for students’ improvement and also take part in English competitions because we need to give students opportunities not only academic ones.

For the school, I do teacher empowerment sharing with other teachers at school as well such as sharing about PBD. As a master teacher, we need to know all these. 

But bear in mind that as a master teacher, we also have room to improve ourselves.

For district level, I do district-level training anything related to CEFR because I am the CEFR-Master trainer. So, I am also the resource person for CEFR at the district level. For example, writing lesson plans. I am trying to make our district have a standardized way of writing lesson plans for teachers. I also come up with ideas for training teachers. I try to come up with a crash course for teachers and I propose this to the PPD officers and then they give green light to carry out the training. 

I also work with the English language district language panel from 2018 to 2019. I come up with programs for students such as English SPM workshops for students which I organize every year. PPD will organize it and I will carry it out. I try to recruit other teachers in the district level to help out with the workshop so that one day I do not have to do the training anymore. As the person in – charge of the English language paneI, I  also successfully carried out the District Level English Across Boundaries 2018 – a conference-styled English language programme where students put up booths sharing successful learning strategies guided by teachers. It was a creative initiative which was well received by schools and this programme has set a trend at the Kinta Utara District level, which till today it is still being done by others with modifications and their own names. I’m glad that I have created a trend by doing a different kind of programme for the Kinta Utara District level,  which is being followed by others who took over from me in 2019. I’m glad as a GC I have set a healthy trend of creating a different genre of paper. 

I am also the PT for the district-level and state-level debate competitions. I’m in charge of the entire competition at the district level – recruiting adjudicators and deciding the motions. I am also the chief technical officer for the  Kinta Utara district where apart from taking care of the debate, I also oversee other competitions.

Be passionate about what you’re doing. For example, in your classroom practices. Are you happy about teaching or entering the classroom? That’s the most important thing that an aspiring master teacher should have. You need to reflect on your own classroom practices. Becoming a GC means to constantly improve what you have been doing. So how do we improve ourselves is to attend a lot of professional development courses. After that, we think about what we can gain from these PD. When we want to become a master teacher we always need to look ahead regarding what we can do next. So that is when you start to do project-based learning in your classrooms and you come up with innovative practices and that innovative practices can be part of your action research to improve your students’ learning. So these are the duties that you need to do as a master teacher. You also need to document everything that you do, even before applying for master teacher, you need to collect all the evidence that you have and store them properly because when you apply for master teacher, the evaluators are going to ask for evidence. Doing all of this need to be done sincerely, not for the sake of promotion. All of the programs that you did will be for the students, not for yourself. Having a good professional relationship with everybody in the school is another matter that an aspiring master teacher needs to have. Get school administrators to support whatever you’re doing for the school. Avoid toxic environments because some people are, no matter what we do, they are going to judge. So choose a positive circle that will lead to your growth. Lastly, be confident in what you do because if you are not convinced of yourself, how are you going to convince the evaluators? Your classroom practices also must be purposeful and they must be continuous.

Always be humble. No matter how far you have come in life, you need to always be humble. When you become a master teacher, you will get a lot of opportunities along the way. When you become a master teacher, always remember that you are one because of your students and there were people who supported you when you wanted to apply for GC. Do not ride on the high horse, always be humble. Another thing is, always remember that when you are a GC, you are not a perfect person and all-knowing. You also need to learn to accept opinions, not only give advice. And continuously learn something new and share that knowledge with the people around you. 

I think ELTC has done a good job in several things in assisting teachers. For example, they have opened up opportunities for teachers to present and they have already started the international English language teachers conference under ELTC. They have also started to get teachers to share their best practices as recently they shared the best practices HIP book where teachers who are comfortable with sharing.

I believe the Ministry of Education should have more things like this which is to give more opportunities to teachers to share their best practices.

What can be improved is ELTC and the ministry should collaborate with other institutions like British Council or American English to organize programs for English teachers. I think we should have more of this and more specific conferences like formative assessment conferences and give more opportunities for teachers to share. 

They also need to give more training to teachers. For example, if they want teachers to implement PBL, I think we need to give extensive training for teachers on PBL. We need a PBL module for English teachers because I don’t think that it has been done yet. Or a PBL module that incorporates STEM subjects.

The ministry also needs to do more training on PBD. Since we are moving away from exam-oriented practices, more emphasis should be given to providing training on PBD. Currently, many teachers and parents do not know the purpose of PBD or how to go about implementing it. We actually already have training on PBD but the question is whether it is done continuously. Is there a post-mortem of what’s going on? We need to find a mechanism for how we can see the bigger picture when it comes to PBD implementation. Maybe we can have a PBD conference where we can have more teachers to come and showcase how to go about doing PBD in a very simplistic way. We are doing too much on PBD documentation which is a problem as well.