READING LOGS

Reading Logs

#1  Chapter 3. “How can I design my lesson so that I will know what students have learned?

Throughout this chapter, as an ESOL teacher one begins to learn to reflect more often on how classes are being taught. An initial reflection on this is to use: “Hot Reflection”. The “hot reflection” is used to be written immediately after the class so we won’t forget what just happened during our class. Why is this so important? Well, doing this kind of activity helps us to be more aware on our students’ learning process in terms of knowing how to assess to them. Only that way will we know if so students are actually learning or if they already know what is being taught.

Chapter 4. “How can I design a flow of activities that supports student learning?”

In this chapter I learnt about the steps one must create carefully in order to make the content more accessible for them. For instance, we must allow them go through each stage by fulfilling the Encountering and Clarifying the content taught. Once they have comprehended the content in these two stages, students may now move on.

#2 Chapter 5: How can I set up activities and my classroom to support student learning?

Teaching English is not all about conveying the message con complexities, but more about making things easier and more practical for our beloved students in terms of learning English faster and much more effectively.  Knowing how to set up a fluency activity is really important but to really get the whole thing working out, requires a teacher to anticipate students’ needs and responses. It doesn’t really matter if you have a large class, as long as you know how to perform the different activities, you will be ok. For instance, you can have students work in pairs or small teams, with these kinds of activities, you can increase and maximize students’ talking time and participation. Let´s keep in mind that when students face each other and have  eye contact, they interact better and more comfortable.

#3 The Group: A Cycle from Birth to Death

This reading is focused on learning how to pay attention to our teaching and to also have a high level of consciousness about what one sees.

Reflective Cycle: This cycle grows out of Deweys’ (1933) original work on reflection. The ability to slow down teacher’s thinking so that they can attend to what is rather important than what they wish were so & then to shift the weight of that thinking from their own teaching to their students learning.

Two Goals: Develop capacity to observe skillfully and to think critically about students and their learning. One must remember to take intelligent action based on the understanding that emerges.

A close observation is: “When we are focused on having the learning central, teaching becomes subordinate to it. One must create activities, a curriculum & learning environment that can reveal learning rather than just answers.

Presence in Experience: Learning to see is basically the ability to be present, if so, you perceive more, and also the greater potential there will be for an intelligent response.

#4 Seeing Student Learning: Teacher Change and the Role of Reflection?

Focusing on how students act or react to our classroom activities makes us wonder on how to improve our teaching techniques. What I enjoyed the most was “The Principles Underlying the Reflective Cycle” As it states in the reading, as a teacher, we must have our mind free, only that way we will be able to observe carefully how our students mental responses  and movements are. Once we have noticed that, we will know if they are applying what has been taught in class and also the way they are using it. If we noticed that our students are not reacting to our classes in a positive way, then  that is our cue to find out what to do, how can we make our classes more meaningful and interactive for them. After reading this, it has made me more aware on how I have to observe my students and how to meet their needs within my classes.

#5 Giving and Receiving Feedback; It will Never Be Easy, But It Can Better

Paying attention to the type of information we receive on a daily basis is really important in order to know how to interpret it. For some reason we as teachers don’t like to be told if we need to improve the way we give our classes. We have the fear on the kind of feedback we will get so what we do is shut ourselves down. However, we must keep in mind that the same way we got our feedback back in the day (as students) is what normally affects us nowadays, therefore, we believe that we will get it the same offensive way.  Knowing how to talk to people or in this case your peers, we must be very careful on the words we use and how we use them to offer our feedback. Not giving the feedback immediately might also cause the receiver to take things personal. So that is why we must know how to do so.

#6 Tell me more on the fine art of listening

Being a good listener makes many people happy and free because they are listened to.  Many of us like to talk about their own lives and we do not pay attention about others. We feel much better once someone listens to us because we enjoy expressing what we think and what we do. Expressing our thoughts, our plans make us feel very special, unique, who doesn’t like to feel that way, hahaha. We all have our creative fountain, however, if we get caught in the rat race or any other world problem we lose track of all and our fountain gets blocked. However, if we start talking to someone again, that fountain gets unlocked. We might sometimes find people who are not very happy, that could be due to the fact that they were not listened to in an appropriate way with affection and  a kind of jolly excitement. Let’s learn to listen and pay attention to what others tell us, bear in mind that we also like to be listened to.

#7 The Three Dimensions

The 3 main dimensions we must take into account are Form, Meaning and Use. Knowing these three dimensions in order to apply it to Language in Communication makes things more effective.

Form: This consists of audible and visible units, which can be written symbols or sounds used in our daily basis lives.

Meaning: This one works on the semantics of the English language, the real meaning encoded of the words.  

Use: This last dimension consists on the Pragmatics. It is not about the encoded  meaning  in a language, but what people actually mean according to the language they use.

#8 Epilogue: Implications for Teaching

Knowing how to teach and how to offer the education our students need is extremely important. As a teacher one must make all classes as meaningful as possible for our learners. Thinking beforehand on how important our content to teach will be for our students is helpful, not only for us but more for our students. Remembering how relevant interaction is in our classes, we must exploit it at all cause. As it was mentioned previously, when our learners are face to face, they feel more comfortable and relaxed to speak about themselves to their classmates. So, let’s make more fluency activities during our classes. Once we have the fluency activity going on, we cannot forget about that their production must be as meaningful as possible for them. They must have a strong reason on why they are speaking about that topic.  If not, our learners won’t care much to discuss the topic given to them in class. Keeping that in mind, we must also be very careful to what to expect from our students during our classes. According to their levels and experience will they only be able to produce certain topics with their peers. So let’s get to know more our students so we can help them improve in a faster yet practical way.

#9 Teaching Reading in a Foreign Language

I believe that it is a matter of our culture in Latin America that people do not read much and if they do, they do it forced due to assignments that they might have from high school or the university. However, it is possible tah as children we were never taught on how to read in effective ways.  There are several strategies for reading such as: Skimming, scanning, summarizing, guessing word meanings, becoming aware of the reading process and also taking tasks. Now, when as teachers we have explained appropriately to students regarding the reading strategies, we must know find how to incorporate them in our classes. To make these kinds of lessons productive and overall meaningful one can follow the PDP Framework to really get into students’ minds.

#10 The Changing Face of Listening

 As we previously saw in the other reading, you can also focus on PDP framework. In order to make this listening activity very productive in class, we got to create three stages. Pre, During and Post. At first we must know what our students already know, (FOWSAK), towards the topic by activating schema. Once we already have an idea on that, we can realize on what kinds of activities we must do to fulfill students’ need. Then we can achieve our main goal in the During stage based on what is being taught. Finally, we can have a fluency/ production activity in the Post stage for our learners. Following these three simple yet important stages can we only make the learning process for our students achievable!!

#11 The Cultural Experience

The cultural knowings framework consists of four interconnected learning interactions:

·        Knowing About:

This involves facts, data or even knowledge about products. This considered Cultural Information.

·        Knowing How:

This involves acquiring behaviors, actions, skills, saying, touching, looking, standing or anything related to “doing something”. This is called Cultural Practices.

·        Knowing Why:

This involves with developing in students an understanding of fundamental of perceptions, beliefs, values and also attitudes. This called Cultural Perspectives.

·       Knowing Oneself:

This involves the individual learning, their values, opinions questions and feelings thoughts, reactions ideas and even a bit of their own cultural values as a central experience. This is called Self-awareness.