The competitiveness is the cancer of the 

comradeship.

This is just the beginning

               Today has been  my last class of didactics; I think this class has taught us about teaching to learn not just teaching to make the students know.  Isn’t it wonderful how different it is teaching to know and teaching to learn? Didactics is about adapting to the kid and not making the kid adapt to the teacher, as teachers we have to be sure that EVERY STUDENT is learning. Understanding the pupils’ needs and the students’ strengths would make you a good teacher.Furthermore, as teachers we have to make the barriers of our students disappear,this is to say, we have to help them to destroy them, that is our most important task.

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                We have to become in students of our students, in order to understand them. We have to understand that we are not in the focus anymore, that the most important thing in our class are the students and not us. We have to be the guides to the knowledge and not the providers of the knowledge. Focusing on the students needs and interests would make you a better teacher.

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                As teachers we have to think that our students can get whatever they want, if they have some interests we have to encourage them.  Sometimes, the students don’t get into the class because we are not helping them to get in. Nowadays, the students are constantly been judged by the teachers, parents... We have to discover what they are, why they are like this and what could they be that’s another task of the teachers.

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                Finally, we have to realize how important our role in nowadays society is. Teachers are constantly undervalued, but even when the society doesn’t see the importance of our role, we cannot undervalue us, because if we don’t value our job we aren’t going to make the better we can make. Education is the most powerful tool to change the world, don’t ever forget it.

*I do not own this images, these images are from the book: To Teach the journey in comics. Really really interesting!

To learn to do

                This week we have been working with didactic units, with a program that makes easier to make it, called PDC. But the program wasn’t what caught more my attention, in my opinion on Tuesday we were talking about the basic competences that the EU asked to include in the curriculum, it is very interesting how the didactic units change when you are focusing in competences instead of objectives.What's best in this new education is that it recognizes that every students have strenghts and challenges and learn best at their own pace, sometimes with supports.

                When you focus on objectives, you have to focus on the evaluation which means that you have to get your students to get those objectives, and nothing else matters. This is to say, you work with the kids to finally evaluate them, make sure that they have got the objectives and then keep going to the next objectives. On the other hand, if we focus on the competences, we are focusing in the methodology. This means that the teacher is going to make them understand the information, not only to know it, furthermore the teacher is going to help them to develop the different skills.

                Ok, we all know that focusing in the methodology is more important that focusing in the evaluation, because this means that we don’t want our students to learn with the purpose of passing the test, we want them to go deeper in the knowledge and get them to learn it. But the real purpose of focusing in the competences is hidden in the nowadays society, our information society this is to say, everyone can just pick the phone and look for information. Today is not important to know everything because we actually have every information at our fingertips, nowadays is more important to understand this information and to be critical with it. The competences are about being able to use the knowledge in our daily life.

 Here you have the list of competences that the EU has asked the countries to include it in the curriculum. As you are going to see, the competences are not only about being critical and understand the information, the competences go further. 

• Communication in the mother tongue.
• Communication in foreign languages.
• Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology.
• Digital competence: involves the confident and critical use of information society technology and the basic skills in information and communication technology.
• Learning to learn: is related to learning, the ability to pursue and organize one's own learning.
• Social and civic competences.
• Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship: is the ability to turn ideas into action.
• Cultural awareness and expression, which involves appreciation of the importance of the creative expression of ideas, experiences and emotions in a range of media.

          The most important is that you don’t stop leaarning these competences when you finish school; you keep learning it throughout your life.  In conclusion, our society nowadays doesn’t ask for people who knows a lot of stuff, our society asks for people who has those competences. Today is more important to have the ability to know how to learn that know everything you have studied, also know how to deal with people is quite important, know how to express yourself… We have to adapt the education to our society changes, because otherwise we are only going to get an obsolete education.

About the experience of the consciousness-aware

A few weeks ago, my friend and I decided to show our classmates the reality of Spain, this is to say, we thought of how important is for future teachers to know how the crisis has affected the society and therefore the children. As volunteers, we know how much our country is suffering the crisis and that the most affected people are the kids.

                We tried to give our mates, some ‘’theory’’ that we thought was important to understand the situation. First, we explained to them the areas of exclusion and inclusion and the four worlds in our world. We did this with some pictures to make it easier and less dense. Then we played a game which was about prejudices, this game tried to explain how we prejudice people by their image and by some little information that we had about them, but they are more than image and information, they are people with their backgrounds and we can’t just judge them we have to understand them. As teachers we think that this is an important lesson, because it’s easy to judge our students by their image or by some little information that we have about them, we have to go deeper and try to know them better, not just imagining how they are.

                Our next step was to give some data about the reality of Spain nowadays because of the crisis, because real information makes things clearer. Finally, we told them our experience because we are conscious that what catches people attention is to hear a real story. Our last step was to encourage them to see the reality of their world by themselves, so we give them some different options of voluntary work.

                As teachers we are probably going to fade a lot of students with economical or family problems, and I think being a volunteer is the best way to fade this reality. Also, being a volunteer could help this world to be a better place and these kids to have a better reality.

