Conclusions

Hello readers!

Last but not least the entry number 11 of my blog, the end of an era, the last chapter of this long book in which you have seen how much I have evolved from the first entry to this one and I hope that with this last entry you could see what I have learned during this course, what things I have changed in my life and what I expect from the future so, let’s start this last chapter of this blog!

When I started the course I was a little disappointed, not only with the career but also with the profession that I am studying for, and that was because I realized that school hasn’t changed very much since I was a child and because teachers nowadays (some of them) don’t have the word CHANGE and the word PROGRESS in their minds, sometimes they just won’t to get their checks paid and spend the minimum ours at school. But, in my case, one of the ideas that I had in mind and that I still have and that encouraged me to start this degree was the idea of change, of progress of evolution and revolution. Because for me education is those four terms and it is also freedom. So when I started the course I thought that what I was planning to do someday with my students was not possible now, because I couldn’t see people motivated not to change the world, but to change the people who live in it instead and make of them better citizens for the planet.

In the area of English, when I started the course my intention was to offer my students the best resources and the best methodology to my students in order to let them enjoy English as much as I do. So I was a bit disappointed because during the Practicum II I could see teachers basing their teaching in just completing worksheets and not allowing students to think and reflect but only to copy and repeat, and that’s not the human I want for this planet. So, even though it took me a long time to recuperate this feeling of changing the world of education, I remember it was after a common talk about what we expected from this degree and from the teacher profession. But that talk encouraged me to be what I think I am today, a fighter a person that has overcome personal problems during the course and a person who has regained his motivation towards education. Therefore this course taught me that what I really hoped about education can still be accomplished and taught me that I must keep fighting to implement my teaching style to class. In that way I have seen during the first days of the practicum III that there are still some teachers that belief that education could be changed and must be changed.

About the concepts that I have learned in this course, I learned at most, what a CLIL unit really is; now I know that English is as much important as the other areas that we are working with, I also know that contents need a specific language learning purpose, the importance of contents distribution, how to work and assess with rubrics, etc. Moreover I learned new engaging activities that I can do in class, methodologies, how to use the new technologies in the class to benefit my students’ learning process,  the importance that the parents have in their children school success  and a thing that is really important to me, how mi ideals are reflected in an academic way and how I can take the ideals I had about education to class. Nonetheless this blog and the debates we’ve done in class have helped me to reflect about new ideas to introduce in class, like the introduction of the comic, how classroom management works and what routines should we introduce in class, the importance that the student has in class thanks to the child centered classroom readings and debates and so on.

So I think that Didàctica de la llengua anglesa, has helped me to learn some new concepts about education and methodology but also has helped me to recuperate that dream I had time ago about changing the educational world and help my students to be happy with their life but also to respect the world, the people that live in it and to wake up in them a reflexive and critic thinking that make them realize that they must fight for what they love and that they must do it not only for them but also for the people they love.

I hope you liked this blog and be aware because maybe I will explain to you my experience during the following Practicum III.

The importance of the contents to manage the classroom.

Wow, this is the end my friends, this is one of the last entries of this blog and each and every day I discover a new topic to talk about and I learn new things about this profession. In this case I will talk about the importance of classroom management and how contents can affect to this.

During my practicum II I could see how difficult it was to me sometimes, and also to teachers with years of experience in the area, to manage a class. I think that it is very important to work classroom management from day one, when you arrive at class the first day of curse you should make your students clears what you expect from them and how they should behave. In order to make this process easier, it’s appropriated to establish some rules in class, to work respect in class to the teacher and to the rest of the students and learning to work appropriately. So to accomplish the mission of keeping under control your class you should also take into account that not only you’re making easy your daily life by keeping the heat of the students down but also you’re making their daily life in the school easy, that is why is important to get their opinion about what they enjoy doing the most how can they keep their anxiety under control and what’s their idea of a perfect class.

So, with that being said, one of the main points you must be successful at is about choosing the right contents for your students, but also offer them the best methodology to learn those contents and to pay attention in class. Therefore, we, as teachers, must offer our students contents useful for their life outside the school, we should give the opportunity to interact, give their opinion, being listened, participate in the development of the class and see that they’re the center of the process known as learning. So if we are able to make our students participate we can manage to perfection the class, because their feedback means attention to what the teacher is saying but also means knowledge, it means learning and it means start a process of metacognition by creating their own knowledge with their interventions.

So, to sum up, while we’re doing class first we must find contents attractive and useful to students, for example it’s more useful for them knowing how to buy a bus ticket rather than knowing which is the sound the cockroaches do. In this way, it’s more useful being able to express themselves orally in English rather than knowing when should we double a consonant when we’re doing word formation, as we have learnt our mother language, we should learn English and speaking and interaction should be a process that occupies at least the 75% of the time dedicated to an English class.

I hope you liked this entry, I promise the last one it’s going to be really interesting! 

Developing CLIL: Towards a theory of practice.

