Feedback

Recently I have been thinking about giving feedback to students and based on the experience I live in the school I current work for and some articles I red during my undergraduate studies and after i realized something:
Encouragement must go to 100% of students. Many students when starting a new language they are afraid of trying because they don´t want to make mistakes in front of other, specially if they are adults. What a teacher should do? It´s important to show that making mistake is a part of the learning process, if the students are making mistakes it´s because they are trying, which means they are feeling comfortable enough to take risks in order to learn without these "mistake-making" worries. It´s very important to please any attempt made by any student. Why? Giving this recognition is a kind of motivation maintainance and as a consequence the students will always feel like trying.
It´s also useful if your s tudents write compositions for you. Why? Because there is a good chance that these compositions are never shown to anybody else, which brings the though: These students write only to me, I´m the only person who reads them. So, why not make some comments beyond the corrections? Even if they show these compositions to other people, why not make some comments on what they´ve written? Making them heard or read beyond correction level will lead your students learning process to another level.

Being used and Being useful

The idea of writing this text came when I was coming back home after work, in a moment when many thoughts "downloaded" into my mind, a huge brainstorm.
I was listenign some music in which the chorus says "I don´t wanna be used, I wanna be useful" and many students questions such as "why this is important?" came to my mind and I started thinking about those questions and this sentence. It came to my mind exactly this, students wanna learn USEFUL things.
Let me give you an example, in the school I work for as a coordinator there is a lesson that basically deals with slogans and headlines. So, many of my students complain about this topic because isn´t interesting and they can understand easily since newspapers are read daily and the sports page use a lot of sarcasm and ambiguity. I understood their opinion because personally I agree with them although I never acknowledged it. The point is that I made it interesting for my students. How did I do it? I searched for something I called "minor elements". What in our lives we used those elements of sarcasm and ambiguity? Jokes can be one of them, culturally speaking Brazilian people make many jokes and many of them relies on specific situations under specific context which leads to specific vocabulary, ambiguity and useness.

The teachers´ role during the class preparation is observe what will be taught and to whom. Doing this the teacher can foresee these possible gaps.

New ideas

Hi guys

In this blog I´ll post some impressions and feedbacks on teaching and learning. I don´t have any specific ideas, views to follow. I´m just posting my own findings based on what I´m studying and my experience.