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natcson · 7 years ago

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Observation assignment

Class Observation

The class

The class began at 11:05 am and the teacher called the list, which took a huge amount of class time. Taking into account that the classes are one hour long, those are precious minutes of the class. This class was the first one of the fourth period of the school year and the teacher started by telling students to write down the “estándares básicos de competencia” for that period. When all the students had finished, the teacher wrote down on the board the subject for that class, she was going to teach the verb to be, more specifically how to introduce themselves and their classmates and how to describe themselves and their classmates. Forty-five minutes of the class were used to do an activity; the students were supposed to say something about themselves like “I am forth teen years old” and then they had to say something about the classmate that was either beside or behind them. When one of them made a mistake, the teacher told that student an example with herself and other student. One of the students didn’t understand after five examples, then the teacher wrote on the boar and told him to read it out loud, the student finally understood. When the activity finished, the class time was over. In the class, the teacher did an activity that consisted of making students describe themselves and their classmates. The instructions were given in Spanish. First, she asked the whole class if they could remember how to present themselves or their classmates. Around eight students raised their hands to participate, one of them, without being given the floor just said that “My name is” is one possible way to do so. Then, the teacher said that it could be one way, but she encouraged students to use different ways from just giving their names. She asked them on how to present someone else. One student said: “You are”.

The teacher also asked one specific student to present himself and the student who was next to him. The student said, “My name is Jonatan and…” but he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Then she asked to the class again if someone knew how to refer to a girl. Many students said at the same time “She is”. After that, the teacher proposed an activity by turns were students had to use the expression “I am and she/he is.” The activity was performed by students in the same order as the rows in which they are organized in the classroom.

The standards

In relation to the standards, we saw that the teacher actually integrates the skills proposed in the document for fifth grade, more specifically the following ones:

- “Participo en juegos y actividades siguiendo instrucciones simples.” Students participate in the activity proposed by the teacher with not much effort by the teacher. Also, the teacher used basic or simple instructions that the students understood.

- “Comprendo información personal proporcionada por mis compañeros y mi profesor.” This one because in the activity they had to give information about one of their classmates.

- “Puedo saludar de acuerdo con la hora del día, de forma natural y apropiada.” This one for they salute the teacher on the beginning of every class by using “Good morning teacher”.

Something to highlight is the fact that the class involved more skills related to speaking and listening, no writing or reading skills were identified in the class. Also, we noticed that the teacher accepted the participation of those students who just screamed and didn’t respect the turns by raising their hands. Something we would recommend is to encourage the exercise of raising their hands every time they want to participate. This because if they don’t correct that when young, once they grow up and take classes at university they will keep interrupting their classmates or the teacher every time they want to talk. In the development of the class, the students were very active in terms of participation. When the teacher asked something, there were always many students who wanted to be listened, they even interrupted turns to be listened, which means that they are interested in the class. At the beginning of the class, it was a little difficult for the teacher to organize them. Some of them were out of their sits playing with others, some others were very curious and came to us ask questions about the reason for our visit. Even though it was hard for the teacher to make them pay attention, once they were more disposed to pay attention to the class, the activities developed with not much difficulties.

The teacher didn’t use many didactic resources. She only wrote general aspects on the board related to the activity previously mentioned, something about the verb to be and the pronouns. Besides that, only the document of the standards that were written on the student’s notebook was used. We think that a good teacher must be able to have a good development of a class without using many aids. In relation to the activity proposed in the class, that was mostly about talking, we consider that the resources were enough and well used for the activity’s purpose in terms of verbal communication. As it was an institution of official character, the classrooms do not usually comes with many audio-visual resources, which means that the teacher must consider that, for example, it is not possible to bring audiovisual content very often, that means a challenge for the teacher. There were no evaluations in terms of exams or activities that involved a grade in that class. The only evaluation we observed was, for example, the corrections the teacher made to the pronunciation of different words in English that students didn’t know how to pronounce.

Reflexivity The standards applied in the class because some skills or components mentioned in the document were integrated as the previously mentioned. As the document for fifth grade focuses on conversational aspects, the teacher tried to integrate the use of the verb to be, for example, by telling the name of a classmate. This could seem very simple related to the other skills proposed in the document, but it is the pillar to more complex processes.

It is also important to remember that the skills proposed on the paper are very ambitious for children at that age who only have four hours of English a week. Here are some of the skills we consider the most ambitious for that grade:

- “Mantengo una conversación simple en inglés con un compañero cuando desarrollo una actividad de aula.” If students can barely use the verb to be, they don’t even know how to pronounce “she”, it would be very difficult to make them have a conversation in a second language.

- “Solicito a mi profesor y a mis compañeros que me aclaren una duda o me expliquen algo sobre lo que hablamos.” This action involves plenty of aspects of the language, we do not consider that a student of fifth grade is able to ask for doubts in English.

