After all
the classes we took about Didactic of the English language I still feel the
same about teaching English in a Primary School classroom, even though I’ve taken
some ideas, modified and merged/included them to my daily teaching life.
A total linguistic
immersion in English classes is a priority for me when we talk about teaching, it
has always been and for sure it will always be. But now, I think I may be also
interested in trying to teach some units of other subjects in English too.
Somehow, CLIL was really tempting. It lets you to use all the subjects in the
school schedule to improve the students’ communicative skills and expand their
vocabulary in a meaningful way (without using those ever so boring lists that
they often have to memorise). Isn’t that what we all want as teachers? Well,
now that we have the opportunity for our students to be able to communicate in
English, we should use it in our classrooms.
Creating a
CLIL unit in class helped me to realise how difficult it is to make it work. Everything
counts, even when you have to say what you would do, the exact sentences, what
you expect and how long it is going to take, you still need to be able to
improvise, and you can never predict it all or plan for every single eventuality.
Although I feel
our unit was amazing (here you can see the Prezi we created), I do not think
that our microteaching went as well as it could have done. True, Mireia and I
were quite ill and feeling very tired due the illness, but as we were saying
afterwards, it would have been more realistic and people would have been more
participative if they had been primary school children, instead of our fellow
classmates.
This said,
I’ll admit that I love the usage of new technologies in class. They are a
really cool and simple way to engage students and make they learn in a fun way.
But sharing ideas and being connected to other teachers by the internet? That
was new. I mean, I can follow podcasts about ESL or a nice blog about creative
ideas, but sharing my ideas and using social media to do this was something
new. I did enjoy it and I’ll probably use it again in the future.
So after
all those classes in university, I think I’ll introduce a more important affective
side to mine, I’ll try to take much more into account the multiple
intelligences and the pupil’s individual needs, to offer them the possibility
to take responsibility and assess themselves with rubrics (that will always
been written with positive criteria instead of negative, as any rules will be),
and for sure, I’ll use the idea of Muffin Mondays to create a nice home-school
connection.
