PEDAGOGICAL  PROJECT II

When talking about the physicall setting of a school, people usually think that it is just referred to the building and the physical location of the school; but educators are the only ones who realize of the importance of having a comfortable and adequate physical setting. The quality of a physical environement is essential for ensuring students' engagement in their learning and teaching process since it is correlated with students' outcomes and their behaviour during the lessons.

Taking into account that students spend most of their time at school, I think that they must have a good atmosphere for developing their schoolar life, in which they can feel relaxed and motivated to learn. That is the problem of most of the public schools, including the one where I was observing, they do not have an appropriate physical setting for enhacing students in the process and for receiving the number of the students they usually have.

It usually looks easy to arrange a classroom assigning different seats to students to fill up the class, but it goes beyond that. Most of the experts on classroom management and experienced teachers say that having an appropriate seating arrangement during the lessons can have a positive impact on classroom discipline, students' interaction and the effectiveness of  the instructions. There are many different ways for students' seating arrangement during the class, and selecting the best depends on the objectives of the lesson and the type of class that teachers wants to create. 

Choosing the most appropriate way for organizing the class can help both, students and teachers. It helps students because it facilitates the achievement of the different goals of the course, as well as it helps teachers to have a better monitoring of students' development during the activities assigned. The teacher I was observing had a good way for organizing the classroom, he was able to see each student and their behavior, at the same time. students were capable of seeing the teacher during the explanations, which helps them to be concentrated in the lesson.

Today, technology is everywhere accessible to everyone; it has brought many changes to our society specially when talking about education. The learning and teaching process has changed through the time by implementing the use of technology in the lessons. Even though there are many professionals on education in favor and against of the use of it, the truth is that it brings many advantages to the students' development.  Using technology in the classroom  helps to facilitate the learning process; technology allows students to access easily to the information needed for the lessons, for example, nowadays students do not need to buy books for working on class since they can get it virtually. 

In my personal opinion, technology is an amazing tool that can provide students a variety of accessible information from which they, and also teachers, can obtain many benefits for the learning process. Moreover, using this tool in the classroom can motivate students; they usually think that technology makes the lessons more fun and interesting because there are a lot of images, audios and videos they can find by using the computer or tab. That is one advantage of the school where I was observing, English teachers make correct use of technology because students have virtual English books in some tabs that were provided by the Ministry of Education. That helps students to save money since mos of them do not have enough money for buying books. 

As mentioned before, a teacher needs to implement a variety of materials as well as strategies in order to catch students' attention and engage them in the learning process. This works better when talking about teaching a foreign langugae such as English since it requires assigning different activities depending on the skills of the language to be develop, and the different students' learning styles. 

I think that it is essential that English teachers use different kinds of activities, methods and strategies for developing effective lesson since it makes the class more ejoyable for learners. Wether a teacher applies or does not apply different strategies in the lessons, it gives us an overview about her/his methodology and the kind of teacher he/she is; the one who is always doing the same activities, or the one who is always improving, changing and innovating for giving his/her best to the students. 

Learning a second language is not easy, it is a process that takes many time, dedication and motivation not only by the learners, but also by the teachers. The use of materials in the classroom is really important since they help both teacher and students, to make easier the learning. When using materials in the classroom, the teacher makes the lesson more creative and dynamic, which help the students to be motivated and focused on the lessons.

Through the observations I could notice the differences between a lesson in which the teacher makes use of different kinds of materials, and a lesson in which the teacher does not make use of them. This differences are evidenced in the students’ development through the lesson. When the teacher did not make use of materials for teaching, students were more unmotivated and they did not want to participate in the activities. Furthermore, when the teacher made a correctly use of materials, students were extremely motivated, and all of them wanted to participate in the different activities given by the teacher.

When teaching to children or teenagers, especially a foreign language such as English, it is important to keep in mind that they tend to get easily distract and misbehave during the lesson. On the one hand, children have a short attention span so they usually misbehave or move around the classroom when the teacher is teaching; on the other hand, teenagers can be concentrated in the lesson but they are in the age of rebel in which they feel that they can do whatever they want, that is the reason why they do not like to pay attention or follow teachers’ instructions.

We, as pre-service teachers, have to take into account those characteristics when teaching to these two different kind of population in order to prepare ourselves for facing students’ misbehave. It is essential for teachers to acquire classroom management skills to manage students’ conducts; the problem is that those skills are only acquired with practice and experience, so most of the beginning teachers will have difficulties managing their classrooms. For that reason, I consider that the process of observing English classes in real contexts is too beneficial for pre-service teachers since they have the opportunity to see the different strategies that in-service teachers applied, and take them as a reference for their professional development.