Traditional Class... ¿Contradiction? Session 3

Hi people!!

Today I’m going to present you a different class compared to the active learning we’ve been seeing these days. It seems such a contradiction, though, but session 3 of the course I’m writing for, followed the traditional system of teaching: lecturer talks in one direction and students listen to her. However, it appears as necessary as well, in small pieces, though, in order to present the content, but always followed by a practical task or activity to ensure that students have understood it by practising it.

In this session, our lecturer presented us different theoretical notions related to the teaching-learning process. First of all, she explained a basic difference between: approach, methodology and strategy. A teaching approach is the direction that an instruction follows, so it comprises the whole teaching process. Within the approach all the principles and methods used for instruction are included, so different methodologies can be used within an approach depending on the task or activity the teacher wants to perform. For example Cooperative and Collaborative learning are two methodologies that can be used within the Communicative approach. The last concept, strategy, refers to the different tools or techniques that can be used to perform a methodology, so, for example, we can present a cooperative task in which students have to fulfill the activities with the use of ITC or a discussion. 

This explanation was very useful for me, since I’ve been taught different approaches, methodologies and strategies during all the year, but it wasn’t till this moment that this difference came clearly defined to me.

After that, we reflected on the purposes of Active learning. We said that this methodology makes information more interesting, so it catches students’ attention easily. It develops students’ linguistic skills as well as skills about life, together with cooperative methods that form them for life (interpersonal skills). I totally agree with these considerations, since to attract students’ attention is one of the best strategies to make them have interest and learn a second language. For me, motivation is the basis of learning, and the active learning helps with it.

However, we also commented that the best option to teach a language is to integrate both methodologies, that is, traditional and active teaching, given that with the traditional you can strengthen the basis in order to assure it with more active ways to practise it.

Traditional Teaching

Active Teaching

We specially talked about the use of word clouds in the teaching-learning process. We mentioned different ways to use them into the different parts of the teaching, namely, pre-teaching, actual teaching and post-teaching. I have referred to this teaching strategy in the previous post as we used it in the station 3 of the active activity we completed in class, so I can just stress again its usefulness because of two things, its simplicity and its originality.

In the end, we made a distinction between Simulation and Role-play. They both are strategies used in active teaching and they could be confused at a certain extent because both of them imply the performance of a role, but we find the difference in the ending of the task. In a role-play, the participants have to ‘act’ and play a defined role, so the ending is already known by the ‘actor’, but in a simulation the participants do not ‘act’, they discuss and negotiate as themselves, so the conditions and decisions are impossible to know, there’s an open-ending. 
In my opinion, the use of both strategies can be positive since to act out some role can make students understand and put themselves in other people's shoes, but with a simulation is the student who expresses his/her own feelings, so there is a personal development.

As I said before, it is certain that this session had a more theoretical nature, but it was very valuable from my point of view in order to set the basis and be able to go to the next step by practising the theory with active tasks that will make our students to understand the content better.

See you soon!!!

We continue with... Session 2 (part 2)

Hi there!!

This post will be dedicated to the second part of session 2 in which we carried out the activities from Station 3.

Station 3

This station was fully devoted to “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”. We were provided with different activity proposals which had to be divided into pre-teaching, actual teaching or post-teaching activities. In order to take our decision, we bore in mind whether the questions demanded information from the actual reading or they could be carried out without a reading, so based on that, we considered, for example, the discussion about the author, Roald Dahl, and the think pair-share to be at the beginning so as to set the story in a context and relate it to other author’s works; or the exercise to find words and expressions to be in the actual teaching since it demanded a concrete reading comprehension.

After that, there was a more practical activity in which we had to represent a scene of our choice using some digital tools in which comics can be created. It was quite exciting for us at the beginning but as we looked into the provided webpages we let down. They were Goanimate and Bitstrips, both with very limited use unless you pay for it, so we found this fact so harmful for our students, since we don’t want them to spend money or have them in front of something that incites to do it. 

In addition, we considered that both pages were not so flexible because they would imply to create a new account out of our personal account, and that means again an inconvenient for our students’ use of digital tools, going against their personal privacy. However, I tried to do a comic scene with the limited uses that Goanimate offers without charge, just for you to see an example; for this, I chose the part of the story at the end when Mr. Bixby and his wife are in the dentist and he wants to uncover her from her lie about the pawnbroker ticket she supposedly found by chance: “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’scoat” comic scene.

