Week diary 5!

Hello everyone!

It's been a while, but I will like to share with you my experience on the last week in the school. That week I could observe an avaluation meeting with the teachers and how they put the marks to every student.

When they write the marks, they use a table with 2 parts: one with numbers 1-4 and the other one is composed by the titles of the curriculum. For example, llegir i comprendre. The first part means a range between the excelent and the fail. 1 is the best option and 4 is the worse. Furthermore, I could observe that excepts some students, all of them were between 3 and 4.

On the other hand, in the meeting, teachers talked about what they did this trimestre and what group activities used to create cohesion between students. Instead of that, not all of the teachers could make a good cohesion, but they noticed better behaviour between them. Finally, they talked about every student and if he or she passed the last cicle of primary. My surprise was that most of the pupils are going to high school with not all the subjects passed. The teachers explained me that it is because they can't make repeat everyone every year. I was very surprised because I didn't expected that situation in the school.

See you soon!

It's been a great time doing that :)

Week diary 4!

Hello everyone!

This week I have got an important aspect to explain. It happened when I was doing one of my project lessons. The class was well until we started the group work. All the teams were okay cuting and painting the activity that I explained before until two girls started to shout each other.

The teacher in charge of the group, we tried to understand what was happening. Then, the student started to cry and say that the other girl was saying bad words to her. She was very angry and she resisted to the teacher when he was trying to calm her, she was catching a table and a chair!

I was very surprised and I tried to continue the class, but the other students were distracted. I tried to made them continue but it was so difficult, she was screaming and crying while the teacher was trying to calm her. Finally, after some advices she calmed down and he could speak to her. He talked to her and he solve the problem between the two girls. I was very happy and calm because I didn't want a big problem between the students.

This experience made me think and reflect about the students and group work, we have to consider lots of aspects when we have an activity like this.

See you next week!

Reading 6: What is differentiated instruction?

Hello again!

This entry is the second reading that I had to read for this week. The second one talks about differentiation. As the article says: differentiation consist of the efforts of teachers to respond to variance among learners in the classroom. The part that I like of this short article is that it gives examples of differentiating content in the four classroom elements that he describe.

-5 key words: content, process, products, learning environment, differentiation

-The main idea

-Create the best learning experience responding the learners necessities with different resources.

-Three other ideas

-We need to give to our students different options to do the contents in a lesson.

-We can use rubrics to analyze student's behavior and what they need.

-Hand on activities helps teachers to motivate their students in class.

Finally, I would like to say that this is my last entry about readings, because this is the last one that we did in class. It was a short one, but it gave me some ideas to prepare more lessons in my future with my students. I want to relate this entry with all the projects that I did and thank during my four years in the university. When we plan a project or a lesson, we have to think about the different necessities that our students have, not only physical needs, also content needs and try to afford all of them.

Reading 5: how dialogue with teachers helps children learn

Hello everyone!

This week we have got two reading analyses. The first one is a book chapter that talks about how dialogue with teacher helps children learn. Also, the author talks about the importance of questions in the classroom, how teachers guide students through them and a key concept, the dialogic teaching. It was a dense reading, but it made me feel and think about those concepts that I did not analyze in that way yet. I found that learning that helped me to understand better the role of a teacher and why when we do a class, we use some kind of strategies to help our students. As other readings, here you have got the keywords, the main idea, three other ideas and a reflection.

-5 key words: dialogic teaching, guide learning, scaffolding, classroom interaction, meaningful questions

-The main idea: 

It is important to dialogue with children as teachers, and make them know that when we ask a question, they have to know through our body language and voice.

-Three other ideas:

-Make children to reformulate their discourse through questions.

-Asking children to verbalize their options.

-We need to challenge our students during our activities.

Finally, as the other entries, I will make a connection with my previous experiences. As a student, I could saw teachers do that to me and I did not realize that it was so important until I read the text. Now that I am in my teacher training, I usually do that type of questions, because I want that my students could follow the class and understand what I am explaining. Also, I could saw that not only in English lessons, the teachers use that strategy, they are always doing it in all the subjects, and when I realized that I understand why they do and the importance of doing it.