How education has changed for me

Today I was reviewing everything we have done in the didactics subject and something came to my mind, with all these information which is the education we are aiming for? We want an education that encourages the child development. An education which promotes critical-thinking that teaches the children to think and to evaluate their world full of manipulated information, also this education has to encourage the kid to learn by him/herself, it has to make students to love learning and this education has to teach the importance of hard-work, cooperative work and to show moral values.

                But how do we get that? Firstly, as teachers we have to leave the center of the stage, because now, the important role is in our students hands. We don’t have the information, the students have it, we are now guides in their process of education and we have to learn with them. This means that the relationship between the student and the teacher has to be bidirectional and that the responsibility of the education is in both, teacher and students hands and the students have to be conscious of it. Believing in the cooperative work, the groups of the class have to be heterogeneous so everybody can enrich with other’s strengths. In these groups, the students have some roles and each of them has to experience every role.

                Now, we are not going to focus only on the product (exam), we have to focus also on the process of the students, also the pupils are going to self-evaluated themselves and if they are working in groups they are going to evaluate their colleagues. The teacher has to adapt his/herself to the students and not otherwise. The teacher has to do an observation of the kids to get to understand them and their situation, also he or she has to motivate their students by using different resources and materials.This education promotes both autonomy and cooperative work, so the students learn by themselves and with others. We get this by giving the kids different responsibilities. The most important idea of this new education is that education is not a competition is a cooperation.

Cooperative learning

                

                So yesterday we worked about cooperative learning, my classmates had to teach me about it. I think the experience of being on the other side, this is to say, being the ‘’pupil’’ is also interesting because when your classmates try to teach you something, is easier to understand the information.

                First of all, cooperative learning is about organising the class in heterogeneous groups, in these groups the pupils will work with each other, also they will go deeper than working individually. Cooperative learning has to be seen as another resource of education, its aim is to get not only the knowledge but to get the personal and social integration, affective support and higher work efficiency. These are some characteristics about cooperative learning:

•  It’s not competitive.
•  Cooperative learning has been created for everybody.
• You learn to work individually and in groups.
• It tries to develop skills such as: empathy, active listening, to dialogue, sharing information.

There are three kind of cooperative learning groups.

• Informal groups: this groups are ‘’short-term’’ groups, I mean, these groups are used to momentary issues. For example, you have shown your students a video and you want them to comment it in groups.
•  Formal groups: these are for a specific task which can last some sessions. For example, you make groups and you asked them to work about mammals, so then they have to expose their teamwork to the class.
•  Base groups: This kind of group is long-term; they can last until the graduation. In these groups, the students help each other with their difficulties. This group has to be monitored by the teacher.

            In cooperative learning the students has some ''roles'' in the groups, all of them has to experienced each role, here you have an example of roles:

But these groups have also some rules:

1. Everybody has to participate.
2. Everybody is equal.
3. Communication abilities have to be taught directly: such as having arguments, knowing how to put into words what you want to say...
4. There are going to be conflicts but we have to get to the solution together.
5.  Each member is going to be evaluated by the teacher and their other members; also the group is going to be evaluated.

We are going to finish with the differences of the traditional school and the one that we aim to:

Working in groups experience

The past two weeks in my class of didactics we have been experienced the process working in groups. First of all, our teacher asked a student of my class to make heterogeneous groups of 5 people, this groups had to become ‘’specialist’’ of a topic there were two topics one was the diversity of the class and the other one was cooperative work. As you can imagine mine was the diversity of the class.

                We had a lot of information about the diversity of the class, so it was impossible for us to read them all. So, what did we do? We became specialist about little topics of the diversity of the class so then we could share our information with the other members of the group so finally we would have understood everything. I think my group did pretty well because we all had many conclusions and some schemes, so the pooling was pretty easy also it was very rewarding because we all went deeper in every topic and also as a lot of information was common we helped each other and if we hadn’t understood something, the other person would have explained us. Next class we make different groups of people with the same topic, so we shared the information with each other, it was very nice because we have left something about the diversity of the class and the other group as well so we increased our information.

                And this week what we have done is getting all the groups with the same topic together so we shared all our information, including some details and then we had to prepare the information with the people of the other topic. For me, getting together all the groups of the same topic at first, was a bit overwhelming but then, once we all starting to work it actually provides me with a lot of feedback, new information and different  points of view(Actually I’m  adding new information to my latest post). Then the teacher asked me to make groups of three people in which one of them had to be someone who doesn’t usually speaks so he or she had to be the one leading the teaching to the students of the other topic, doing this task was interesting and I had to select carefully the people who was going to talk, It was not precisely simple but it was interesting to do it.

                Finally, once we were in the work groups, we looked for ways to teach the other group. My group decided to try not to only explaining it by words but also with pictures and videos. I think we also did it pretty well and our colleague of the other topic told us she had understood it well. Finally, next week the other the people of the other topic are going to teach us about cooperative learning. I think being on the other side have to be also interesting. I’ll tell you about it next week!