Unespected news

As a teacher there are many reasons to be happy but there are also many ones to be sad.

Yesterday, in the 6th grade group I noticed there was a boy who wasn't there before. Is this your first class with me? I asked. Yes, he claimed. And we continue the class.

During the recess, the teacher told me that this handsome boy was during three months in a reabilitation center.

I share this because I was surprised.

Partner Professional Dialogue

Now, that I have done the activity related with the Professional dialogue, I am inclined to believe that partner professional dialogue is a crucial stage in the teaching-learning process. It is similar to peer coaching, which might help teachers to reflect and find out how they are doing with their teaching. In this case the Professional dialogue might occur between English Language Teachers in one or more than one conversations.

During the development of this activity we as teachers need to reflect on our teaching practice, it is related with the context in where we are teaching. I conclude that most of the teachers could benefit from becoming reflective teachers and having professional dialogues with partners.

For instance when I had the first dialogue with my colleague Miss Diva, she tried to situate in my entire context despite she does not teach children. I explained the goals of the course and how I was expecting to achieve them. It took time to talk about details; what was happening in the classroom, the development of the classes and students’ behavior. Indeed all this was necessary for the reflection on action process.

One advantage of choosing Miss Diva to have the dialogue was that she is my very close neighbor, so for the second (some hours) conversation she had reflected in my teaching practice and she was ready to comment some strategies. Even I needed to make changes in my planning.

My colleague was present in one of my classes as an observer, I remember we have seen this in other subject, the teacher observing, I liked and I consider as I mention above: most of the teachers might benefit with this practice. Although we can feel uncomfortable to have an observer and most to be criticize but the sole aim of this is to help us in our performance.

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“The only source of knowledge is experience:”

 Albert Einstein

Learning involves participation in a community of practice. I agree with this sentence because we can learn a lot from the books but …there’s with the practice when we really know what we know.

Relating with the social learning theory which posits: “that people learn from observing other people”, in Spanish we have a very famous sentence: “al lugar que fueres haz lo que vieres.” Or either way with observation we can see what happens with this or that action. It helps us to know something from the acting of others.

We never finished learning. We start learning from our mom when we are infants and we continue learning throughout our lives. Sometimes the learning gets from a hard experience or as a result of a difficult action.

Another famous phrase in Spanish: “la práctica hace al maestro.” The teachers might count from their teaching with the experience of what to do or how to work in different situations. Teachers must keep in their journal of “teaching practice” the most important events of their dairy routine.

“Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery.” I totally agree with this statement, and I consider it is the way it should be, because we need to see where we are getting in and then get in.

"Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, and communities of knowledge and practice. I relate this with a person when is training to somebody else who will take his/her place.

Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part. We all are part of a society and we give and receive during the process of living which is process of learning.

Gardner (1999: 24) puts it, 'intelligence is better thought of as "distributed" in the world rather than "in the head"'.