1. Watch the following video and SPEAK OUT YOUR MIND!!!
2. Tell us what was hot in your mind after watching the videos!!
2. Comment and then RESPOND to comments made. At least 2 participation plus your first personal comment, for a total of five comments!!
Opening date: November 16th to November 21th.
HAVE FUN!!
Successful teaching is measured on the client´s satisfaction rates more than on the learning process itself. Education has become into a private business where most school´s directors or owners are mostly willing to make more profit so the business can stay open. Consequently, it is not random than some many schools treat students and parents as clients more what they are: students who are enrolled into an educational institution to construct knowledge while shaping cultural and social values. And on the other hand, parents are to be a support more than a barrier to let the process unfold.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, the reality in Costa Rica and in my other countries falls into this merchandize system. Education and its inner core principles are no longer the ultimately goal; consequently, we have teacher providing sloppy classes where they are afraid of pushing students to do well, or to help them become sensitive enough to some social issues for they are afraid of parents complains, and this is the kind of feedback lots of teachers get from their coordinators. The assessment provided then is routed to please a client more than to support the learning and teaching process. And as the video mentioned, at the end of the school year, teacher may just get a satisfactory evaluation rate as the only source of assessment.
Finally, not only students are being victims on the evaluation system but teacher. Our assessment is ranked on summative standards just as our students. The ideal goal will be to prioritize education over pleasing the client; nevertheless, this is our reality and we have to develop some skills to manage to do both.
I agree with you when you stated that in most institutions the feedback given to teachers is based on the students and parents personal satisfaction in regards to grades, and I consider that is an extremely sad reality. The monetary power some institutions have nowadays is based on satisfying and pleasing learners and parents, which just gives teachers one path to follow and sometimes it is to get into their comfort zone, into a very squared way of teaching, by making sure everybody will be able to get good grades and so parents will be happy; it has turned into an insane cycle that is only leading the educational system to a dangerous edge in which everybody loses.
DeleteIt is a shame that students are currently consider clients or numbers only for the fact that they pay for a faster and low quality education. I may sound selfish or just wrong saying that for example to a private university, but I have been there and I ran away fast. Everybody said it was faster and easier , but in a workplace, weakness will be their main feature. Teachers just follow a standard website or virtual class which only offers few learning tasks that are easy to check based on a provided layout or software that makes almost everything, and it measures knowledge without feedback, just a number.
DeleteI think there is also dependence from books. As we discussed in class, some textbooks became course books because they provide some much information and many resources that the teacher just follows what is stated. So, let´s suppose we follow everything that the textbook includes, and the coordinator of the course makes a survey based on the objectives from the textbook. Probably, the survey will be ok, but does it really exemplify your teaching practice? Does it really give you feedback about extracurricular situations that can affect your class? Does it really measure you as a teacher? Definitely, it does not. Education has become a nonsense mechanical cycle that does not either construct or provide feedback.
DeletePaula, you nailed it! I have seen both perspectives. In private schools and high schools, the source of the feedback they give to their teachers comes from parents’ comments; sometimes positive comments some other times impartial. But in their case, money runs the business; therefore, they have to please parents. And it is so depressing when you realize that you work for a school that does not support its teachers. On the other hand, in public education, they are governed by averages and metrics. However, I don’t understand their concept about feedback because teachers hardly get to know it. I have a friend; actually he is the participant of my final project and he has worked for MEP for 7 years and he has never received the feedback of his performance appraisals. Can you believe that? How come teachers don’t get the feedback, how are they going to know what they have to improve? I don’t know there are so many leaks in the system that make me wonder if we are going to change or go by the flow.
DeleteAccording to the video I completely agree, we as teachers in Costa Rica and in the public system do not receive trainings in order to help students to improve their skills. I know if we as teachers do not have the tools we can do our best. Something that I belief is the following:
DeleteWhile working and reflecting on my teaching practice, I understood that there is not a ‘correct’ way or method to teach, but there are many ways to help my students reach their goals. Even though, many teachers believe that old methods should not be used, I strongly believe that they all have important principles that can help teachers in their daily practice, and I can assure that a combination of them has constituted a good ingredient in my teaching experience. I have to admit, though, that it is not quite easy to put all the pieces of foreign language teaching methods together, but in my teaching experience I have selected activities and topics to catch my students attention in the room.
