When it comes to my teaching philosophy, I try to keep in mind some of the philosophies and ideologies we have studied at the ISL. One of the main philosophies I like to refer to is Realism, which allows students to use the knowledge in real-life situations, which is the main goal of any learning, but it is especially with language learning, teaching a lesson for students to apply to their lives in a meaningful capacity, this type of philosophy also aims for student agency and self-reliance, it helps the student develop critical thinking, and it leads them to be a better advocate for their education.

One of the ways I try to keep realism as a part of my teaching philosophy in my classroom is by using real-life examples for students to contextualize the meaning of the lesson. For example, when I started a unit about describing the features and body parts of monsters with my students, I asked them to draw their favorite movie character and describe that character, which could have been a kid, a monster, an alien, a pet, or anything else, so they could be able to describe the character, then they had to describe their classmate, this allowed them to associate the vocabulary not only with monsters as the book uses them for but for people, too.

Another aspect that I mentioned above is that I like to think of teaching ideologies, and the current ideology I apply to my teaching is Social Efficiency, which consists of me utilizing the resources I have at the Institute and presenting my students with them, then I become a supervisor of some sort, but I would love to implement a Learner-Centered approach to my teaching philosophy, that would be the best, students being at the forefront as they should be, and me becoming just a facilitator for their learning, being just a guiding force for them.

As previously stated, I have a current teaching philosophy, but I would love to achieve one day the other ideas that I have in mind, and I think these ideas are positive and achievable. Perhaps, I need to keep attending teaching seminars and ask other teachers how to get to the level of becoming more than a simple lecturer and research more about how to become a facilitator for my students rather than a dictator trying to rule over them. The end goal is always to keep students safe, interested, engaged, and participating.

• For my students to be confident in their skills.

• For my students to develop critical thinking skills.

• For my students to have a positive mindset when it comes to learning.

• For my students to have fun while learning.

• For my students to become more self-reliant.

• For my students to become motivated.

For my observations, I decided to observe at an Institute of the English Language in Asunción, Paraguay. The institute teaches English from the ages of 4-5 (children 1) up to adults, and there is no age limit to be a student. The institute assigned me the classes I would observe and subsequently teach, according to the requirements for this year’s observations guideline.

It was a class of 12 students, but there were only 8 students present that day, and they were around 13-15 years of age, and they were in the Adolescence 7 course, which is an intermediate level B1-B2, they were using the book “Impact”, Unit 2, and their teacher is Miss V. The class observation lasted for 120 minutes in total.

The second class I observed for 90 minutes, and was a class of six students 12-14 years old, and the course is called Adolescence 3, the teacher is Miss C, and their levels are around A2-B1, and they were also using the book “Impact”, but they were developing a class about writing emails.

Here is the first lesson plan I developed alongside Daniela for the Adolescence 7 class, because we were going to observe and teach in the same classroom. I used the book as requested by the teacher Miss V.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PC2oh5NKm-wGnRD7PKaf-ewaUrOPvSq4/view?usp=sharing

For the second class, Daniela and I taught together, I started the class and she took the second part of the lesson. And here is the lesson plan of that class.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BDrrgMHkoBD6V3zJZY9nhC8Kk_Xwo47B/view?usp=sharing

This lesson plan was created for the class of Miss C.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MExTLvu20Cg0tfoOcIyRpgXhL03ZPKzB/view?usp=sharing

After observing this group and talking to the teacher, I figured that the students wanted to be challenged, they enjoyed it when the activities were a bit more difficult and challenging, so with Daniela, we prepared and presented the first activity “Running Dictation” together as an opener to our class. This activity was very successful, even though it took a bit more time than expected, the students were very engaged with the activity, which consisted of having to read 8 short paragraphs from the board, and dictating them to their partners, so they had to read, recall, and speak the information to complete the task. As I mentioned before, this activity got the students up and trying to complete the task, which was somewhat challenging, thankfully, it got them engaged, if there is anything I could change, I would have asked them to repeat the instructions back to me, so that I knew for sure they knew what to do.

After the Running Dictation, we proceeded to complete the course book, for this part, Daniela and I divided our time, so we could practice separately. My turn came after the second recess, which was to complete pages 28 and 29 of their course book. These activities were more monotonous, the students were not as engaged, but they still participated. After a few simple activities, we had a task that involved being creative and writing about a topic they have chosen, then they had to present their work. This is where things got a bit messy, some students were getting a bit rowdy, and I had some trouble getting them to focus on their classmates’ stories, which tends to be my issue when students try to go away from the topic or task at hand.

As a whining-down task, I chose to do a little game provided by the book. There were a few flashcards with phrases they have read about before, and they had to say the phrase and ask if it was true or false. Luckily, the students enjoyed this game, but after three hours of class, they were ready to be done.

I would say that I learned a few things with this group, being that they are more advanced students than I have taught before, they were ready to learn more, to practice what they knew, and to do games that were challenging rather than playing easy games to pass the time. I would have prepared more dynamic games if I knew they would be open to doing them.