Regarding to this comic scene, we were also asked to consider the possibility to post it in an educational webpage called Kidblog; my teamwork didn’t consider this option because as we decided not to create the comic, we skipped question 3, but I’ve done it by my own and I find this webpage very interesting. With Kidblog students can publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community, and that is because teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts. I also like it because it is not necessary to create a new account, you can access it as a google user, so this is very functional. I have created a teacher’s blog were students can follow me and participate on discussions, and I have posted on it “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat” comic scene. You can see my Kidblog’s page here.

Finally, we had to create a word cloud image using Woodle and consider if we would use it in class. Everyone in my team considered this tool very beneficial and witty to use it either in pre-teaching or in post-teaching. It can be used to provide the context of an activity, as a brainstorm to learn new vocabulary or to highlight the most important words found in a text and summarize it as well. So, here you have our word-cloud, thought to sum up “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat” short story using key words that can provide meaningful information about the story. 

Cooperative teamwork final conclusion

As a final thought about the work we performed as a cooperative team, I would say that it is necessary a great implication from all the members of the team so as to achieve the intended goal, in our case, the fulfillment of the 3 station activities. We started quite motivated, each member assuming his/her role as an important element of the group, but as the time went by some members had to assume the role of others because they were not so much integrated. Anyway, it has been a great experience for me, I have learnt another way to work in contrast to the traditional way, with the use of active learning, cooperative and collaborative learning and digital tools. They make students to help each other, socialize and get responsibilities so, in my opinion, active learning provides very important sources of motivation, social-affective relationships and personal knowledge. For all these reasons, I will keep on studying about these methods and strategies for sure. 

This has been all for now, see you soon with more active tasks to perform!!!! 

Session 2 (part 1)

Hi people!

Today, I’m going to explain you what we did in session 2. Our group got together and we split the class into 2 parts: first part for the activities in the Station 2, and second part for Station 3. In this post, I'll explain Station 2, and Station 3 will be explained in the next one.

Station 2

This station was centered again on both short stories we saw in class, “Lamb to theslaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”. In this station we were asked to get into a simulation, a learning strategy that consists of a given-task which requires participants to resolve a problem of some kind using their own life experience and character, that is, they do not have to “act” a role, because the role a person has to play is not specified.

In this way, a disaster was presented: a major environmental disaster was going to happen in the earth and it would bring an end to all humankind. Only 7 people could survive in a deserted island in the Pacific because it would be not affected by the disaster. We, as a group, had to decide which 7 people would be saved and which must stay behind, so, in order to perform this task, we had to work with the collaborative strategy, that is, all the members as a group had to decide and agree on a solution.

As you can see on the worksheet, we had 12 characters from the short stories studied, so we must come to an agreement on why save one or another. We had a deep discussion on the matter, it was quite interesting because we first consider as an important fact their profession but when we had more or less all the survivors, we realised that we didn’t have chosen almost any women. We changed our mind and included some more women since without them the humankind was not possible to procreate so it would die out. Finally, we came to an agreement and designed a glogster to present it: Salvation Island– The Chosen.

After doing the previous work, we didn’t have much time to finish the other activity we were required to do. We were asked to create a smart card in which present the island, and this could be an example I made by my own:

The fact that we had to choose the 7 survivors was also related to more significant aspects, as prejudices and human rights. It was certain that at the beginning we had some prejudices towards the homosexual, the priest or the top model, but finally we decided to include them into the list because these features were not really important, the significant aspects were that the homosexual was a SAS officer, familiar with surviving under extreme conditions, the priest has experience in agriculture and the top model was a young girl ready to procreate, so they could contribute to the group situation very positive qualities.

Moreover, the task included a webpage were we can give a little help to poor people (freerice.com), so in this way, we could help the characters of the short stories to survive from the environmental disaster but at the same time we could also help real people. Here was used the service-learning strategy, a strategy which uses what students learn in the classroom to solve real-life problems. In this case it was in an insignificant way, but service learning can be related in a considerable way into the classroom, bringing learning to life (for further information you can visit: National Service-Learning Clearinghouse).

Finally, the task also included some questions for us to think about the possibilities of use of the digital tools: Glogster to create the glog, and Kerproof to create the smart card. It was interesting for me again, since I could grasp some ideas from my classmates about the uses of the digital tools in the different parts of the teaching process.

So, here you have the station 2 explanation, see you soon!!!

TO BEGIN WITH... Session 1

Hi everyone, 

As I said to you before, I'll be publishing all the activities and resources we have been seeing since we began this course 2 months ago.

