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!

The diversity of the class

Nowadays, the modern school has an uniform curriculum, classes with a lot of students and divided by ages and we can't change that but what we are able to change is the tradiotional method of teaching and we could adapt those things we can't change to the principles of diversity of the class. But... What does it mean diversity of the class?

To start with, I have to clarify that the diversity of the classroom happens in every classroom, why? Because as Gardner says in the multiple intelligences research (which I would probably talk another day because I think is a quite interesting topic), every kid learn in a different way so that’s what make every class full of diversity. If education is applyed equally to every student, the differences will grow. So what diversity of the class is trying to do is to provide every student with what they need, how do we get that? If you want to get this aim there are two rules:

• You have to know every student, but also you have to know your class, this is to said, the whole group (how the group work better, which are the flaws and the strengths...
• One word, FLEXIBILITY: as a teacher you have to have flexibility in the methods, materials, classroom... This also means that you have to know perfectly these methods, materials, evaluations... This is really important because if we are facing the diversity of the class we have to know a lot of methods to cover every student needs.

Maybe you don’t have yet a clear idea about what is and what is not the diversity of the classroom, here are some hints:

·         NO:

o   Personalised.

o   Chaotic.

o   Another way of creating homogeneous groups.

o   Trying everyone to understand the same curriculum.

·         YES:

o   Proactive education which tries to cover a range of necessities.

o   More qualitative that quantitative.

o   Based on the diagnostic: the diagnostic isn’t just test, it is everything the the pupil does.

o   Multiple standpoints.

o   Focus on the pupil who has more responsibilities.

o   Combines individual learning, group learning and global learning.

Furthermore, we have to make sure that the educational environment (activities, the classroom, timetables...) encouraged each child to act to learn. Now, I’m going to introduce you the two keys of the attention to diversity in education:

·         Autonomous learning: each pupil has to know that he or she is responsible of his or her education that they have to create their own knowledge.

·         Cooperative learning:  the group is another responsible of the learning, the pupils have to get the knowledge by working together too because each of them has some flaws and strengths so if they work with their strengths they are going to go further and their flaws will not impediment their learning process.

Focusing on the topic about how the people learn better we have four keys:

·         Finding sense of what they have learnt.

·         Organised knowledge:
                 --Clarity knowledge.

                 -- Firmness knowledge.

·         Active participation.

·         Being motivated because they are learning something that they are interested in.

In general we could have two types of students, the advanced ones and the ones who have difficulties, as teacher we can’t deny this fact. This is just a general idea because this may vary on different subjects, moments... Furthermore there aren’t only two types of students but to start with we can focus in these two types.

• Advanced students could be bored because the tasks are easy for them, so they could end up being lazy students who haven’t acquired the habit of study. Also they could become in perfectionists who are never happy with their work and don’t accept the mistakes because they think having a mistake is fail. So with these students we have to challenge them so they have to make efforts in their education and also we could give them more responsibilities as trying to help another student who has difficulties.
• Students with difficulties: could end up being frustrated. As teacher we have to show them their good skills and make sure that those subjects in whom they have problems don’t affect the other ones. We can’t give them easy tasks so they don’t get frustrated because they have also to make an effort in their learning, this is to say, finding a middle point in which they make an effort but don’t get frustrated. We have to get them to learn the important, not specific details.

We have said that with this kind of education the group tasks are very important, here comes the problem how should we make the groups? The diversity of the class bet on the hetereogenous groups but we have to be careful on it, in this scheme you can see the advanced students, the middle-level students and the students with difficulties in a particular subject. With middle-level student I’m not saying that there’s a standard student those are the students between the advanced ones and the ones with difficulties. So the groups has to be homogeneous but can’t mix an advanced student with one who has a lot of difficulties because both are going to end up frustrated. But if you put an advanced student with a ‘’middle-level’’ student, the advanced one can help the other one and learn by teaching that also happens with the ones with difficulties and the middle-level students, the middle level students can help the ones with difficulties so neither of them gets frustrated or bored.

