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.