In this entry I introduce to you the last obligatory reading we had in the subject of Didàctica de la Llengua Anglesa, and this article written by Do Coyle talks, as you can imagine, about CLIL. Just to put you in situation, last year when I worked for the first time with the concept of CLIL i assumed by mistake that CLIL was just doing a subject in a foreign language with the purpose to improve your skills in the language principally and then in the contents of that subject, but after reading this article and after all the debate we’ve done in class allow me to introduce to you what CLIL really is.

In the article we understand CLIL as a way of integrating a language into the teaching of a content but with the idea of improving your skills equally in both areas, meaning that what you’re doing in a foreign language is not content that you have done before in your own language but it’s a way of working the new content with the purpose of learning it while you’re learning the foreign language. CLIL is not about translating the contents but it is about working the contents in a language with the purpose of becoming this new knowledge more interesting to the student and the teacher.

As we can see in the text the purpose of CLIL doesn’t stop just with that, the benefits of producing a high quality CLIL implies that raises the learner’s linguistic competence and confidence, raises the teacher’s and learner’s expectations, develops risk-taking and problem-solving skills in the learners, increase the vocabulary learning skills and grammatical awareness, motivate and encourage the student’s independence, takes the students beyond limited foreign language topics, improve L1 literacy, encourages oral spontaneity if students are enabled to learn through the language rather than in the language, develops study skills, concentration, etc. Generates positive attitudes and address gender issues in motivation and put cultural awareness back on the agenda. Why? Because a CLIL project is a flexible project that should adapt to any kind of content but also can adapt to any kind of activity just to make sure that we, as teachers, can adapt to every child’s necessities (taking into account the multiple intelligences).

To do all this we need a perfect coordination of the teachers of the subject and the language. Therefore not only the students must practice CLIL but teachers must study how to create and implement CLIL using modern pedagogy tools but also increasing their foreign language knowledge (content of the language but also the cultural aspects). In this way, the Generalitat de Catalunya has been doing in the past few years some courses to teachers just to prepare them to introduce CLIL in the Catalan classes.

CLIL is integrated into the 4Cs framework: content, communication, cognition and culture which means that: learners create their own knowledge, during this process interaction is essential and therefore language too (language is basic in the learning process to execute the cognition process) and intercultural awareness is fundamental to CLIL.

So with CLIL we use language to learn effectively, because language is not only a basic tool to communicate but also helps us to make a scheme of the new content. Nonetheless while applying CLIL in a class we must realise that to learn new language content we must have some bases that help us understand the new contents in language that we are receiving because if we pretend to interact and create our own knowledge, first of all we must understand what is being said.

So with that being said I think that this phrase could summarise what CLIL means:

“From this perspective, CLIL involves learning to use the language appropriately whilst using language to learn effectively”.

I hope that as I do now, you understand with my help a little better what CLIL really means and if you have any doubts, please let me know.

Enjoy your day! And be careful with you CLIL projects!

The house-school connection, affective situations and the importance of a good atmosphere in class.

Hello readers, here I am once again and today I think it’s really clear what I’ll be talking about. In today’s entry I will highlight the importance that the nearest social environment has in the development of our students, as I usually do I will give my opinion about the three topic mentioned in the title and I will talk about all this by offering some personal experiences in this area.

Recently in class we’ve talked about the house-school connection and how this link affects our students. Well I remember that when I was younger and even now, my family always paid attention about my progress with studies because it’s really important for them that I work hard for my future and this attitude shown by my parents have always helped me to improve in my studies. When I was at primary school I remember my mother sitting next to me helping while I was doing my homework, or asking me the contents for the next day’s exam or even asking me for an explanation when teachers called my attention when I forgot my homework and that was something that really helped me stay in the right path and that nowadays I’m glad that my parents were so conscious about my studies. I think that establishing a great home-school connection, not only benefits the student to be more encouraged and backed while studying, but also helps the school and the parents to know more about the students or to help each other when they’re in need. In this case I also remember when my parents went to my high school to help for carnival or when some of my teachers came to see me at the hospital when I was sick.

In this way I think that affective situations between students and teachers can encourage and engage students into the teacher’s lessons because they give a major grade of significance to what the teacher is saying. In this case even now I pay more attention to the teachers who are nice to me than to the ones that just simply explain their concepts and don’t establish social connections with you.

Finally, creating a good atmosphere in class between students and with the teachers, helps the pupils and the school to decrease the risk of problems we can have in class but also increases the possibilities of having the help of students when the school is in need in the period of Christmas and different festivities, which benefit both parts.

So creating a safe and close relation (respecting the distances) between students, teachers and parents, can help the three parts to increase the possibilities of success of students but also could mean that school and parents will help each other when they’re in need.

Do you agree with what I’ve just said, let me know please, your opinion is so important to me!

Rethinking classroom management.

As the authors of the text, Natalia Maldonado and Pilar Olivares, say the main thought was until now that classroom management was basically having our students under control by establishing a serial of rules that force them to put in practice some attitudes just not to disturb. But this thought could have become a little rusty nowadays in the 21^st century, so that it’s why these authors promote a new view of the concept of classroom management in which we are not only talking about behavioural issues, but also about being responsible about our own teaching and learning and creating an attitude of responsibility for learning.

