How dialogue with a teacher helps children learn.

In this extract of the text Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking by Mercer and Littleton it takes place a reflection on how language and class interaction affects students’ learning process. In this case, the intervention of the teacher is analyzed while he’s teaching his lesson and researchers could observe that while doing the lesson, inside the class some “ground rules” have been established and accepted by the different members of the class. This rules are two: the first one is that the teacher should ask and use to ask a lot of questions and the second one is that students don’t use to ask many questions. With that being said the question that comes up is “Are that amount of questions necessary?”, and there’s only one valid answer: Depends. Yes, it depends on the quality of the questions that are being asked and the relevance, if they make sense they are necessary.

But which questions are relevant and of a good quality? Well the text gives us some ideas related to that. The first case that can help us to solve this question is the one that talks about two students doing a project in pairs during the realisation of this project the teachers does an intervention in order to correct some mistakes. With the questions the teacher not only identifies the mistakes and correct them (not giving the solution but asking for it) but she also is able to create a scaffolding for her students in which she helps students to reach their goals. The intervention of the teacher in this case was crucial not only for students but also for the teacher in order to know the level of her pupils.

In the second case that takes place in Mexico, a group of researchers have analyzed different schools in which the students’ level are different but the contents that are taught are the same. So they observed that the difference between groups consisted on the teachers’ dialogue, the students with a higher level were requested by the teacher to make explicit their thoughts in order to guide the development of the students and even to discover the initial level of the pupils, they were also requested to reflect on their thoughts by creating why questions, teachers also offered students rules and tips to solve the problems but making a connexion with reality and encouraging their students to make evident which was their progress and finally, they encouraged their students to interact in order to create more complex thoughts and to take into account the opinion of the rest of the class.

Once we know how to intervene in the class, the text introduces us the context of dialogical teaching. Dialogical teaching consists on asking determined questions to provoke thoughtful answers, take into account answers in order to ask more questions and to create a block of knowledge not only not contextualized questions, interactions among the members of the class are done in real context situations and not in artificial dialogues. So with this students are given the opportunity to ask questions, reflect of their points of view and comment on ideas that come up during the lesson, teacher is able to create a situation in which he can find the previous or the actual knowledge of the students, teachers find different evidences that can help them to adapt the the new contents to students needs (scaffolding), last but not least, teacher tries to create a context in which students feel comfortable and they are able to create their own knowledge (child-centered classroom).

As we go through the text, we can see some important strategies that could be use during the realisation of the lesson and that can help our students to improve their knowledge. Therefore, it is convenient to use “why” questions that help our students to reflect on their thoughts, our pupils should use  reasoning words such as “so”, “if” or “because” and offering reasons to back up their statements,  teacher should check that everyone understood the new concepts and he has to make sure that the debates offered in class lead students to a common agreement and a common knowledge.
With that being said, the text offers a table with four kinds of teaching procedures that can help us while doing our classes. Each procedure is important at its time and none is better that the others, but we must be aware when to use each one. The procedures are:

	Interactive	Non-Interactive
Authoritative	Interactive/Authoritative	Non-Interactive/Authoritative
Dialogic	Interactive/Dialogic	Non-Interactive/Dialogic

Nonetheless the procedure that should extend the most during classes and that should be used frequently is the interactive/dialogic procedure, that could lead to debates and the creation of a common knowledge among students. In the same case, when we are teaching some rules that are unbreakable or that can lead only to one possible solution, we will use a non-interactive and authoritative procedure, which is not bad, but just required.
To sum up the text, what it is trying to explain is that while doing class, we should try to create in our students a critical thinking with which they question and reflect on what they are learning, they discuss about the new concepts with themselves and their classmates and a way of thinking that can lead them to build their own knowledge but also helps them to create links of significance with their previous knowledge. This way of thinking, practically equal to the scientific method, should be take into practice by teachers and students, with the first ones facilitating the tools and methodologies that can adapt to every students’ need and with the second ones taking profit of what the teacher offers them.

Getting Started on Differentiated Instructions

Carol Tomlinson talks in this video (and as I do in my introduction) about the importance of doing the first step while trying to work on differentiated instruction. She says that the important is not to start to perfection but just to start, because learning is a continuous process and with mistakes we learn how to improve and do better each and every day of our lives. With that being said, she considers that starting by analyzing your students, could be useful to start your differentiated instruction, taking weeks or lessons to analyze your students could be really useful at the beginning. You should try to identify which are their needs. If you don’t feel comfortable with this methodology, she offers the possibility of using a pre-assessment tool in which you must identify which are the concepts that students should know by now. So you can do this pre-assessment at the beginning of every unit and once you have done it several times you can see how you should start the next unit of the book or even you can ask yourself if you are going to use the book.

