The most important thing to teach - BLOG ENTRY 2

In my opinion, one of the most important things to accomplish while teaching my subject is to make my pupils see the importance of the knowledge that I’m sharing with them and its application to real life. This is something that I’m already doing now with all the curriculum restrictions and I would reinforce it if I were free to design my own curriculum.

Although Maths is a subject that has some areas of knowledge which are plenty of real life examples and applications, there are also many other areas which are not properly covered in this way. In fact, even those that have clear applications are not usually exercised in a real context or with communicative practices.

So that, I would like to teach my subject with a proper reorganization of the contents along the different courses which let me include more real life practices and more group activities. This would be a great way to promote a subject that students usually are afraid of and a fantastic method to improve and promote communication and language practice too. 

 Under this approach, the evaluation could be focused on how students try to find and solve problems (alone but also as part of a group) interacting with other students and confronting real life situations where acquired knowledge must be applied.

Advantages and Disadvantages of using the ELP with my groups

The European Language Portfolio (ELP) was developed in order to support the learner autonomy, plurilingualism and intercultural awareness and competence, but also to let them record their language learning achivements and their experiences of learning and using languages.

The ELP works like a passport for the language learner and, in this way, it has some advantages that I would like to talk about.  In my opinion, the main advantage is that it promotes the learner’s self-assessment and that’s something that teenagers appreciate because they are always looking for their own autonomy. Besides it stimulates the language learning as a if it was part of a game and encourages the tolerance and respect for other languages and cultures.

But obviously, I have also found some disadvantages while using this instrument. The most important one is related to the implementation of the ELP as part of our regular classes due to our current subjects’ schedules and the lack of time, which was already present in most of the subjects before trying to adopt the ELP. Furthermore, it requires a minimum of responsibility and discipline, and those are values which are hardly present in many of our student groups.

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