I'll also propose some reflections and feedback about them, and after that I'll suggest some others to develop in English as a Foreign Language teaching.

These activities are part of a subject I'm attending as part of a master's degree to become a Secondary English teacher, and the name of the course is "Recursos didácticos para la enseñanza de la lengua y la literatura".

Our lecturer is Laura Angelini Doffo, she's a very outgoing and active person, so that makes reference to the way she performs her classes, very lively and enjoyable.

To begin with, I'll start with the description of all the activities we carried out in the first  day of class.

Session 1 

This session could be divided into 2 parts:

The first part was kind of an introductory lesson in which our lecturer started by explaining the way she was going to assess us. After that she did a short explanation about what active learning is, since this method was the one she was going to carry out during the most part of the lessons. 

This methodology implies active teaching, so the teacher must plan and create activities all the time in order to make her students work on everything intended to be learnt by them. I find this fact very important, students need to practise and be in direct contact with the object of learning, so in this way they will be able to acquire it. However, this could be certainly applied to any field of learning, as it is proved that when something catches your attention and feelings is when you learn and gather it.

We also talked about the ICT's as a resource for English classes; we considered the variety of techs and resources in an English class as an essential way to engage students and call their attention through the 5 senses. I definitely agree with a variety of resources in a language class but also think that technology must be one of the most important strategies employed by the teacher. It is a fact that technology is part of the life of our secondary students, they have grown up with it so they are perfect users; because of that, they have changed their way to acquire a language, their learning styles are different, they are more visual, intuitive-random and multi-tasking. Therefore, we as teachers must adapt our teaching strategies so as to fit our students’ needs.

Then, the lecturer did a distinction between groupwork and teamwork. The first one is used when we are talking about collaborative learning, that is, when students are set into different groups where they will carry out an activity or task that will be solved with the aid of everyone. All of them have the same importance and through a discussion or debate, they will find the solution. In contrast, teamwork is used with cooperative learning and it implies different roles within a team; each student has a different responsibility so at the end all parts need to be performed in order to complete the task. This explanation was used for introducing the second part of the session.

In the second part, the lecturer explained the active learning activity we were going to complete. It would consist of a task divided into 3 stations. The 3 stations were built around 2 short stories we had to read (“Lamb to the slaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”, both by Roald Dahl), so all the activities were related to them. We were distributed into different teams, so the task would be performed by the use of the cooperative method. Each member of the team had a different role, which were the leader, the language supervisor, the secretary and the advisor. Groups were presumably of 4 people, but if more, some of the roles could be repeated; it was the case of my group, so we had 2 secretaries. We were Group 1 and the members of my group were:

- Eliseo Martínez, the leader

- Phil Lee, the advisor

- Sara Gozálvez, the language supervisor

- Irene Montalar and I, the secretaries

Furthermore, all the work done throughout the 3 stations was shared in a digital platform called Edmodo and in this way we could also see and comment our classmates’ work.

Station 1

In this section we had to deal with some questions related to both short stories, “Lamb to the slaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”.

We had no problems answering the questions, almost everyone participated in the decisions and we carried out our roles fairly.  The questions 2 and 3 dealt directly with information related to the stories and I found them quite appealing because, with the first one, we related both female protagonists, making us to think about their personalities and their behaviours, so we were able to go beyond the actual events; with the second one, we thought about the ironic symbols and what they symbolize in each story.

What’s more, we could learn to use some digital tools as Edmodo which is a very useful tool to share and comment our work with the rest of the teams and to see our classmates' work and learn from them, or soundcloud and vacaroo tools to record voice online. I have to say that we had some problems when using the voice-recorder tools, but we could fix them by using another alternative to record the voice, so here you have the audio in which one of our team members pretended to be Mrs Malony, excusing herself of the attempted murder. 

On the other hand, we were asked to consider when these tools would be used in a better way throughout the teaching process, that is, in pre-teaching, actual teaching or post-teaching, and I personally found these questions useful since we, as a group, could comment and discuss why use them in the first place or in another.

So, this is the explanation of Station 1, see you soon on the STATION 2!!!

Full of Enthusiasm

I'm a beginner in the world of teaching, studying at the moment to become an English teacher.

I certainly believe in MOTIVATION as one of the most important strategies when learning a language. It should be the core of any teaching methodology and teachers play a central role on engaging pupils' attention.

As part of a course, I'll be publishing some activities we carry out in class related to literature, reflections and feedback about them, and I'll propose some others to develop in English as a Foreign Language teaching.

I've just got into a new challenge I don't want to miss out!!