Narrative: Improving the Teaching Learning Process

I have been a second language teacher for more than twenty years and have taught students of all ages in public and private schools as well as private lessons, despite I have never had formal teaching education, as professor MacBeath says in lecture 1, ‘I understand already a great deal about the nature of learning and the nature of teaching’. I have been teaching business people for almost two years. All along no colleague or education authority has evaluated my teaching performance, it is for this reason that I decided to enroll in this course; to learn more, to analyze and review what I have been doing, to obtain support, feedback and interchange ideas in order to become a better teacher. Although this is not the first course for which I enroll in Coursera, it is for me a great achievement to have reached this point because I have to admit I had not overcome the fear of not understanding what is taught, not being able to accomplish the assignments and even worse the possibility of failing a test. Under all these circumstances, I find myself as a learner who needs guidance to change all that knowledge I have into teaching tools.

Each lecture took me into a serious reflection about teaching and learning, for instance while watching lecture 1.4 and heard about Jeff Southworth toxins and nutrients, “nutrients, the things that actually help you to grow professionally, and the toxins, the things that actually poison that professionalism”. Among the toxins; the high percentage of students absenteeism and delays to classes due to their work responsibilities, teacher using time of classes to take care of other responsibilities, such as article translation and correction of documents, time lost in traveling from one bui...

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...lack found, when give children a grade and a comment, they tended not to look at the comment, but to look at the grade.’

Thus I do agree that assessment should be aimed to help learners realized how much they have learned, what they still have to learn and how they are going to apply all they have learned in real life. As for teachers, it should help them to know what will be the next step, what they have to change or improve and how what has been taught will improve their students living.

I am aware of how much humanity has developed and improved the teaching learning process through experience, research, creativity, trial and error. I am thankful for all those sources that have been created to facilitate knowledge transmission and I am sure that we still a long way to go to become better teachers to prepare our pupils to make a difference in their lives.