In this case the authors offer the possibility of treating classroom management in three interrelated ways that depend one from the other. These are: the organisational issues, the curriculum issues and the social issues.

When we talk about the organisational issues in the text, we talk about all these rights and duties that students have in the class. In this case, we should consider if the rules that we will establish in our class should be selected by the teacher or by the students that form the class too. I think that the fairest point would be that together students and teachers choose which rights and duties will be present in the class not only to keep under control the students mood but also to create rules that allow students take as much profit as possible of the experience of being in class.

Talking now about curriculum issues we should be aware about how students learn. In this point the authors talk about the importance of knowing what we want, as teachers that our students learn. Once we know that we must challenge ourselves to offer our students the activities and strategies that adapt better to the situation we have in our class. In this case, in the text we talk about the importance of offering diverse activities that adapt to every students way of learning, moreover, we should combine individual and group tasks just to help our students develop their social and individual skills. Finally even though every teacher has his/her own teaching style, our main goal should be that our activities are engaging, encouraging and interesting to our students in terms that these activities promote in them a critical thought and let the students have space for reflection and metacognition.

Last but not least, when we talk about the social issues in the text, we refer to the climate of confidence and security that students feel when they’re in class. This issue should not only be related to the social relations that students have with their peers but also with the teacher. Even though students pass most of their time with their equals, and surely it’s important that they have a peaceful relation with their classmates it’s important too that students feel confident when they’re talking with the teacher. Based in my self experience I have learned more and better when I had a good relation with my teacher than when I hadn’t so teachers should pay attention to the classroom environment that has been established in the class.

Therefore and as I said previously once I have read the whole text I think that we should all consider the importance of the three points or issues treated in this entry because they all have the same importance but also they need one another just to make sure that our students could exploit all their potential through their learning process.

Thanks for your attention!

The ultimate resource films and series in class!

Hello readers, once again I’m updating my blog and today I bring you a very personal entry, but as always an entry related to English in the educational world. In this entry I would talk about two resources that really helped me a lot to improve my English level, I’m talking about watching series and films in English.

As I have said, probably, a thousand times, during my early years at high school I started taking Cambridge classes and during that time I also started to watch English series and films, not only to improve my English level but also to have a good time. After years of doing this I could realise how much vocabulary and pronunciation I’ve learned but also I  could realise that my listening skills have Improved a lot, therefore I tried to offer this resource to my younger brother in order to prove my theory about how useful this tools are but also to help him to improve his level. After some time watching series in English I could prove that the English level of my brother improved dramatically too.

That it’s why I am doing this entry, to offer you the possibility of giving these tools a chance and introduce them in your classes, not as I watched them but doing rich activities with them instead. My idea would be to introduce these tools at the early stages, during the first courses of primary school, we could offer our students anime series or cartoons series in English with Spanish or Catalan subtitles and as they move forward, change the kind of series or film they watch and also the subtitles into English ones. Once we have this in mind, at the early stages we should offer the possibility to our students of giving their opinion about the film or serie or doing simple questions about what did they like about it, as they group up the difficulty of these activities should increase and therefore we should do activities like propose and alternative ending to the chapter or film you’ve seen or maybe analyse his/her favourite character in the film, finally, we can also offer them the chance of debate orally about the film.

I think that if we propose this at primary school the English level of our students can improve drastically, but we should also offer them the chance of watching these resources at home uploading them via moodle. As always, this is my opinion, but I want to know yours, so don’t forget to reflect it in the commentary section below!

Thanks for your attention!

Meeting individual needs with young learners

The text quoted at the title of this entry and written by Peter Westwood and Wendy Arnold is the result of an online discussion forum in which different experts of the educational area discussed the meaning of differentiated instruction and its influence in the school.

We understand for differentiated instruction all the activities and process that we as teachers do to give answer to all the cognitive realities we can find I our class, to make it clear, it’s attending to every students learning necessities in order to adapt to every learning style so everyone gets a special attention and get the opportunity of working with material that will exploit his/her intellectual potential.

So in this discussions experts on the field argued about different ways of attending to everyone’s necessities by grading the difficulty of the tasks, creating online tasks that goes from less difficulty to more difficulty, doing small-group activities to allow everyone to participate and give their opinion on what is being treated, doing hands on activities that can accommodate to everyone’s necessities, offering different material depending on the learning style of the student, create a atmosphere of confidence and complicity between the teacher and the student, work by projects and so on.

My idea on all this process is that I think it is vital that teacher can reach to everyone’s necessities and to do that the teacher must be aware of the every child’s learning style. So if we have a child with a visual learning style, we should offer him resources such as images videos and graphical representations that can help him/her to create deep knowledge connection between the new concepts and the old ones he/she carried with himself/herself. Moreover, we should also consider that nowadays the number of children per teacher is quite high, so we should notice that sometimes we don’t have the human, economical or temporary resources to reach to everyone’s necessities, that is why if we are really limited, we should at least offer differentiated activities to the whole class, varying from one activity to another to its learning style. Nonetheless if we have the good conditions and attitude to attend to every child’s needs, we should offer to every student different activities that contain the same concepts but that attend to his/her learning style (idea based on Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Model).

See you next time!