First day

The purpose of this post is write about what I learnt these days in class of “Organización de las instituciones educativas” with my own work in group and the presentation of the rest of the groups (because we can learn with the successes and mistakes of our classmates):



In these days we did a group work in which we had to read a document about the cooperative learning to create a lesson plan of one subject taking a specific technique of this topic. The final aim of this work was to know how we can teach using different techniques of cooperative learning. At first, all of the components of my group read the information about the document that was uploaded on the network in the blog “organizacioninstituciones2011”. This document talked about the distribution of the pupils to do a work in groups and the distribution of classroom furniture, the different techniques to organize a didactic sequence, the operating rules group for teamwork, the internal organization of the teams (Team Notebook), the celebrations in teams and group class and the various techniques of cooperative learning: Team Assisted Individualization, Peer Tutoring, Jigsawor or Puzzel, Group-Investigation and Teams - Games Tournaments. My group opted to choose the technique of the puzzle for doing the sequence taking as a pillar the instructions of the document.

The first day that we had to expose our work to the rest of the class was the 11 of February. This class was only of two hours, for that reason only could present two groups: KIA group and Los minions group (my awesome group).

The KIA group was the first. They did a wonderful project mixing the creativity and the modernity to explain a “boring topic” for the child: the planets. I could see at the beginning that all of the components were nervous, but I think that is quite normal because is not easy talk in front of 20 individuals that they are judging and also in my  explanation was nervous when we had to do it. The technique that they used was Jigsaw or puzzle. In my opinion, they did a fantastic explanation about the technique and their own organization when they had to do the power point. Also their personal commitments, commitments like “improve the speaking or lose the insecurity in public”. It is a very important thing, because is a way to be conscious that all the people have mistakes or things to overcome like the insecurity or the fear to do a bad or wrong pronunciation, and sharing that we can learn.

Ana Escribano was my favorite speaker, her ability and control of the language gave her the chance to explain with all the normality and the facility the theoretical content of Cooperative learning and for that cause we could understand perfectly. The activity to do in class, teach the planets in groups, that they proposed in the lesson plan, was very related with the technique that they used. I really liked the concept to use cards to assimilate the concepts or give additional information to the students when the kids had to explain the other kids their work about the Solar System.

Other thing that I could see was the control that all the components had about the power point, I mean, not all of them knew only their part but also the part of others. I really think that all of they could have explained other slides that were not their own.
Sometimes the teacher intervened to do a constructive critique (crítica constructiva) about the things that they had to change. I could learn of these interventions that the most important in a comparative learning is that the kids can work together sharing their experiences and knowledges and the games mustn’t be competitive rather collaborative.  The game “stop” is a formidable game to do it in class but not to do it from a competitive perspective, all the kids should win something (stickers, positives).

In my understanding they have to improve in the time (their exposition was around 1.05 h) and their expressions.