As an opener I had written some of the animals we read about in the previous class, the students had to write down the vocabulary words from the animals as one does in a “Word-Web”. After writing down what they felt each word fitted best the animal, the students had to create 8-10 lines of a paragraph using the words surrounding the animal of their choosing. This activity was seemingly not too difficult, but it got the class moving and engaged with the content, they were a bit more passionate about misunderstood animals since the last class, perhaps some of them did some research and were able to talk freely about their thoughts on the animals. After they had done their paragraph, they had to read them aloud and express their feelings and reasons for those feelings towards the misunderstood animals. Most students paid attention and were interested to hear what the other person wrote down. I would say this was a successful activity.

Then, we proceeded to complete the course book on page 30. Which were a few interactive tasks with their classmates, asking them about their answers. The last excise I completed with the group was the “Unit 2 Worksheet” where students had to match the cause and the effect, then they had to complete the sentence with the correct phrase. These activities were a bit calmer, but to make it more interesting and not lose their attention, I asked them to complete the phrases on the board for both exercises.

Overall I believe my performance was better the second time around, I remembered to ask students to repeat instructions, and I asked multiple times if there were any doubts or if there were any words they didn't know the meaning of, and I avoided using Spanish to explain the things they couldn’t understand. I politely asked them to put their cellphones away, because in the first lesson I had forgotten about this.

If I could change anything, it would be to ask them about their week before starting the class, try to create some rapport before diving into the lesson, and to have more games ready to go for them, as they have three-hour classes, by the second hour they tend to get bored and games tend to stimulate them and allow them to practice as well.

For my third and final teaching class, it was ninety minutes long, and I had pages 68 and 69 of the course book, which were about the different houses around the world and why they were different. So as an opener I decided to have three pictures of different types of houses and different names alongside the materials from which the houses were made of. The students had to guess which house was made of which material and the name itself, then they had to read a short story about each type of house. Then I asked them why the houses were so differently made and located, they gave their answers and speculations. Then we proceeded to complete the course book, watched videos, and we chatted about our ideal room, then students had to re-create their favorite room as they wanted it to be, it could be any of the rooms in their house, in the worksheet. Sadly, we did not use the last worksheet because we ran out of time, and I did not want to leave them homework because I was not going to be able to pick up their homework.

From this last lesson I practiced I realize that we need to be aware of the different levels of our students as much as humanly possible, we could have students that are ready to be on the next level, and we will have students that need more time to develop their skills, and also I need to improve on my classroom management skills, whenever there are more than 10 students I tend to panic and scramble through the class, I need to be more confident with a larger group. For this group in particular we played a little bit of “Hangman” by using the vocabulary words from the unit, as a cooling-off period for them before going home.

My teaching experience consists of the past 8 months teaching your learners (true and false beginners) around the ages of 8 to 10, at an English Institute. I am very grateful to have been given such a great opportunity to explore working with younger kids, which I have enjoyed very much.

I have been a part of the ISL English Symposium for all four consecutive years, and I am also grateful for that, it gave me confidence, and a sense of accomplishment to be able to produce videos and presentations for the Symposium.

Here are some works I decided to share with you, hopefully it can help you grow not only as a student, but as a teacher, too.

This video was created for Educational Psychology 2021, with the professor Belén Migliorisi, with the intent of sharing it at the 2020 Symposium, and the goal was to share the definition and the basic aspects of Autism Spectrum Disorder, such as the different levels, the characterictis, how it becomes relevant when teaching, especially when we develop differentiated instructions, and strategies, tools, and routines for teachers on how to deal this disorder in the classroom.

After learning about this topic myself, I realized that there are so many things to take into account when speaking about Autism Spectrum Disorder, for example, people diagnosed with ASD tend to get diagnosed with other disorders as well, such as, depression, ADHD, and OCD, so there are a few struggles to get through when dealing with ASD.

This lesson plan was created for the subject Teaching Practice I, 2021, professor Carol Ortíz. The objectives of this lesson were to provide a class full of TPR for young learners, after presenting the lesson to the professor, thanks to her constructive criticism we realized that we did not take all aspects of teaching into account, because we had no experience in teaching whatsoever at this point. We forgot to think if our students had the proper reading level, if they had their listening skills developed to the point we needed them to have, we made the activities a bit too long, and so on. Creating this lesson plan was very helpful in many regards and I am proud of learning to be more acquainted with students and to also remember to contextualize the lessons.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-2Lu7HGbjRwF03fdtTKLT1WzSL9gptNdEjXpyb5e7Fk/edit?usp=sharing

This term paper was created for the subject Didactics with professor Romina Bento in 2021, the purpose of the paper was to research and reflect upon the teaching methods regarding speaking, we researched the role of the teacher, the importance of teaching speaking, the different approaches to teach speaking, and the issues we could encounter regarding teaching speaking.

This video was created for the 2021 Symposium, with the intention of sharing more about American Sign Language and its inclusivity when it comes to teaching. The main topic was color in ASL and so we prepared the video with different phrases using the vocabulary.

decided dtoI share this video here because I believe it is important to know a bit of Sign Language, and it is important to look at it as a form of inclusive communication.

This video was made for the 2022 Symposium. The purpose of this video is to inform about Sign Language in the Paraguayan context, and I chose to share it here because I believe more people should know about Sign Langauge and its use to promote inclusive communication in our country.

https://docs.google.com/presentaton/d/1cr5YGntJqtOfELpCkx0iKliMBawkPs2ecIkLQkh0zs8/edit?usp=sharing