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!