Reaching our goals!

July the 15th 2014

What a great class we had with Cindy today!

One of the purposes of this summer workshop for English teacher is to renew and revive our enthusiasm and energy for teaching English as a foreign language. I have to say that the teachers are reaching it faster than they thought. I mean, it is just the first day of classes and I realize, with Cindy´s class, the importance of applying the backward design model in our classroom.

What I learned, and will never forget is:

“Setting goals is the key to success in EFL classes”. Having defined our goals, we decide what methodology we are going to use to achieve those goals, always having in mind that is the meaningful learning what we are looking for.

Then, I learned that there is not a panacea, an ideal methodology for everything. All teachers are different, as well as the students that we have, so we can vary the methodologies. However we have to take into consideration a set of important things, which we can divide in three stages:

1. Identify desired results.
2.Determine acceptable evidences of learning.
3.Design learning experiences and instruction.

In general aspects, it is all about not getting married with only one thing: as our desired results are going to be always different, our evidences of learning must be different, and in consequence the experiences are not always going to be the same. Then it comes to the stage our capacity to become a reflective teacher. But how can we reach that? Through OBSERVATION.  

I never thought that I was going to learn another language in this course: with Cindy we did, we learnt Croatian! With this little Croatian class we had the chance to put in practice our capacity to learn through observation, and to realize that the most difficult part of it is to leave out our conceptions about teaching, as there is not an ideal way to teach, furthermore something that we don’t have to forget is that we have to be objective when we observe, otherwise it is going to be a simple waste of time.  Also, we must take into account different aspects: the classroom, the teacher, the students and the lesson.

It is difficult to include in this post all the things that we learnt, but I tried not to leave out the most important things.

Hvala!

Carlos Ramos