I think you are totally right, an extremely important aspect is to select what works from every approach, method, strategy or tecnhique to adap it and to use it for the specific class context we are working with, I think that in order to help students, teachers must make really important decisiones both based on knowledge and experience.
DeleteHi Elioth, I think that in CR, the problem with the training programs of the public system is that they don’t reach all professors equally because of many reasons, let say, teachers’ location, academic load, high school organization, personal interest, among others. Consequently, much of the feedback that the teacher gives to his/her students has to come up from his/her own teaching experience. Therefore, no matter if the system provides opportunities for on-going training (which should be definitely), there must be also a personal desire on teachers to pursue professional development. Thankfully, there are many ways to increase your knowledge whether on your own, at home using internet or enrolling on online courses, and if you prefer the old school, you can look for institution or non-profit organizations to receive a class. The main point here is that there should always be a personal interest on the teacher to improve his/her teaching every day. Like your case, It seems you are driven by a personal desire to be better and that is why you take the best out of the teaching methods.
DeleteNowadays, feedback is an essential tool in many different fields; however, it is not usually used in education to help teachers improve; sometimes, the fear to feel as teachers exposed to someone’s comments or constructive criticism not even lets teachers get together to share their personal class experiences and to ask for pieces of advice for improving and helping students in the class. I do believe giving feedback is powerful, and it can enhance positive attitudes and ways to address the distinct, varied and even difficult situations instructors have to face on a daily basis, but to start this process of giving feedback, there should be a previous work on learning and teaching how to give it to help people see strengths as well as weaknesses from a perspective of targeting areas of improvement rather than criticizing negatively someone’s job.
ReplyDeleteWe teachers use feedback a lot. I consider myself as a "feedbacker" I am constantly giving feedback, bu who gives feedback to me? Nobody I have learned from you and your experiences, but there is not any administrative source or representative working on this.
DeleteI agree with you. Maybe one of the causes of being afraid at receiving feedback is being negatively criticized. There are many people who just know to make destructive comments. We need to learn how to be assertive in order to say the truth in a way that instead of hurting people´s feelings can provide a formative feedback that inspires a constant improvement for everybody.
DeleteI agree with both of you, I think it would be very interesting to design a proposal for a "Feedback Framework" for teachers. Don't you think so? I consider it would provide teachers with a basis and source of information for giving feedback. Actually, in the video, it was stated that there is a lack of this type of material, so I think it could be very helpful to create a framework for it.
DeleteYou mentioned how powerful feedback can be. The questions that rises is what kind of feedback are we used to? Can feedback be informative and formative? Are we really open to hear and receive any kind of feedback? Are pre-service and in-.servive teachers being trained to provide and received any kind of feedback?
DeleteI totally agree with you guys, we as teachers need feedback from our colleagues in order to improve our teaching practice. Even the students´feedback can help us to improve our classes
DeleteThe necessity of overcoming economic situations, improving professional profile, have active participation in society and getting more job opportunities is what make people feel and accomplish the necessity of learning a foreign language, in this case English, and be part of a bilingual work environment. Learning a language is a political issue because people need to fulfill work demands and requirements in order to be successful in their job. For example, doing business, tourism industry, communication, technology and traveling are some areas where communication in English becomes a must to be successful. Learning a language is synonym of having both a gift and a source to be independent and successful in a commercially developed society.
