New knowledge, new experiences

I’m convinced that the rapport with students must be built up little by little everyday. I think students must be heard, but when they start to backtalk and the “conversation” becomes a never ending story, then there’s a huge problem.

As a student I don’t remember any backtalking situation, but I’ve had the opportunity to observe other teachers working with young children. Usually the teacher starts with the disussion and they go on and on until the teacher has had enough and quits the conversation, then the students has no more options an ends up quiet. After reading a synopsis of the book Tools for teaching by Dr. Fred Jones I noticed that the teacher did the right thing, but maybe too late. If she had quit the conversation when it had just started she wouldn’t have lost so much precious time.

As a teacher I hope to be strong enough to manage this kind of situations and others to come.

For those of you who are still asking this question:

Believe me, it’s just crazy to try to come to a class without a plan! Unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way… A year ago I was given the opportunity to work as an EFL teacher in a saturday course for children. The fact is that I was contracted just the friday afternoon before the course began, I was not given anything but a students’ book and as I had no experience I didn’t make a plan, I just didn’t know how to. You can imagine how awful my first day was! I just didn’t know what to do! and of course it was a lost day for my students!

The experience and this wonderful course have made me realize that lesson planning is certainly the basis for a successful teaching-learning process. As a teacher, you must know where your learners are, where you want them to be at the end of a certain period of time, and how you are going to get them there.

I hope my experience to be useful for all of you. Don’t ever forget to plan your lessons. Good luck!

I had never heard about Bloom’s taxonomy before, but I’m glad to have discovered it. What a good way to integrate learning! I mean learning is not just ‘remembering’ things (as many people used to think), learning goes beyond that. Bloom’s taxonomy can be applied at any level of any subject, and it’s an excellent tool for planning successful teaching activities.

Planting a tree: (Example of Bloom’s taxonomy application)

1. Remembering: Name and list the materials you need in order to plant a lemon tree.

2. Understanding: Describe the procedure to plant a lemon tree.

3. Applying: Dramatize (or illustrate, if you prefer) the steps of the procedure.

Now I realize how important differentiation is inside a classroom. Maybe I hadn’t done it before because here in México we never experience it as students. Most of the teachers use just one teaching approach (mainly PPP) and there’s nothing students can do about it if they don’t feel comfortable or ready to work on a new topic. The consequences of this are terrible… that’s the reason why most of the students in this country (specially children) are demotivated.

Nothing could be done in this world without motivation. My own experience suggests me that intrinsic motivation should be privileged while learning languages: students must be convinced that learning is an awesome experience, that the only fact of knowing something new in pleasant. Of course, I don’t mean that extrinsic motivation should be avoided, to the contrary! it also plays an important role when intrinsic motivation is missing, and should be used differentially.

We call learning style to the way we learn best. No matter which our learning style is, as teachers we must be able to create opportunities for all our students depending on their own styles and characteristics. Of course, it becomes very important to know well our students’ characteristics since it will help us design different classroom activities and avoid excluding some students.

I don’t think my own learning characteristics would really contribute to my teaching style, instead I think that abusing of my own preferences would result harmful to those students that don’t share the same characteristics with me.

 P.S. Clicking on the link below you will be able to look at my “learning philosophy poster” and make a little immersion into my characteristics as a learner.

Denia’s learning characteristics

There are many applications on line that could help us design listening classes. woices.com is a website where you can share your voice recordings and listen to others’ all around the world. I think this application could be very useful to improve our students’ listening skills. A class could be designed to play one of this recordings about an specific topic and work on students comprehension.

Copyright by Annie Mole

Literacy circles are small groups of persons that join together to read and comment texts. Through them, students can improve reading subskills such as intensive and extensive reading, and reading for detail, specially when they are given a certain role in the group.

In my country (México) we have the misfortune of missing a real reading culture in our mother language. As a consequence, it might become very difficult to get this important language skill in English. Since literacy circles are useful to encourage students to read because they make reading interesting, challenging and fun, I think they are indispensable in ESL lessons in México. Personally, as a student never had I the opportunity to join one, I would have loved to.

Preschool students can’t just be evaluated like other students by making written tests or individual oral presentations. They aren’t neither used to nor prepared for that, so their learning progress has to be assessed day after day without them noticing it. Of course I think that rubrics would be very useful for that purpose due to their objectivity and clarity. For example, I consider that a  rubric could be designed to assess preschoolers learning of greeting expressions: if they understand and use them, if they understand but don’t use them, or if they don’t even understand them.

It’s important for teachers to know and recognize the value of this kind of resourses which are useful to know better the progress of students and therefore to improve the quality of lessons.

I must confess I hadn’t ever heard about a wordle. Now I realize that these “clouds” can be very useful for leaning new vocabulary.

This Wordle contains words from unit 2:

As you can see, I think Base words are very important because they let us forn new words easily just by adding affixes, and these new words may adopt different lexical features.