TEACHING PHILOSOPHY OR JUST PHILOSOPHY?

Teaching philosophy

It is said that human being should have a philosophy for every one of his/her activity and of course, this would mean a different behavior in front of the different challenges of our multiple social dimensions; and, in spite of famous voices such as Freud, or Lacan that claims that it is true such argument of the multi dimension of the mind and human behaviors, that does not necessarily means there must be an specific “philosophy” for every one of our mental or social dimension, in this specific case a “teaching philosophy” which for me would mean a labor philosophy because this is my profession.

Having clear this point about only one philosophy I may talk about the topic which I will call just philosophy and not a “teaching philosophy”. The philosophy applied in my life as a social and mental active human being it is summarize in one single word conscious. For me this is the main premise of my life and I applied to every single dimension of my thoughts and actions in social life, and of course it is easily seen also in my social functions as a professional. Thus when I adopt the role of a teacher I guide the students to that premise “being conscious” but, about what? Well, that depends of the context: it is not the same teaching English to children in a low economic status than teaching adults in the country, what a I mean with this idea is that what I first have to do is make me conscious of the context, the needs the resources and mainly make me conscious of the people in front of me, because, despite their similarities all of them have something to said or give an opinion. And, after “reading” the context, how to achieve that conscience I am looking for??

That is the difficult part because in that point once I have observed I have to harmonize what a saw and what I know to integrate everything in a way to touch those people who decide to be there. It is difficult giving a “methodology” for doing that, all what I know is that once I know the group or the being in front of me I invest my energies in making Them conscious of what they are, what they want, what they desire, why they decide being there or what big social enterprise or institution influences his/her personal decision in order to respond a living style or a specific modus operandi for doing something that sometimes seems to be ours but we do not know or see that we are obeying another force different to our own will, maybe to benefit ourselves or just to make us fix in a chain of production of living style and thoughts that could be positive but necessarily ours owns.

TBL or task based learning

Basically in this entry it will be seen what TBL is through a simple example. With this what we look for is to increase the understanding of this teaching view and its big advantages to put in practice in a foreing language class.

First of all, let's limitate our ideal class to keep a criteria of what we are going to teach and what subjets will be implied in it.
Class characteristics: a 8th grade with students from a bilingual high school
Number of students: 20
Topic: Solar system and space
time to develop: the English class will dedicate one of its 6 weekly hour to get information about the topic and writting exercises. language class will dedicate 2 of its 4 weekly hours to check how to write a fantastic story and the structure of this type of document in order to desing their own documents, and social sciences class will dedicate enough tiem to study theories related with the origins of the space and conformation of planet earth.
Subjects involved: language, History, social sciences.
Skill to develop: writting, reading, and also composing from a personal view taking into account the topic and literacy capacities of the student.
Objective:
organize the students ideas around an specific topic in order to research about it and put inpractice all the knowledge and articulate it in other areas not completely enchained to the topic. For example the study of the milky way seen through the literature.

PRE-task:
every curse will present the topic and the activities. Every teacher from every curse will design his/her own specific objetives, extra activities and evaluations. The teachers will have independence in their courses they may work as they want, just keeping in mind they must dedicate an space for the task. Thus English class will have the responsability of guiding the students through the information searching, discussion about the topic. Language class will show the characteristics of a tale and fantastic stories related to the space, and social science will filtrate the obtained information in the English class to present the main topics of this area such as; the space, planet Earth, development of the different theories about the origin of the univers and so on.

Task In the English class:

the class will be divided in 4 groups which are going to work in the web to search information after watching the next presentation. Once, they have already watched the presentation the students are requested to look for information that they are interested in about the topic, for example if they are interested in the origin of stars they may look for it and then to express opinions about their interests, students may work in the conformed groups or in pairs. in a second session the students will present the information they have found to use; for example if they find how are the stars conformed and how these birth and die, they will make small presentations about it in class.
planing
In a third session the groups will design a poster with one of the 4 chosen topics from the previous presented about the research they did about their preferences about the space. In this poster the students will also add information they have obtained from the other courses like for example, theories about the origin of the universe or any comment related to the topic.
Once the poster is finished every group will post their poster in a public space to show the final group product to all the school.
report
Finally the students will write two documents as a final productions in the english class but related to the other courses. the first one is a cognitive one, it means, every student individually will writte a document, it may be an essay, a research report or any other where they show their knowledge about the space, related theories, conformation of the Earth and all other topics related to the task. the second document will be a fantastic story also related to the space, in this story the student will take advantage of the knowledge get in the language class, also the student may use previous documents seen in that class.