ReplyDeleteTeaching English is a political issue because it is the government decision to improve bilingualism in an educated society. It is the government decision to improve the quality of their citizens giving them the opportunity to learn French and English in school or high school years. This opportunity provides the basis for training students into a globalized world, where they can use their cognitive skills and develop their strength to be competitive and successful in society. Although there are many issues to correct in regards to teaching methodology, teaching sources, technology access, teacher’s role, students’ role, needs, and willing, at least citizens can get a piece of information, that only if they choose, they can improve with further studies. The problem is that we do not get feedback from the government, only few congress or meetings that just tell few problems faced during the year and how money was used to overcome these problems. Are we trained enough to teach a language? Are we teaching a foreign language appropriately? Are we teaching language components?
For instance, learning and teaching a foreign language has a lot to do with culture. The way how words are used, the way how we speak, address to people and even behave while communicate with others are all related to the culture where a language belongs to. Besides learning vocabulary, grammar rules, pronunciation from readings and communicative tasks, culture provides the speaker with proper values, behavior, language background, correct use of words which not only improves communicative skills in the target language speaker, but also gives them the opportunity to be successful in their native and foreign culture. It is not the same learning English in North America that in our country; we may not know about specific culture contexts or situations which are proper of its culture, or even be accepted or rejected when our accent does not have a North American intonation, but at least, the target language offers the opportunity to learn more, especially about cultural aspects which may differ from ours.
I also believe in this conception you have of education as a political issue, I think education is the door towards promoting better and improved values to society, and it is an engine that makes many other fields work out perfectly. The goverment must be able to correct those inadequate practices and to formulate plans for improving the already existent patterns, policies and systems.
DeleteWhat a controversial topic regarding the political aspect of education! Every country´s educational curriculum is intended to provide a system to contribute to form the concept of a society and its culture. Whether the government fails in providing a better education is not simply a matter of doing a poor job or being negligent, there might be hidden reasons for the need to remain with the old fashion-educational system: political, economic, none of the mentioned….who knows. What I know is that changes take lots of time and lots of guts. There is the need then to lead differentiated processes as a contribution to the intended change we want to make.
DeleteWhen we learn a language, we can say that we study a foreign language in our own social and cultural environment. We learn it for several purposes including both academic and professional ones. The difference is that we are not learning it from its corresponding native culture and country. In this case, we just learn about its culture, linguistic structures and implications, but we do not adapt its culture and make out life to change because of it. When we acquire a language it means that we not only learn the language but also adapt our life style to the culture this language belongs to, even making this language the official one to communicate in our daily life. Learning English as a foreign language is synonym of learning English in Costa Rica, and learning English as a second language it means studying it in its corresponding cultural context. Is Costa Rican government aware of this necessity? Is our country’s government and education ministry a good coach for educators? Are they providing the main sources, materials and technology to overcome class problems and catch students’ attention to stay in the classroom?
ReplyDeleteLooking at the usage of technology in the sample class, I agree with the fact that Technology helps to contextualize the L2 class. Technology gives the opportunity to use pictures, videos, recordings which show natural and contextualized realia to help students have a clear idea of specific topics in regards to culture, food, idiomatic expressions, news, body language among other academic, social and inter cultural ideas that only looking at them, makes them easier to understand.
Technology is a way of bringing real life to the class, not only to learn with it, but also to understand topics in an easier, visual and auditory way. After looking at examples from pictures, videos or sounds students may have a clear perception as basis to generate class learning, practice, production and even class discussion taking into account the target language practice. As the author mentioned in the reading, video offers the opportunity to present language on its cultural context, language labs help students to keep interactive communication and feedback and teaching sources such as modern books with software or class ware help to integrate language skills in the learning and production processes.
From my personal experience, I use technology in my L2 classes every week. My groups have access to a language lab with high tech components, such as intelligent whiteboard, video beam, mp3 booths, computer, flat screen, air conditioner and home theater. In the classroom they have flat screen, video beam, laptops, desktop computer, CD player and air conditioner. Both classrooms are full of technology even comfortable seats and air conditioner to make the class even more enjoyable. In the lab, we watch videos, we play multimedia grammar and listening exercises where students are able to interact with the software’s avatars, pronunciation class-ware where they can see the articulators’ behavior while pronouncing in English, and they can record themselves in the booths and send the recording by mp3 files to the teacher’s computer. The video beam is useful for visual aids during oral presentations and of course as a tool for teaching, too. The home theater system provides a high definition sound to support the listening tasks.
