Tenth Task - Critical Reflective Practitioner

1 - What roles can you play as a "critical reflective practitioner?" 

We as critical reflective practitioners can perform many roles in our school institutions. Teaching should never be seen as an isolated incident but rather a collaborative opportunity to improve teaching practices and grow professionally. Nevertheless, this type of collaborative/team teaching effort has ditched or rejected by many teachers as this would imply investing additional time off their timetable.

The leadership role is another important facet for those interested in becoming critical reflective practitioners. This type of role means that the teacher must always be a role model for the students and also a persona that can lead to provide feedback and help other teachers' situations.

With that in mind, the teacher can also perform and make a difference outside the classroom, these days, the act of teaching must transcend the barriers and take part in social and cultural settings. For instance, the teacher can have a greater impact on the community, the actions and decisions he or she makes will have a great influence on the children they teach. That is why teaching is a great responsibility, as we also perform as social agents in the communities we work for.

2 - What conceptual distinction would you make among "poiesis," "praxis" and "phronesis?"  which of these actions do you feel identified with?

Poesis: When we talk about Poesis we can say that is a technical way of acting, but in order to perform an action it is required to know how to do. The concept does not go beyond that. It also does not involve any type of reflection.

Praxis: On the other hand, the concept of praxis is concerned with doing good in the world we live in. Nevertheless, we need to take into account that our way of acting is always attained and defined by our beliefs, philosophy, principles, our teaching practices, our ideologies. Praxis also refers to the actions we make so as to improve in personal and professional terms

Phronesis: This concept differs from the previous one in the sense that it seeks to act/take action in the world but by doing what is right, taking the best decision so we can have better relationships among the people we relate to. Phronesis is a concept that is rooted and informed by reflection.













about teaching in an isl

Ninth Task - Methapor Drawing Activity

This is my marterpiece. Feel free to comment :)

Currently, I am a primary teacher at the school I work for, and it has been in that way since I started working there. Because of that, I have had to perform different tasks and roles over these years, I consider myself a very happy and playful teacher. I try to cater for all the students' needs and interest, though it sometimes it is not an easy task. For instance, as children are visual leaners I always try to carry colorful markers and colors, stamps stickers, and something that would define me figuratively speaking is the use of emojis/faces to grade or check students' work, test and so on. I also try to be very concern about the students' interest in regard to my teaching. Mostly children like cartoons, fluffy animals, comics, superheroes, so to fulfill that need I need to be very versatile, including elements of fantasy and surprise in any of my teaching sessions, which can captive students' attention and motivate them as well. In that sense, the unicorn represents those fictional elements I incorporate into my lesson as I mentioned before so students can feel at ease and ready for learning through the activities I present. That fantasy role is also included in my lesson throughout the language games that I used to play every day in the classroom.

In relation to the roles, I would like to interpret, I can say that including dancing and more singing performances into my lesson as well as a more interactive role by using technology tools.

Sixth Task - How Reflective I am ?

How reflective I am :)

After revising the paper/assignment that I wrote on the very first encounters of this course. I realized that I did not provide my best answer to the questions. It may be due to the fact that I was not that acquainted with the theoretical tenets of reflective teaching. In addition to that, I am also aware that the type of narrative that I used to tell my story as a reflective practitioner can be improved. This time I would like to make an analogy to express my role as a teacher and as a reflective practitioner.

We the teachers are like sports coaches in the sense that we are responsible for the academic and personal growth of our students and trainees in the case of sports. I have always made this type of reflection in which we want them to be successful in life, to have a bright future in which they can reach a high level of autonomy in the discipline they chose to study at the university. However, we as a teacher to make sure that happens, we need to display ourselves as a role model for them. Same way parent does with their kids at home. What happens nowadays is that neither teacher nor parents ponder on those issues or they do not take as seriously as we all should do.

