POSTS of English Didactics.

The secret of working with children

1. Comment on the following video: Carol Read: The secret of working with children http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/carol-read-secret-working-children

Wow, she own a powerfull method, with the potential to change the perception of any school and pupil; as a resume I can remember that what we have to use is:

S ensory accuraty: The skill to fell what is happening.

E motional inteligence: The skill to understanding the other´s perspectives.

C orporal language: The ability of expresing and reading non-verbal languages.

R apport or relationships: The balance and good socialization with pupils and others.

E valuation: The self-evaluation of the process as teachers

T actical talk: The capability of making a common conclusion in a conversation, mostly focused on allowing to choose.

To conclude I need to say that it´s more extense as needed but that I´m absolutely convinced of that the type of evaluation gived by her is the most important, not to mention that is the only effective one (either because other ones are not to the only person we could change and also because the other´s feedbacks are conditioned by so much variables, making a false sense of security and accuracy)

Ideas for using flashcards

2. Comment on the following video: Carol Read: Ideas for using flashcards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9KebTgfLJI

Well, that´s an amazing video full of resources for teaching English; not just vocabulary, but also for classifications, spelling and much more…. As a resume of the video I´ll explain in my own words what it´s exposed:

Flash: Just to ask with the images and repeat the respective names.

Slow, slow: Mostly the same, but including a competition factor while the image is being showed, because they could guess before the completely image is visible.

What,s missing: It´s trying to guess what image had disappear.

Magic eyes: Like the last activity, but making disappear all of them and one by one.

Lip reading: Exactly and literary what everyone infers about the title.

Flashcards riddles: To describe the meaning to promote the guessing.

Flashcards groups: To order something particular to each flashcard, taking in account that each flashcard represents a group.

Hands on heads: To name the cards, waiting the respective group to put their hands on their heads.

Flashcards chains: It,s a cycle of questions about the card and to the next partner.

Kim´s game: It´s about remember and repeat with a partner the most cards as posible.

The Pygmalion Effect and the Power of Positive Expectations

3. Comment on the following video: The Pygmalion Effect and the Power of Positive Expectations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTghEXKNj7g

That video explains an important psycology effect to take account of, the famous Pigmaleón effect. From my point of view is a simple perspective that doesn´t includes the hermeneutic needs at it´s assimilation (I mean that it´s important to take conscience of that it exist, it should exist to all population as sistem-teacher relations, and not just to teacher-pupils ones) and, in the same way, it´s not related with more effects that are co-related as the Halo effect (to the extent that if a docent start thinking well about their discents, that docent will start a possitive perception of him/her at them).

But anyway, that´s an old-fashioned video that is showing the start of a new educational perspective in a few minutes, so I really enjoyed it and that every docent could see, because the cost is insignificant in relation to the benefits that it´s offering us.

Inclusive assessment approaches:

4. Comment on one article: In the following link you will find practical teaching articles for teachers working in the primary classroom. Choose one of them and comment on it.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-kids/articles

-The choosen one was:

www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/inclusive-assessment-approaches

Inclusive assessment approaches:

That absolutely impossible to get better article (At least from my point of view) is telling us how to adapt our class dynamics to special needs. At first is explaining the concept, to highligh the fact of that everyone could be interpretated as a person with (more or less) “special” needs, according to that this people isn´t just the different intelectual leveled, and it´s more related with a problem to learn in a particular (o generalized) situation.

One important thing to remember is that our job as teachers isn´t to diagnose them, but it´s to adapt our teaching to everyone….. So we´ll forget the classiffication and start focussing at the recognition factors (behaviour, sociality, cognition….), followed by the types of enviroments that are causing it (everyone, just a class, just a methodology….), the ways to solve or adapt the problem (possitive feedback, changing evaluation process….) to particularities and finally some advices to perform dialectics to parents (the most important is to avoid the negative terms by substitution with possitive potentialities at reach).

As a conclusion, I can just add that thank´s to Marie for this effort to help teachers and pupils in bad situations! :D