- “Digo un texto corto memorizado en una dramatización, ayudándome con gestos.” Remembering a text for students of fifth grade, in their first language is very difficult, expecting them to remember a whole text in a second language is not very realistic. Same thing happens with the following one.

- “Recito un trabalenguas sencillo o una rima, o canto el coro de una canción.”

Many of the things in the official documents are easy to criticize to what we can see in schools these days. If you wanted to be formed in all those aspects, you may need more hours a day and more than a year for each grade to make sure that all of them are correctly acquired. We took some of the skills presented on the paper and showed why they are not reflection of today’s realities. We also consider that the standards need to be rethought because if compared to the skills that students have on a specific grade, only a few aspects will be reflected, but as the intention of the observation is not that, we only focused on a few of them.

The interview

The teacher told us that the activities she tries to bring to the class are meant to make children speak and to have conversations with others. She said that making them write all the time is not going to be effective since they are very energetic and can´t stay still for long time. She claimed that to create a comfortable environment in the classroom, is necessary to allow students’ participation, but she also considers that if all students start talking at the same time, the control of the class is going to be lost and the precious time will be wasted.

The class we observed didn´t involve other resources besides the blackboard and the knowledge of the teacher, but when we asked the teacher about this, she said that she uses a lot of the audiovisual support in her classroom. Students enjoy watching movies and videos, and at the same time, they are learning since the videos and the movies they watch are in English with subtitles in Spanish. At first, she thought that it wasn´t going to work because the kids are very impatient with things they don´t know, as it can be movies they don´t fully understand, but they have been improving their English a lot since the teacher started with the activity of the movies.

To teach children, one must learn to make corrections without being rude, otherwise they might fell badly and lose interest in learning, that is why she says that, to correct kids properly, she makes them repeat like if it was just practice, this way she makes sure that the kid is having proper correction and the others are reinforcing what they learn.

As we have said before, the teacher uses the “Estándares básicos de competencia” to let them know what they are going to learn. She understands giving children the topics that are going to be studied in the classroom, they might feel curios about the class and will also put their best in the activities. The teacher told us that this is something new in her classroom, she knew that the Ministry of Education´s FL standards existed but never gave to it a space in her activities, before using this method she used to make a test to see the level of the students and with this she would plan the activities and everything related to the class.

Finally, we would like to say that doing this work was an enlightening experience, we learned that time is an important factor in the development of the class. If one has an hour or less to give a class, it is necessary to have everything ready before the class begins. We also learnt that showing kids what they are going to learn might be a trigger of curiosity, which may lead them to be more focused on the class.

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natcson · 7 years ago

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Teaching statement

Teaching has been around me since I was born, both of my parents are teachers and in top of that I always studied in schools where either one of them was teaching, thus my experience in school was different, some say it must have been awful or wonderful, I never saw it as something bad neither good, but something certain was that this experience changed the way that I understood what learning means, the fact that they always knew what the homework were that the other teachers gave me it was good, and because of this I never had bad grades and I did pretty good in school. Education has been an important part of my life and it is very significant for me to ask myself what kind of teacher I am going to be.

In the subject “Practicas en contextos diversos” I had the opportunity to teach children from the school UPB. I think it was the best experience I have ever had with teaching, even though I had the chance to teach before, I think that the time that I spent with those kids was wonderful, this experience gave me an idea of how I have to behave in order to be a good teacher, some of that I would have to face when becoming a teacher and how I should work with kids, it also taught me that a meaningful way to learn is to interact with the things we want to learn, for example if one wants to teach about the plants and photosynthesis, one have to find the way to show this process to the students instead of just reading about it, that is why I want to support my process of teaching in this kind of method, where the student interacts directly with the knowledge instead of just learning trough books. I understand that this methodology is rare in Colombia, but the best thing of being a teacher is that you have the chance to try new ways to teach and if it works, you get to do research about how our students learn, why they behave the way they do and how to make the classroom a better place to learn.

Being a good teacher is no easy task, one must have a lot of qualities to engage a real connection between you and your students, and taking into account that the number of students can be from five to forty students, it becomes an colossal task to develop connections to everyone of your students, that’s why I want to be a teacher that is able to create a good environment in the classroom by being not only a tutor but a guide and friend, without breaking the barrier of authority that a teacher should always have in the classroom in order to be the one in control of what happens inside the classroom. I think that teaching is about knowing your students, see things how they see them and let yourself think the way they do, with the aim of understand their context and with that in mind create strategies to teach them in a more meaningful way.

As I said before, teaching is not an easy task but very rewarding when you achieve your goals, I want to be a teacher fulfilling the role of a guide more than a giver of information, creating meaningful connections with my students, so they feel comfortable being in the classroom, learning new things each day, I think that this is the most effective way to give our students a significant learning. Teaching requires people that understand people, able to see the other´s problems and face them along with them.

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