In this way she considers that little actions like taking your time with a group of students to see their level or just to re-teach something could be really useful for students. A useful thing to do with students could be to prepare different kinds of homework depending on the class level and while doing that paying attention to the students who need you the most. In that way you can join a group of 5-6 students and do with them low preparation activities and once a month try to work with the a more difficult activity to see where is their level at that moment. So once you do that you can see the results in a year and from that point the upcoming years seeing that you now have a guide to assess and attend the different needs in the class and that from a difficult methodology you now have an habit. As she says, education is not a sprint, is a marathon and you must work every day to get the results, little by little and never surrender. So differentiated instruction is not possible from one day to another but by being constant.

Students at the center of their own learning.

In this summary of a document written by McCombs and Wishler,  we can see their 12 principles of student-centered learning. The principles proposed are:

1. The nature of the learning process: both authors affirm that the learning process is a conscious and volunteer process in which students will not only learn what is taught, but they should do it while being engaged. Therefore, letting students being aware of this process and helping them to set their goals and offering engaging activities, will help to awake our students’ interest on learning but also to be occupied in full commited activities.
2. Goals of the learning process: once the students set their goals, as teachers we should try to see if the goals are achievable, once we know that, we should be aware that the activities we are offering to each and every student are appropriated for their learning style, but also appropriated to their goals. Therefore we must offer challenging activities based in logic more than memorization.
3. The construction of knowledge: while learning, students will relate the new knowledge to their previous knowledge, that is why we should offer information and concepts that are related in some way to their previous knowledge, just to challenge these or to enlarge them. Students then, will make connections and structures in their brains in order to organize and simplify the new information.
4. Higher order thinking: while we (teachers) allow students to build their own knowledge, they should acquire strategies to confront these new concepts, in that case we should offer them the possibility to question the new knowledges with essential questions that will make them reflect on what they’re learning, but we should also allow them to discuss about these new concepts with their classmates in order to build a common knowledge or just to clarify the difficulties he/she may have with this new knowledge. Nonetheless if our students are good at working by themselves, we should offer them the tools to assess and analyze the new concepts.
Motivational influences on learning: while students are into a learning process, their motivation and mood will influence them to reach a higher or lower level of knowledge. In this case, we can see that this motivation has 4 key factors: behavioural, humanistic, cognitive and sociocultural. Behavioural is reinforced by punishing or rewarding the student,  the humanistic is determined by a need of confidence, self-esteem, self-fulfillment and self-determination; the cognitive is related to the idea of success or failure and expectations, students will try to achieve as much as they can but being realistic, in this process they can succeed or fail; and finally sociocultural is related to being part of a community and create links with them by sharing knowledge so the individual could fit into a group.
6. The intrinsic motivation to learn: all students love the feeling of learning and need to learn in order to feel more realised, but teachers must be careful of the students level because if they’re doing something too complicated for them, this can lead into a demotivational situation, that’s why if teachers are aware of their students’ knowledge, interests and capabilities then they can scaffold the new knowledges in order to reach each and every student and adapt them to pupils.
7. Characteristics of motivation-enhancing learning tasks: in this case teachers should focus their attention on motivating students by testing their creativity, judgement and reflection. Challenging students with logical activities that are adapted to every level will challenge and encourage students to trust their judgment and to avoid the outside poisonous ideas while taking profit of the elaborated ones.
8. Developmental  constraints and opportunities: students are determined by physical capabilities and environmental ones, therefore each and every child’s knowledge is different. With that being said, students must adapt to every student’s intelligence and style of learning to help them to reach their goals and limits.
9. Social and cultural diversity: while in class, group activities and debates can help students to create more complex knowledges, that’s why students need the cooperation of their classmates by sharing information and helping each other, but to reach that point, they must learn that respecting and being tolerant with the opinion of the other students can help them to grow as individuals but also to grow as a united group in which there is a relationship of equality among their members.
10. Social acceptance, self-esteem and learning: while working in group, students must not only reinforce their own self-esteem and learning process, but also reinforce these two points towards their classmates, that’s why respecting each other and helping each other will facilitate that task to them being all benefited from this situation. Furthermore giving feedback of this learning process will help students to be conscious of their situation and which changes they should do or even which attitudes they should continue practising.
11. Individual differences in learning: as it is said early on in the text, students capabilities are determined by their environment and their inheritance, therefore we must consider the multiple intelligences we can find in class and adapt to them.
12. Cognitive filters: so to sum-up all these, teachers in class will find a group of individuals that are conditioned by their previous knowledge, beliefs and environment that will acquire as important the knowledge they need to reach their goals. With these factors students will create their own personal knowledge based also in their learning styles to which teachers will adapt in order to facilitate and reach every children’s needs by using specific tools, methodologies .

