Positive Psychology: "Aulas Felices"

Good afternoon everybody,

In this post, I will provide you with three activities that you can carry out in your class to improve confidence and perseverance among students.

These three exercises are pulled out from a program called "Aulas Felices" whose authors are Ricardo Arguís Rey, Ana Pilar Bolsas Valero, Silvia Hernández Paniello and Mª del Mar Salvador Monge.

The first activity is called "Los ciegos":

Body: In the gym, in pairs, one student will be the blind and the other will be the guide. The guide should say instructions to his or her partner to arrive somewhere together. The exercise will have two parts, in the first one the one who is the blind should follow the instructions but without physical contact. In the second part, they can be guided by touching some part of the body of their guides. At the end, the blind person should say how he or she has felt in both situations with and without physical contact. After that, they have to change their roles.

Goals: Moving around with closed eyes, sharpening the rest of the senses. Develop trust in their partners.

The second activity is called "¡Corre, corre, que te freno!".

Body: All the students, except one of them, should be placed forming a V without spaces between them. In front of the row, the student will have his or her eyes covered. Then, he or she has to reach out until his or her classmates. When everyone has done the activity, they have to say how they have felt during the exercise.

Goals: Run with their eyes closed. Develop trust in their partners.

The third activity is called: "Potenciando la perseverancia en casos especiales"

Body: There are some students that need special steps to strengthen perseverance habits during their school tasks. They can be students with immaturity problems, lack of work habits, attention deficit disorder, lack of motivation, etc. For this reason, we can look up information about some strategies in the following document:

"La concentración en las tareas en casos especiales":  http://documents.mx/documents/la-concentracion-en-las-tareas-en-casos-especialespdf.html

Goals: Favor concentration in ADHD students.

Action research project

Bad habits inside and outside the classroom

Nowadays, the world where we live is facing a hard situation regarding the habits that thousand of students adopt in the school context (both inside and outside the classroom).

This post is a call for awareness in order that families, teachers and the rest of school staff act together as a team trying to solve the aforementioned behavioural problems that our youths are currently having.

Here you can find some examples of inappropriate habits that students have inside the academic context.

• The ‘mobile-dependence’. This phenomenon is becoming more frequent in classrooms. The mobile phone is among the technological tools with the greatest presence in the market. During a period of scarcely 10 years, it has gone from being almost non-existent to being the device most used (and desired) by adolescents. Its physical characteristics as well as the psychological processes involved in its use explain both the fascination it elicits and the abuse or dependence it can come to provoke or encourage in adolescents. Sadly, this phenomenon decreases face-to-face interaction among students and disturbs the normal and  fluent teaching-learning process, leading to more distractions and increasing attention deficit.

• Lack of care of classrooms materials. Students sometimes do not value what they have in their classroom. What is more, they do not feel their classroom is a place where everything must be cleaned and tidy. That is the reason why teachers can find rubbish, chalks, papers on the floor, chairs that are not in their proper place… Thus, it is important to organise the classroom and to make students understand everything has its own place.   

• Focusing more on their classmates than on their teachers. Students tend to pay more attention to their friends during the lessons instead of listening their teachers. They think it is more important to share moments with other students and that is one of the reasons why they lose some important information that the teacher says in class.

Now, talking about the bad habits outside the classroom, we have the following examples:

• Doing dangerous things aimed at having a picture of themselves doing something risky for their “Instagram” or “Facebook” profiles. In this example the teeneger is hanging from a tree`s branch and their friends were looking at him laughing and taking  pictures of his “monkey abilities”.

Here you can find an example of inappropriate habit that students have inside and outside the academic context:

• Bullying: It’s a worldwide problem. Bullying has many manifestations, many forms, and many victims. But they all have one thing in common: people get hurt and it needs to stop. Bullying has a negative impact on everyone involved; the target, the bully and the bystanders. Sadly, this phenomenon increases step by step every single day. As a teacher, we have to know how to stop bullying in schools: encouraging peer-to-peer relationships, mediation…However, bullying is more likely to occur outside of class or between classes when students focus on interacting with others classmates.

Krashen vs. Swain

Today, I am going to talk about the differences among two authors, Krashen and Swain. The first one is known because of his "Natural Approach", he says that a second language is acquired in the same way children learn their mother tongue. Thus, we acquire another language when we are able to understand messages so the emphasis would be on meaningful interactions. Otherwise, Swain states that learning takes place when encountering a 'gap' in the linguistic knowledge of the second language.

On the other hand, Krashen focuses on input and he tells that comprehensible one need to be at the right level during learning while Swain says that output is also critical and it enhances fluency and creates awareness of language knowledge gaps. Moreover, about acquisition, Krashen mentions that if we are under stress or anxiety, it will decrease. So, children will learn more if their anxiety rate is low. Thereby, Swain defends output and says that it provides opportunities to experiment with language forms and structures. Also, it obtains feedback from others about language use. Finally, regarding grammar, Krashen tells that it cannot be explained because students can only notice it once it is internalized, so the grammar and vocabulary can only be acquired in a natural way.

After all these statements, what do you think? Who do you think is right?

Speakers' Corner

Good afternoon everybody!

Here you can find our speakers' corner presentation about "How to write effective classroom materials?"

SPEAKERS' CORNER PRESENTATION

Learning styles questionnaire

The previous entry of the blog was about multiple intelligences and how to assess them. The next post will be about a learning styles questionnaire. We have 8 types of of them:

1. Verbal: when the words are your strongest point.

2. Visual: the pictures, images, diagrams and so on are your best way to study and organize ideas.

3. Musical: music or sounds help you to understand better everything.

4. Physical or kinaesthetic: you prefer to act things out.

5. Logical or mathematical: logic, reasoning systems and sequences are your strengths.

6. Social: Being in a group is really important for you and that helps you to share opinions and                             knowledge.

7. Solitary: It is just the opposite of the previous learning style.

8. Combination: Your learning style is the combination of two or more of these types.

So, the web to do the questionnaire is: http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html
And here you have a picture about how you will see the results:

Multiple intelligence self-assessment

Good afternoon,

Do you think your multiple intelligences are important? Do you want to assess them and find your strengths? Today, I am going to introduce two webs where you can do it! The first web is:

1. https://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-assessment

Here, you will see all of your intelligences but they will be measured in percentages. So, you can find out which ones are stronger for you. When you finish the test, you will see something like this:

2. http://www.literacynet.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html

The second one is to find out which are your strengths, your better intelligences. Here you have an example of the result:

Theory of learning

Learning contract

A learning contract is an agreement negotiated between the student and the teacher in order to change the students' behavior and improve their opportunities to learn. The benefit of a learning contract is that it can affect a positive change in our students while still involving them in class.

http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/best%20of%20bilash/learning%20contracts.html

Here you have an example: