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!

Comics, the forgotten ally!

Hello I am Carlos Benito and as you can see my blog is becoming a space where you readers and I can reflect about topics related to what being a teacher implies and also what being an English teacher means. In this entry I would love to talk about a useful forgotten tool that could help us, as English teachers but also teachers from other subjects, to encourage our students to include the habit of reading in their routine, yes as you could see in the title of this entry I am talking about the comic.

The Department of Education of Catalonia and a great amount of English teachers have always been worried about the lack of a reading culture in our classes, not only in the English subject but also in Catalan and Spanish. It’s true that nowadays, though, students must read Catalan and Spanish books but not as frequently they must read English books, so if there is actually a lack of a reading culture in our classes, this attitude of underestimate the importance of English leads to a total neglect of the activity of reading English texts. This means that students not only have poor reading comprehension skills but also they are in need of different English resources that can help them to improve their English language knowledge.

That is why I think that we should introduce the comic to our English classes because it’s a tool that offer students the possibility of learning new vocabulary, helping them to improve their reading comprehension skills and having a good time while reading. Moreover, the appearance of pictures can help them to understand better what they’re reading and to give sense to the idioms and common phrases used in English. This activity can help them to be motivated by lecture and could be applied not only to English classes but also to Spanish and Catalan ones.

To sum up, the comic is a tool that some of us used to have a good time but I think that teachers have underestimated its power because while the reader is having a good time walking through the bullets, unconsciously he/she is learning new vocabulary, making sense of what he’s reading and fomenting their imagination by creating expectations of what can happen next in the story.

Naruto one of the most famous manga of all times. Really entertaining!