So once we know all this, we should realise that students should be formed in three areas: as individuals, into interaction and integration (individualisation and socialisation process). Therefore they must know not only academical concepts but also how to teach these concepts depending on the needs of the class and the subject. So, classroom management is essential to learn more time to students to increase their concepts, to have access to more information and to help students to develop their self-management. Once they know that they can set their goals and achieve them. Individual assessment is also very important to reach every child’s needs. Finally we must make our students the center of the learning process, offering them the TIC resources when it’s appropriated but using them in a formative way and not only because this methodology is frequent in today’s educational system.

Intervention Video

In this video you could see how I am doing the last lesson which was the assessment lesson. In this case I am starting the class, organizing the oral presentations, starting them and correcting the possible mistakes from the students. Moreover I give them a feedback of their work and I complete a Rubrick in which I evaluate them. After that I help some students with their difficulties and I use the example of a classmate to correct some common mistakes. When the video ends, I continue working with the presentations and once we finish them I play with my students a game about describing an animal only giving three tips and then if the rest of the class don't know the animal they keep giving some tips. Students really enjoy describing the animals for their peers! They're an amazing class so happy to have shared good moments with them! I hope you enjoy it!

A day in a school #3

Hello readers!

Today I bring again a new chapter on my daily life at my Practicum school, just for your information, this week I started my UD in class so I am very excited about it and i would love that you could read the part on my diary in which I talk about how I felt during the lesson!

Tuesday

Today I could see something that I didn't like at all, it was not a negative activity that can harm the students, but it is a procedure that I would never introduce in my class because my ideals don't sympathise with this. So the thing was that my tutor was doing an activity about giving the children some words and telling them to look the words in the dictionary so they must give a definition of the word with another word and to write down the pronunciation. What my teacher pretended to do with this activity was to allow their students learn "by heart" how to look for words in the dictionary and to understand how each and every symbol of the pronunciation means. My point is that I don't think that's a really good activity because you can allow the students know what every word means by reading the text and analyzing the context, but moreover you can ask some specific questions to help them to understand the meaning of a word. Finally, I think that pronunciation can be learned by repetition and once you know some examples of a sound you create a rule in your head about it. With this idea in mind, I am preparing myself to do my first intervention on Thursday.

Wednesday

The topic that I've written about in here will only be present in my memory in respect for a student, so this will be private.

Thursday

At least it is Thursday and at least I have done my intervention in class and I must say that I have found some strong points in it but also some weaknesses, but despite of that I am very happy with myself but also with the behaviour of my students. So the lesson started with my introduction and a warm up activity, during this activity I asked students about how they felt and why, so they get involved into English and to let them know we already started the class. Once we've done that, we read a brief listening about animals and adjectives that describe them in order to remember the topic and the vocabulary of the project. Once we did that, I asked the students the question "Which of these animals do you think is the fastest?" Son as we are working with comparative and superlative I tried to let them realise that in the question was a superlative. A few students knew what I was asking so I ask them to explain it to the rest of the class and I tried to use different resources such as dividing fastest into fast + -est to let them see that it was a formed word. From that point I introduced questions with more and most and with specific questions I asked them such as, "why fastest is written with -est and intelligent is written most intelligent?" or "How many syllables has fast? And Intelligent?" So we all together got the rule to elaborate this kind of words and we could continue to the next activity. The next activity was a worksheet that I prepared myself in which students should create sentences with more, most, -er and -est, these activities were done by all students out loud and I helped them to do them because it was not about writing or proving that they can copy but that they can express their ideas orally, they start to comprehend that new concepts and that we can create a common learning process. This activity take longer than I expected because I wanted that students got the the new concepts so I attend those students who had difficulties and it took more time than it was supposed to take. Nonetheless, the majority of the students felt confident with the new concepts and could do the activities with little help.

To sum up this experience, I would say that I am happy that my students paid attention and learnt the new concepts, but I was disappointed with myself because I planned to do a funny but complete activity about description that was oral and I could not do it, so I don't want my students think that I cannot offer them useful but also funny activities during class.

