MY POTENTIAL AS A TEACHER / ORGANIZATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DIDACTIC PROCESS

 MY POTENTIAL AS A TEACHER

When I was a full-time classroom teacher back in my country, there was a particular topic I loved to introduce, and even if it was not included in the course books, was not part of the term’s schedule, or part of the curriculum, I always liked to begin with it. This topic is the children’s rights, from the 1959 Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It is very important for me to add them here, to better understand how precious they are to me.

• 1. The right to equality, without distinction on account of race, religion, or national origin.

• 2. The right to special protection for the child’s physical, mental and social development.

• 3. The right to a name and a nationality.

• 4. The right to adequate nutrition, housing, and medical services.

• 5. The right to special education and treatment when a child is physically or mentally handicapped.

• 6. The right to understand and love my parents and society.

• 7. The right to recreational activities and free education.

• 8. The right to be among the first to receive relief in all circumstances.

• 9. The right to protection against all forms of neglect, cruelty, and exploitation.

• 10. The right to be brought up in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, friendship among peoples, and universal brotherhood.

The 7th point, “the right to recreational activities and free education” in my opinion, is the core of the child’s right, and all of the above are there to back it up and provide a healthy and safe environment for this education to happen. Sir Ken Robinson said in his Ted Talk, on education: “We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise … what the world will look like in five years' time.” I want the children to feel valued and important irrespective of anything that may pull them down.

Therefore, as a teacher, I feel that it is my responsibility to accompany every child entrusted into my care to help him or her to experience all these rights and achieve the goal that would equip and prepare him or her for an uncertain future. This is why I love the teaching profession, and hope one day to open a school where the creativity of children will be preserved through the respect for their autonomy as learners; the provision of a safe learning environment with a low affective filter, and the use learning materials that represent all the beauty of diversity, in our multicultural world.

In order to achieve these, self-imposed objectives, I got enrolled in formal training that would empower me with all the necessary skills, and am conscious that I must keep learning and be up to date, through observation, undertaking research and action research, and collaborating with my colleagues and my professors. I have now adopted a reflective mindset to identify the good and the bad in my teaching techniques and find ways to improve on them. With this, my creativity has greatly been boosted, I have become open-minded, I feel concerned about the needs of others, especially children, and I accept criticism because they make me grow and become a better person. 

If I chose the teaching profession by curiosity, with no experience and doubting if this was truly my calling, today I can confidently say that I have found my vocation, empowered by all the amazing professional training I received within the formal framework of my GPTE journey. I belong to the Noble Profession.

ORGANIZATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DIDACTIC PROCESS

Thanks to the courses and my practicum experiences in this program, I have realized that there are some essential elements that I must take into consideration when designing my lessons in order to effectively implement a didactic process. First of all, I need to set a goal, and have purposeful interaction with my students, always bearing in mind the paramount objective of helping them to develop and be able to achieve their life ambitions. Therefore, I am careful to select among a variety of didactic tools, the appropriate content for my lesson, and I am a very creative person, I am quite able to also develop substantial content from a scanty idea because I believe that in life, every content is connected, and can be looked upon from various angles and viewpoints. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15b_VEQmRXbR_nV8mPJb9o7kzMiBGOkh57dIOqPsbWUo/edit

For instance, during my practicum, I was given a task to teach Charity to Grade 4 students who have never learned about charity. The only material I had was 2 pages from the course book about a charitable foundation and volunteering. I could come out with 5 topics, and incorporate English, history, mathematics, health, and environmental education, for my students to have a highly informative, cohesive, coherent, and comprehensible input because I learned that “we acquire language when we understand what we hear or read” (Krashen, 2017). All of these are very essential in order to engage and motivate the students for effective learning to take place taking into account the Ten Commandments of motivation (Dörnyei, Z. and Csizer, K.,1998), I try to do my best to make my lessons interesting, else, I won’t enjoy teaching it. I am able to create a friendly teaching and learning environment and develop a good relationship with my students. I get to know them deeper, to have more ideas for my content, which the students will identify themselves with. Thus, I ensure that they feel free to interact during the lessons. What I love most is to boost their self-confidence, because once they believe in themselves, they are likely to take more risks in learning, and will eventually become autonomous and take responsibility for their learning journey. Concerning my selection of didactic materials, I have 3 main criteria: they must be appealing to my target students bearing in mind Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory (Gardner, 1993); they must reflect the diversity, and be relevant to their lives as a whole, and to the specific lesson at hand.charity_what to give and environment_ - Google Slides

However, I still struggle with two things: giving clear instructions and time management. so that the students easily understand the task. At times I always feel my instructions are not clear enough, so I tend to give too much, and in the end, they are lengthy and complicated guidelines. As a matter of fact, one of my assignments on English Phonetics was rejected because the instructions were really complicated, I admit. So I don’t want to imagine young learners struggling with an L2. For sure, I need to get a way to present my task properly. It is the same with giving explanations. I want to give as many examples as possible to make sure my students understand, and I most often don’t meet the day’s lesson goals. During my practicum, my Mentor had to remind me of the students’ break. I couldn’t really notice this when I was fully in charge of a classroom in my country. But now I know how important it is when many teachers handle the same class. These are potential fields I intend to tackle in an Action Research Project.

 

References
-Krashen, S. (1985). The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Harlow: Longman.

 

-Dörnyei, Z. and Csizer, K. (1998) Ten Commandments for Motivating Language Learners: Results of an Empirical Study. Language Teaching Research, 2, 203-229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/136216889800200303

-edutopia. (1997) Howard Gardner of the Multiple Intelligence Theory. [Video file]. Retrieved   from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2QtSbP4FRg