In order to fulfill that imperative goal, I as a teacher must start doing more research about several situations that happen in the classroom so I can in the process try to solve or provide reasonable solutions to academic or disciplinary issues that arise in a normal language classroom. Perhaps, the best tool to achieve and undergo the process of research in education is reflective teaching. We as teachers are also humans and have also the need to think about the mistakes we make and the achievement we obtain in the classroom with our students. In life, we have gone to several difficulties and the only way we can overcome those issues is through reflection, what happens is we sometimes do it a very superficial manner and not in a systematic and more rigorous way as it should be done. For those who want to start in the process of reflective teaching, I would suggest Farrell's framework ( 2016) 

To sum up, I consider that we as teachers can improve not only our teaching practices through the process of reflecting but we can also grow professionally. In that way, reflective teaching presents to ourselves as an alternative to overcome classroom issues and as a way to generate awareness in our students about the multiple socio-cultural issues that may mislead our students if they are not critically prepared to make the best decisions for themselves and for the sake of humanity.


Color Code for this activity/assignment

Philosophy

Beliefs

Theory

Practice

Beyond Practice

Carlos Andres Losada Meza - 2019 >.<

Fifth Task - Beliefs

Beliefs about English

I have always believed that learning a new language will provide people with many opportunities to grow in their field of interest. Indeed, I can say that learning and teaching English have given me the chance to travel and get a job while doing something I find rather appealing which is teaching. That is what I think English can also offer/provide to my students a wider perspective of the world. With that, I am not saying that they should forget about their cultures and customs but o be also open-minded and tolerant of other cultures that we can learn a lot about. 

Another belief that I used to hold was that I should reach a native-like accent, but after taking the course of language learning acquisition I have a different conception about that. I admit that having good pronunciation and good command of the language is important, but as well as that the way we care about the students and foster reflection when talking about cultures is also quite relevant.

Beliefs about learning

When I was in primary school I had my first encounter with a foreign language. A teacher that was in charge of ethics and religion, one day started teaching us the subject of English. At that moment, I started to find quite interesting as I was seeing new words and sounds I have never heard or seen in life. It was all about curiosity at that point, but as I was growing up I started to be more aware and devoted more time thinking about the way of learning English. Although I had not had a good start what I consider that was kept me focused on my learning process was my intrinsic motivation, which I consider a relevant factor when learning about something as well as the extrinsic motivation type. In the beginning, I used mostly the audio-lingual method, as I only listened and did translation activities to find out what were the lyrics of my favorite songs about. 

At some point, I decided to start studying English at the University's language program at the undergraduate level. in that way, I was able to learn from watching others, listening to them, and more importantly by reading about theories related to language acquisition. It is also relevant to mention, that learning for me is constant and reciprocal, we learn from people and students every day and that on-going process stays along through our lives.


Beliefs about teaching


My beliefs about teaching started first to be shaped at the undergraduate program. I learn how to teach by watching what my teachers were doing at that moment. Another decisive moment came when I started the teaching practicum, I began facing a lot of difficulties with my students. I received feedback from teachers and keep modeling my teaching strategies. Based on the feedback I received, I started to make some changes such as to include activities related to the students' needs and interests. I really wanted my classes to be fun and not having students bored or complaining about many things. That is why , I finally decided to and inclined towards including game-like activities in each one of my classes which has somehow given me good results. 

With regard to other teaching beliefs, I used to think that grammar must be the main element of teaching as we were taught in that way. Fortunately, there are so many resources we can resort to in order to present classes in a dynamic way including implicitly the grammar part which is crucial but no the axis of teaching and learning.

Seven Task - Analysis of Journal Entries

Here is the link to the journal entries I analyzed.


https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bLlVDTdj9XhrsLZ5OUD3p-0PTR4USTyj

Fourth Task - Journal Entries

DIRECTIONS: Based on three lessons you are to teach the following days, write and post in your blog three journal entries as evidence of your reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. These entries are expected to go beyond the descriptive account of what happens in the lessons. They should also examine all the whys and whereabouts of the classroom occurrences, and appreciate alternative ways of teaching in the future.

Here is the link (below)to the journal entries ( some )  I have been working on also as a data collection instrument for my thesis project about games and values.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1b4tDbVWi71_CSE_Tek3M9qHxqzvF1647?usp=sharing 

Second Task: Mind Map

DIRECTIONS: Read "Reflective Teaching and its Impact on Foreign Language Teaching," make and post in your personal blog a mind map summing up the most important contributions of Reflective teaching to our ELT profession.

http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=44720504006

This is the mind map.