My Teaching Philosophy

I consider teaching is to guide and contribute to students' personal development as members of the society. It is a goal to provide students with the correct tools and values that will help them to face their achievements and difficulties with responsibility and desire to be better in their learning process. As teacher who guide in the leaning of a language, it is important to motivate students and create the atmosphere necessary to develop learning. In this way it is necessary to increase motivation and self-esteem in our student. Create an environment that makes interesting and necessary improve in their learning process is the objective of teaching. The idea is make of learning a game, but in good terms. That is to say, make students enjoy learning and create the need to know more, to go deeper and clarify doubts and difficulties. If I am able, as a teacher, to create the need to improve the performance and overcome difficulties, I think I will be doing a good work. That is why I consider it is important provide students with learning strategies and let them know that we all are in a learning process, that they can improve if they just make an effort.

Values and formation is also an important part in the teaching process. Teachers are not only those who provide guidance in a specific topic. Teachers are those who provide guidance in the daily life behavior. Form our students in values; let them know how important it is to respect, to be tolerant and responsible will also support the learning process. It is also important to maintain a common view of teaching with parents and have common goals at school as well as at home. Students reflect what they see, so teachers and parents must be a model of responsibility and enthusiasm for learning.

In the learning process students fill more comfortable in class if it exists an empathy with the teachers. It is necessary provide students will enough confidents that encourage them to ask and look for teacher help. It is important as well keep the control of the group, do not confuse confidence with lack of respect. In this case it is convenient take into account teacher centered and students centered classes. Give the opportunity to ask, suggest and participate, but also to follow instructions, listen and act in the way that allow students have a good performance.

New technologies in English teaching and learning: WEBQUEST

The WEBQUEST is a tool created by the professor of Educational Technology Bernie Dodge. Its goal is to assign students group/individual tasks and assigments that will be developed using the World Wide Web resources. This tool can be used by teachers at any aducational level and is a way to study in depth a certaint topic. The WEBQUEST requires the teacher's crativity in order to keep the students focused and to encourage the development of the assigned tasks or assessments.

The WEBQUEST is a didactic way to assign students an specific task. It provides clear intructions about what the student must do: there is an intro that explains the reason why the tasks is assigned and the purpose; the taks descriptions; the process of development of the task; the role of each student and their assigned work; description of the evaluatio, in group or individual; the conclusion provides a description of what the student must have done and learn after the task development; and aditional information the teacher considers important to be posted in the page. Here an example: http://www.teacherweb.com/IN/PNC/Cassady/index.html
http://www.iwebquest.com/egypt/ancientegypt.htm

This task, as we said before, can be assigned in groups or individualy. The tasks assigned can be evaluated through the WEBQUEST ifself or in class, it depends on the teacher.

What can be the advantages or disadvantages of this tool.

As advantages we can hightly:
- It develops students sense of responsibility.
- It contributes to develop research strategies and ability in the area.
- Encourage student to achive the proposed goals and promotes team work.
- Focuses students in the real use of the internet and gives a new vision of how usefull can it be in their learning process.
- It keeps student's interest in their learning process even during the out class time.

Disadvantages:
- If you want to work in class must be sure there are enough computers to work and a good internet provider, in order to avoid lost of time.
- Because it is a kind of "self-supervision" work, it can achieve the opposite goal that is loss of interest and irresponsibility with the work.
- If it is not attractive enough or clear in instructions, can be a boring and difficult task to achieve.
- It requires a lot of responsability and conscientious work of the teacher, who must provide safe and interesting links to develop the task. If there is not, students could get lost in the web.


Implementation Ideas

For those teachers who love projects is an ideal tool in order to guide these kind of activities. The use of internet can motivate and increase student's interest in their project development.

It can be applied to motivate the use of english out of class. Assigning tasks through a WEBQUEST, teachers can motivate and promote the english language review as well as it helps students to improve the language learning while working in their interest pages.

Lesson on values

This is the first of three lessons proposed to work on values in the classroom. We chose Religion as a topic because it involves respect for the others and their believes and tolerance tolerance among other values that are important to be developed in class in order to help student to achieve a better undestanding of their social environment.

Activity 3A: Task planning

Step one: Why ethics and values? Because during the learning process it is important to form a good behaviour in the learners in order to have an appropriate learning environment of respect and order. It is also important in a Foreign Language Learning process to reinforce different values that will help the understanding of a foreign culture as well as the own.

The role of values and ethics in education is to open learners’ mind in order to accept the differences in a society such as religion believes, races, customs, and politics ideologies and so on. Its place is every single subject the learner has, extracurricular activities and at home.

Step two: Where can we look for meaningful topics? We can look for meaningful topics in the Colombian General Education Law. In the Estándares Básicos de Competencias en Lenguas Extranjeras: Ingles del Ministerio de Educación Nacional we can find the following standards about ethics and values.

Participo en situaciones comunicativas cotidianas tales como pedir favores, disculparme y agradecer (MEN document on Standards, p.23).

Expreso de manera sencilla lo que me gusta y disgusta respecto a algo (MEN document on Standards, p.23).

Identifico elementos culturales presentes en textos sencillos (MEN document on Standards, p.24).

Demuestro que reconozco elementos de la cultura extranjera y los relaciono con mi cultura (MEN document on Standards, p.25).
Step three: Brainstorming for meaningful topics: religion, laws, social differences, racism, world wars, world conflicts, and so on.

Step four: Selecting topics and designing tasks

Step five: Actual lesson planning: first class has six steps for being developed in fifty minutes.

Step One: Teacher divides the class in six groups of five students each one (one minute).

Step Two: Teacher gives to each group one envelop with some pieces of paper that form a definition of the word “religion.” Each group has a different definition but they do not know what it is about; they have to organize the sentence (four minutes).

Step Three: Once everybody has the right definition, they have to write it down on the board and after reading all the definitions the whole class must find out the word that belongs to those definitions (five minutes).

Step Four: Teacher asks students if they agree with those definitions and proposes them, working in the same groups, to write their own definition of religion (five minutes).

Step Five: Each group read its definition and the whole class discuss about them (fifteen minutes).

Step Six: Teacher asks what religion students know and does a brainstorming (twenty minutes).

Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences

The LS and MI are theories that provide an idea about the way people learn. Not everybody learn in the same way. According to the MI theory, develop by Dr H: Gardner, there are eight types of intelligences (linguistic; spatial; logic/mathematic; kinesthetic; musical; interpersonal; Intrapersonal; naturalist), human being have them all but some are more developed than others, identify these intelligences will be helpful in the learning process, as well as it will be to strengthen the ones that are weak. The Learnig Styles follow a similar theory than the MI. They establish that the human being have different styles of learnig, they can be visual, auditory or kinesthetic.


The knowledge of these learning styles can help students, and people in general, to improve their learning process. The implementation of certain strategies in the learning process can make it easy or clear if you know whar are your learnig styles or more developed intelligences.

We as teachers or future teacher must take this theories into account in order to provide different and varied activities in our class. The variety will provide the students with a serie of opportunities to understand the topics and develop the different skills and abilities. It is important to recognize the predominant learning styles and MI in order to work with them in class, but it is also important to help the students to develop those in which they are weak. The preparation and correct application of different theories and startegies will provide amusing and interesting lessons for our students.

All our students are different, some would prefer the music, others the visual activities, group work, etc. The idea is provide the students the opportunity to experiment their favourite learning strategy as well as help them to use the others that they feel are less productive. In a class one could work two different strategies in order to give everybody the space to interect. We as teachers can also explain our students how to implement a new strategy, perhaps they do not use them because do not understand how it works.