Friday

Today I could realise about the importance of the home-school connection, again, in this case the importance of following the steps of the school advises but also the psychological and pedagogical resources from outside the school. Why do I talk about this? Because during today's lunch time I had time to talk with the educació especial teacher and I asked her about a special case that was taking place in the school. It is about a girl who has learning problems but also you can see that she has physical problems because she's not as tall as she should be for her age and also you can see something in her face that in not frequent in the rest of the students, nobody know the exact problem of this girl because her parents are convinced that she has not problems and therefore they don't help her by taking her to a specialist and make her some tests. So if the school is advising the parents to act in someway and the specialists outside the school too because it's still early to do something I think that parents should react to her daughter's situation. That's why a good climate of trust is essential in the school, because we, as teachers, want the best for our students and in some kind of way, we want to take care of them as if they were our own children or family, so if we say that the student has difficulties or other problems it's because we want to help them and not make fun of them and this is why sometimes parents should reconsider the importance of respecting the educational world that nowadays is devalued. 

A day in a school #2

Hello everyone here I introduce to you my reflections about the second week at the school, 

Tuesday

In the English class with the 4th year students I realised that while my tutor is teaching the new contents, the students that have more difficulties try to participate by rising their hand because is new content related to nothing previous and despite of that he does not prioritize his attention on them, so the two students that have more difficulties took two different positions. One of them kept rising his hand during the class and at last he was asked and he answer correctly but with some difficulties on pronunciation, and the second just got tired of rising her hand and just got distracted and did not paid much attention to what the teacher was saying. Nonetheless when the teacher kept going with the lesson, he began to work with the book and both students got lost because they began doing activities which requires previous knowledge. The student who participated the most has true difficulties to follow the lessons.

Wednesday

Today I could reflect on what could be one of the most important aspects that could be in education along with my tutor of the school: assess ourselves during each and every class and analyze which have been the positive and negative points of that class. When I am talking about this topic my teacher and I agreed that even though you don’t have to be so strict with you, you should be responsible of assessing yourself just to offer to our pupils the best teaching exercise we can give. That’s why we should analyze if the class we just leave had been good or bad, which aspects we should change and if the distribution of the tasks was the correct one, in this way, I find appropriate starting and finishing the class with funny activities and easy (just to leave in the memory of our students that the end of the class was really entertaining) and in the middle of the lesson introduce the difficult activities (because they’ve got a good rhythm of work with the introductory activities).Therefore, we should learn from our mistakes and try to offer every day the best teaching lesson we can offer, relying on our studies but also on the assessment and the improvements we do each and every day we are in class.

Thursday

Today I will reflect again on the fact of the children that at this moment of the course don’t have books. I think this can be one of the points that affect me the most because I understand that education should not be a business so books should be as cheap as possible, and moreover, the state should help parents when buying books and so. That’s why I don’t understand how some people try to make a business of this job because in frequently teachers does not work for big amounts of money but for doing a service to the community and being happy with what they do. With that being said, I must also highlight that I don’t understand neither the parents who doesn’t pay attention to their children’s education because I think that education will help them in their daily lives and will make of them better members of the society and better as individuals. That’s why when a parent doesn’t read his child’s grades or he doesn’t buy the material it’s like not paying attention to your son/daughter and therefore you should not be called a father or mother. In this case, I as a teacher would help my students to get some books by any means necessary and I must say I wouldn’t share the opinion of a teacher that say “We cannot buy the books or photocopy them to give to the children that don’t have books, because if we do so, parents will get use to the fact that they don’t have to buy books”. In this way I would give children the chance of working with books and if the next year parents don’t buy the books I would call the authorities to inform about the parents’ behaviour towards their son/daughter. 

Those were the main topics that came up this second week and that I wanted to show you because they looked really interesting to me I hope you're enjoying my blog and see you next week, thanks for your attention! 

A day in a school #1

As promised, here I will introduce to you some facts about my firsts days at Pau Sans school.

If I am honest, probably this will be the best school I have ever been at as a teacher, not only because of the teachers themselves but also because of the students. I must say that most of them as I could appreciate during this first week, are really nice students: they pay attention to what the teacher is saying, they have a good level of English and also they participate in the English speaking activities. So, I am quite impatient because I want to start my intervention in class as soon as possible!

Moreover during the first week at school I have been aware of that the way that my English tutor works with the kids and mine are quite similar. We both want that our students spend most of the class talking in English and learning communication skills such as speaking and listening more than writing or just learning how to copy an English text.

I could also see this week that students don't work much often with TIC during the English lesson, and that is something that I would change in my English classes because I think that TIC could be really helpful for my students.

Last but not least, I could realise how amaze students are when my tutor and I talk in English fluently talking about typical topics of our daily life at school. They also doubt if I am able to talk in Spanish or Catalan, most of them think that I can only speak English.

That's more or less the most important points about my first week but I am quite sure that lots of interesting things will happen during the next four weeks so make sure you don't miss anything!