ReplyDeleteIn the classroom, we use the flat screen to play a short video, a music video or the workbook’s video. The CD player is useful for listening tasks and the computers in case we need to search information on internet o just to play flash drives, CDs or DVDs for teaching purposes. I really like the amount of technology available, but it doesn’t mean that the 100% of the classroom is high tech based; these are just simply resources to support the Communicative Language Teaching Approach and other related approaches too.
I really like the way how the teacher from the video said “My name is Sarah and I am an English teacher” she feels so proud of her profession. Actually, she inspired me to keep a fluent teaching in class and speak strong and secure. Self-reflection becomes the strongest point in class to make us learn and understand from what we do in the classroom.
In my opinion, teachers have the most important job in the world: we help people to learn and improve day by day. But still, we forget learning never stops. Teaching is an unfinished learning process that needs feedback for improving.
ReplyDeleteBill Gates states in the video that in Shangai, China, students own the first place in a worldwide ranking in terms of reading, math and science. One of the factors from this success is the constant training teachers have. For instance, some of the practices teachers do include:
• Young teachers need to observe master teachers´ work.
• There are weekly study groups where teachers get together and give feedback among each other.
• Students make a survey to give feedback to the teacher in terms of :
*Making challenging questions
*Providing different ways of explaining an idea
One of the teaching practices that called my attention was the video recording of the class. It would be great if the system allow us to use a camera for recording every single moment in our class in order to analyze our practice. However, the system and some stakeholders prohibit the use of these tools. Even though writing a journal is an excellent self assessment practice, a video recording would help more.
Finally, another teaching practice that has always impressed me is the colleagues’ sessions. I think they are essential not just to talk about academic and teaching aspects, but also about students´ situations. More than a therapeutic activity, sharing our daily teaching with colleagues gives us alternative ways to address certain situations , receive and construct feedback just as the popular saying states “two (or in this case more than two) are better than one. ”
You are right! Self-observation and monitoring helps teachers to be aware of their own teaching process, which comes from Reflective Teaching a practice that can be carried out if feedback is not received constantly, to have sources of information to improve the teaching process and to address students' needs.
ReplyDeleteI would refer to two concepts I got from the video. First of all, feedback, I do not know if it is just my opinion or it is a general perception but in CR, this meaning is a little bit distortive because teachers tend to associate feedback with evaluation and the latter, as the same time, links to a number, a grade and at this point is when educators paralyze. But why the connection? Where does it come from? For me, it comes from an evaluation system that has emphasized for decades on numbers and averages. Therefore, some teachers are not receptive to take feedback because of this negative connotation that brings in it. I am not overgeneralizing; of course, it is what I have seen and it also depends on the context in which feedback is giving. I think that a possible action plan could be to work with teachers on the concept of feedback, what they understand, what is its function, etc. After that, I could talk about evaluation strategies such as collaborative work or video recording as showed on the video. Regarding the first one, I think that once teachers understand that feedback is not harmful, they will be more open minded to work with peers and build up together. Concerning video recording, it is matter of feeling comfortable, having the equipment and committing to do something worthy with the information even to share it with colleagues. What really matters is that feedback is meant to be helpful and to make you improve and succeed in your teaching practice. You always must take positive feedback and what you think it applies to you.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the need to be trained to provide self and peer-feedback; nevertheless, it should become a practice not only for in-service teacher but for pre-service teachers. When studying to become teachers, the system should provide the space for teachers to discuss, analyze and make a modification plan based on their pre-service teacher training instead of simply providing a summative feedback.
DeleteI agree and a big question that comes to my mind is: Why Is Teacher Development Important?: Because Students Deserve the Best
DeleteGreat teachers help create great students. In fact, some studies shows that an inspiring and informed teacher is the most important school-related factor influencing student achievement, so it is critical to pay close attention to how we train and support both new and experienced educators.