learning styles the vision of what is it about

In the current entry it will be discussed a little bit about the learning style and a relationship with the multiple intelligences already disscused.
first of all, a definition of the three main learning styles will be stablished:

Visual Learners

learn through seeing
These learners need to see the teacher's body language and facial expression to fully understand the content of a lesson. They tend to prefer sitting at the front of the classroom to avoid visual obstructions.

Auditory Learners
learn through listening
They learn through verbal lectures, discussions, talking things through and listening to what others have to say. Auditory learners interpret the underlying meanings of speech through listening to tone of voice, pitch, speed and other gestures.

Kinesthetic Learners

learn through , moving, doing and touching
Tactile/Kinesthetic persons learn best through a hands-on approach, actively exploring the physical world around them. They may find it hard to sit still for long periods and may become distracted by their need for activity and exploration.

So far, it is understood that human beings have particular ways to aquire new information or knowledge depending of enviromental or situational context .

So it can be clasified every multiple intelligence in these three learning styles for designing easier taking into account the Gardner's multiple intelligences. So we might say that the visual learners are those who explode more the Visual/spatial intelligence, and why not the interpersonal intelligence. In the Auditory learners we would have the linguistic intelligence, the mathematic intelligence and also the intrapersonal intelligence. finally, it is the kinesthetic learners where it might be include the body/kinesthetic intelligence, and the musical.

with this clasification it is posible to design looking at the best way to present a new knowledge to your students taking as a reference what posible skills they have. This clasification is not necessarily restrictive because human brain sometimes acts in different way by mixing all its skills to learn something. So, after stablishing this theoritical clasification it may be proposed an activity but don't forgeting some important tips; as we said in the last entry of this blog, it is good to observe the interaction in the classroom before taking decisions, the way the students socialize and behave with others classmates will guid the way an activity will develop, for example if you see that the level of interaction among them is not quite closer group activities should be avoid, but what to do if the most part of the student present like for example the kinesthetic skill individually? Well in that case is when learning skill and the intelligences must be mixed, for example if what we mentioned happen a simple solution may be to combine a musical activity outdoors with certains particularities in the song or the rythim to help them to interact without push them to socialize.

learning styles and mutiple intelligences

well before talking about an specific topic we should reach a small defnition of what is it about, so, in this line, WHAT IS MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
according an irrespected quotation of Dr. H gardner ( the first in talking about this) It suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited. Instead, it is proposed eight different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These intelligences are:
Linguistic intelligence ("word smart"):
Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")
Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")
Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")
Musical intelligence ("music smart")
Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")
Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")
Naturalist intelligence

so far it may be said that humans, believed or not, are able to think or learn in differents ways depending of their personal characteristics. amazing, isn't it?

now what for?
in the case you design your teaching plan you might have into account an evaluation of the multiple intelligences for having a global picture of the students you have, in order to design a very aimed activity depending of the most common intelligence in your classroom, for example if your students are more "music smart" you know they will improve their skills a lot with a listening activity or in the opositte, if they are not so good in that skills you should avoid that kind of activity because you may lose the focus of your intentions and the student's attention.
a good idea to avoid this uncomfortable situation the best is to exchange among the differents intelligences, it means, not necessarily design your units with only one intelligence in mind just because most of the students show high levels according to a test; the idea is to design exploring all the intelligences. Thus the students will explore their others posibilities and , of course thye will go desiding which one is their and you as the teacher will modify what you propose and constructing new ways to reach the knowledge to them.

our very first time creating a blog on blogger

well, as primiparos as always we're here trying to create a simple blog... how difficult might be this task, but what we don't know is how useful this personal pages are for any field we are. For example right now if this class is fully designed by this media we wouldn't be worried because the university is closed or we don't have any money for comming until the campus; we won't need that!! because a whole disscusion it may be held through this media.futhermore, through this a precedent of what we said it will remian for the your future opinion about my view of the topic we're dealing with.

O.K stop with introductions and let's start with our very first interesting: LEARNING STRATEGIES.