Reflecting on my Teaching

Fundamentos de enseñar para aprender 1: Introducción

por Commonwealth Education Trust (Coursera)

First Assignment 

My teaching experience has been short. I’ve been working with children for about 4 ½ years now. To be completely honest, I feel now, that I certainly didn’t have the tools to make or achieve the best in them. And, doing some reflection, it is because I didn’t know how to use my own potential, I didn’t truly recognize my skills and abilities. I didn’t truly understand the impact of what I was doing or wasn’t doing.

It is really embarrassing to admit that in a certain way I thought teaching was a linear process, from me (teacher) to them (students). That it was a simple activity that required only the transmission of information because that was the way it was always done.

But, as time went by, I started using strategies in my different classes that made me see and experienced how engaged my students were. They participated and accomplished what was asked of them. However, I didn’t really set learning goals for those activities (Making videos, playing bingo in English, taking pictures with a cellphone and then describing them, recording lectures digitally to later discuss it in the classroom). I didn’t do the follow ups to determine what was working and what didn’t. I was being innovative, no question about it, but without a clue on how to do it properly in a way that helped me and my students to succeed.

Then I discovered gamification, flipped classroom and visible thinking theories and experiences, and made me realize that I am not that far from being a real teaching professional. I just need to find the theories, methods and strategies necessaries to back up and make the most out of those activities I once used ignoring their potential. 

In Lecture 2, Gardner (1999: 180-181) expressed “Teachers are the core of the educational system. Does not only he reflects what society wants and needs, but it requires from him to know, understand and give solutions to his learners, school, and community”.  It is really a big amount of responsibility and work, this is what it is expected from us, and so it is extremely important to understand ourselves. In what ways do I work best? What can I do to reconcile the outside world with the world in my classroom? What is my educational philosophy? What do I want from my students? 

We teachers need to reflect on these questions, about the realities to which our students are exposed. For example, economic, social and politically Venezuela is going through its worst time in history, people can’t find basic goods as food or medicines. Salaries aren’t enough to eat properly. So this has had a strong impact on education, many children stopped going to school because they didn’t have food or they have to go with their families to find food, after long hours doing lines. In the middle of this debacle, we teacher need to motivate them to continue their studies. We need to provide safe and loving environments in which they feel they belong again. In which they have a voice that it’s important to listen to.

In lecture 4, being a Professional, Professor Macbeath explained that children are exposed to three different worlds and that teachers need to make the connection between the three of them: Academic, Social and cyber. Living in my country right now added a fourth world, the political. If schools are supposed to first and foremost bring young people together, to help them to learn, to live in a way that our political society so badly needs (Professor Macbeath, lecture 4), we (teachers) most definitely need to pay attention to the Urgent (urgent being approaching the kids in a way they feel they are valued, respected and considered) versus the important (execute the curriculum).

If learning its mediated by emotional centers as pointed out by Damasio, or is a social activity as expressed by Vygotsky, we need to take into consideration the small community that inhabits in our classroom for about 8 hours every day, we need to address their inquiries, their problems, their daily basis cognitive conflicts.  

We need to make learning a place, a place where I have an opinion, where I can make mistakes and encouraged to fail better next time, where I could share my point of view, where I could provide solutions, where I can be an agent of change inside my real community. 

Marian Godoy

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