In this kind of education the role of the teacher has changed, the teacher is no longer the one who has all the information and provide it to the pupils, know the teacher has to create a bridge between the students and the learning. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important the knowledge of the teacher. The teacher has to fit the task with the class and students, of course it’s almost impossible to cover every student needs every time but we have to try it by using a lot of methods, materials, evaluations... so nobody is forget in this kind of education. The teacher has to let the students chose some tasks but also gives them some task, this has to be balanced. Both the teacher and the students are essentials in the class so they collaborate to get the aims.

A teacher has to create a climate of community, respect and security in the class and also has to plan every task carefully thinking about which could go wrong and having alternative plans. Let’s say that a teacher is a coach, a coach know the sport deeply and so their players and the team. The coach has goals to each player and to the team. In each practise the coach plan some individual activities, sections activities and group activities. The coach knows how to motivate each player and he promotes team work. He encouraged the team, makes an effort, give instructions and give responsibilities to some players to get his aims. But the most important thing about a coach is that he doesn’t play the game.

In conclusion, we could summarize everything in the triangle theory which explains that a triangle is not a triangle if it has not its three vertexes. Every vertex is essential for education forgetting one of those would mean that you are not educating properly.

As we have seen, a diversity class is not easy but if we focus on it, it will be much more educative. We have to understand how our pupils learn and how do they enjoy learning and try to cover it as much time as possible. Something as simple as changing the normal classroom and going to the hallway, playground... can catch their attention so they would learn much and better. The kids has to go to the school excited because they don’t know what they’re going to do so every day is different. Everyday has to be a challenge for the kid.

All this information has been provided by a book written by Tomlinson called ‘’La diversidad del aula’’.

ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF TEACHING UNITS AND TENS

             A week ago, my teacher told us that we have to prepare a ‘’class’’ in which we had to explain the units and tens by the universal design of learning principles. My group decided to explain first some theory and then do some other activities and games. We first split them in groups named as important places or monuments, there were a monument of each continent so everybody could feel part of the class, because the class was supposed formatted by 5 different cultures, we thought that it was important to show them some characteristics about the monuments, although it was a math class you can teach them geography and a little history. We also gave some roles of people who don’t understand English to make the simulation easier. We explained the theory with a power point to give some visual learning, the power point had some balls and with each ball we put a poster which said with numbers and letter how much units or tens there were.

Then we thought that we need an exercise to be sure that the students understood the information, we try to motivate them not by competence but with a simulation, we told them that their monuments were falling down so they had to make piles of bricks to endure the monuments, we gave them how much tens and units they had to get with those bricks in order to save the monuments but we also tell them that everybody should have at least a brick and that they had to help each other. Once they did it, we started another game in which they had to be walking around the class and the teacher told them to make groups of certain units and tens.

                But our practice had some mistakes as in the power point we should have written in every ball 1 to get them to understand that each ball was a unit and also focus a little more in the tens.  They second game was also a little difficult and the kids may not have understood it, also we lost the control of the class sometimes and we could have ask their attention by explaining to them the exercise that when the teacher raise his/her hand each of them have to raise their hand and be quiet. I think our best activity was the last game because they could have fun and also learn. Also when we explained the monument, we could have show them it on google earth so they can see them and place them ok.

What they do right, some groups give the students the opportunity to choose which game they wanted to play, one of these groups also includes a lot of types of learning lie using the tablet, by kinesthetic, writing and reading… That’s why I think that we should have included the children in the activity but letting them to choose which game they wanted to play and make different games in each group so they do different things at the same time so nobody gets bored.

              Finally we saw a video in which the teacher did it in a real class with blocks, the interactive board, groups of level in which the kids with more difficulties had a special attention, she showed them by an example with one of the groups what they had to do, so everybody was able to understand what to do by whatching the first group. Even with 11 different nationalities, she was able to teach them all. What caught more my attention was when the class was about to finish she asked them what they had learnt and that's how she evaluates them.