Pedagogical Artifacts and Reflective Writing

Observation Stage

During my week of observation of my future class I could see that all the activities planned by the teacher were focused on the grammar-translation method. In one opportunity the students were asked to translate lists of words into Spanish disconnected from any context; they were using only rote learning.

This was very important to me because I am very interested in planning activities where the students have to think deeper, to make associations of ideas and support the answers given to a certain topic, and to having students that are used to be taught in the way in which they have to memorize words was very challenging. On the other hand, to see this during the observation stage was very significant because I could make more informed decisions when I had to plan the activities for this particular group.

With this experience I could reaffirm myself that I am not interested in teaching just grammar rules and isolated words; on the contrary, I want to propose activities where the students can practice with more than one skill and where everybody has the opportunity to participate.

I am aware that when we want to change attitudes and behaviors it is necessary to do it slowly and taking in consideration the opinion of everybody, but it is our responsibility as teacher to implement this changes inside of the class and schools.

Team Teaching Stage

On the Team teaching stage I observed one situation that was very illustrative of how evaluation is used as “a classroom management tool”.

I selected this because I think it is a very good example of how teachers use evaluation as punitive tool, and not as an instrument to see the level of achievement the students may have.

We have learned that when we evaluate our students it is necessary that these evaluations have to be significant for the students; they have to know what the objectives are and what the teacher expects from them. It is not a way of “punishment” for something that it has been doing wrong and to control the class.

I could observe this situation before starting my teaching stage which gave me the possibility to make the decision of changing this aspect in my future classes. I made the decision of telling them a week before when the test was going to be; to establish clear objectives for the test and to give them more time to do the task. I considered that the grades did not represent what the students could do and knew; that is why I was concerned about this.

I think that I am going to keep reading and learning about this topic because I think is relevant for our future as teachers. We always have to be checking the progress of our students to see if we are making good decisions or if we have to improve something related to evaluation and assessment.

Teaching stage

An activity that was very successful during my teaching stage was when I asked the class to write a short paragraph about someone or something relevant or important for them.

When I presented this activity I showed the class a short piece of writing created by me; in this paragraph I talked about my cat and it was written only using simple present tense and adverbs of frequency because that was the content for those classes. They had to present their writing in front of the class in the next couple of weeks using a PPP or any visual representation such as, posters or videos.

By giving them the possibility to choose the topic of their writing the students got involved in the process; everybody wanted to go in front of the class and talk about their favorite bands and movies, best friends, pets, family, famous actors and actresses. From my point of view, this decision was critical for the success of this activity; it would have been easy to define the topic for this presentation, but it would have become this experience in another irrelevant task for the students.

In the teaching stage it is necessary to relate the content with the students’ interests in order to make our classes meaningful and student-centered. The students could see how these grammar rules are used to talk and write about our personal interest, daily activities and our life in general; they could see that they can use English too.

This was a very good experience because I saw a group of students very motivated and willing to learn and participate. I am convinced that when teachers give opportunities to students to put into practice what they can do and know, and when the activities are based on the students` needs, we have a more meaningful and effective instruction giving students a better quality of learning.

I am definitely going to incorporate the students-centered approach in my future teaching career; I will keep updating my knowledge related to this in order to incorporate it in my teaching style.