My Teaching Philosophy
.My teaching philosophy is grounded on different pedagogical approaches. Before living in the USA, I usually took my own professors’ classrooms as a model. So lectures in the most traditional way were given to my students of Spanish literature and language in those early years of my career.
Things changed when I started to work in study abroad programs where culture topics led me to develop more interactive courses. 2005-2006 was the academic year I met Prof. Casilde Isabelli, as graduate student of a master degree in University of Nevada, Reno. I was trained under her supervision to teach Spanish language, literature and culture courses for first and second year students of Spanish, based on the grounds of the communicative method developed by Van Patten. This approach discards mechanical exercises and favor meaningful communication with a purpose as the real way to use natural language acquisition strategies. In Isabelli's course on how to teach a foreign language, I had the opportunity to learn about many different SL2 teaching approaches: audiolingualism, behaviorism, and several communicative theories developed by Krashen along with those I mentioned before. Today, I still start my classes with a warm up as an opening introduction to an activity where students receive an structured input.
During my years as a PhD student in University of California, Davis, I was also trained to teach in the program the Department of Spanish and Portuguese offers to their Teaching Assistants and Teaching Associate Instructors. With Norma López Burton I became familiar on blending approaches so we followed an instructional sequence where grammar was presented to the student in an structured input activity.
So, I planned for my classes entire sets of warm up, signature, information gap, role, follow up, reading, pre and post-reading, writing and listening activities, pre-test, and mock exams. Also, as part of the course, students had to complete written compositions and essays developed in three graded phases which helped them to draw an initial draft and convert it into a final version. Each one of these phases was corrected and graded separately, following first a key of errors for the grammar and spelling, and later providing substancial feedback on content and style, which was specially important in the case of the first “essays” written, when students must learn how to write an academic paper.
I usually made (and make), craft, a wide variety of materials, working alone or in collaboration with other colleagues. They varied (and still today vary) from the most basic ones to power point presentations or even media. As an example, I especially like a video I recorded on myself cooking a Spanish omelette which was used as an activity to work on the vocabulary of the utensils in the kitchen, the verbs on cooking and the food, and was focused on the impersonal forms of the verb. So, after learning about the vocab and reviewing the grammar point, students watched the video and worked in groups to catch the information. Another activity asked them to present in front of the class a personal recipe written by themselves focusing on the vocabulary and the grammar of the lesson. Then, they recorded how to cook that same recipe following the model given in my video. As a final summary for the lesson, we all cooked different and simple recipes and ate the output. I must say it. This video became very popular among my colleagues (even many of them asked me for permission to use it in their respective courses and today is available in the public website of Tesoros, which was developed by graduate students of Spanish in UCDavis under the supervision of Linguistics Professor Robert Blake, member of the Royal Spanish Academy in the US). But, more important, this video was effective among my students. Watching your Spanish teacher on a video playing as a new Martha Stewart must be priceless. But in the end they were engaged and motivated in my classroom which is a crucial key when teaching.
So, in order to organize and facilitate an immersive environment I use all the strategies as much as possible. This is why from 2010 I research more and more on technology. Additionally, as new approaches on the use of TICs have been arousing in the late years, I plan my classes using the principles of what I learned in the US along with other interdisciplinary practices that evolve concepts like “collaboration”, “coworking”, “leadership”, nets of knowledge”, gammification, etc.
My goal is to work on connecting students among them, along with other people outside the classroom to enrich their learning process in wider local and global settings. Today, to include in my classroom the concept of “lab” is useful when students explore critical thinking or when they look for reliable sources as scholars. Furthermore, the idea of "lab" gives me the opportunity to think about the classroom in a more flexible, student-centered space of knowledge.
In many ways, current and innovative ideas on education like those spread by people like Ken Robinson, Alejandro Piscitelli, Dolors Reig, or those provided by distant colleagues like Shanon Cristine Mattern, or closer educators like Gabriel Guillén, even the connections found with non academic people on the way we share, exchange and manage knowledge are radically helping me to constantly improve my teaching performance.
I feel teaching requires being always on the search of what we have in mind as the perfect model of classroom. To me, creating the most immersive environment to teach a foreign language, its literatures and its cultures gives us the chance to explore and experiment education as never before. Including multimodal and transmedia resources in my classrooms, exploring with my students new approaches and new tools, new topics or even new subjects in order to understand Spanish canonical and non canonical works gives me the pleasure to share my most precious desire, learning how to became a good teacher, which means a constant and non stop vocational search.
Things changed when I started to work in study abroad programs where culture topics led me to develop more interactive courses. 2005-2006 was the academic year I met Prof. Casilde Isabelli, as graduate student of a master degree in University of Nevada, Reno. I was trained under her supervision to teach Spanish language, literature and culture courses for first and second year students of Spanish, based on the grounds of the communicative method developed by Van Patten. This approach discards mechanical exercises and favor meaningful communication with a purpose as the real way to use natural language acquisition strategies. In Isabelli's course on how to teach a foreign language, I had the opportunity to learn about many different SL2 teaching approaches: audiolingualism, behaviorism, and several communicative theories developed by Krashen along with those I mentioned before. Today, I still start my classes with a warm up as an opening introduction to an activity where students receive an structured input.
During my years as a PhD student in University of California, Davis, I was also trained to teach in the program the Department of Spanish and Portuguese offers to their Teaching Assistants and Teaching Associate Instructors. With Norma López Burton I became familiar on blending approaches so we followed an instructional sequence where grammar was presented to the student in an structured input activity.
So, I planned for my classes entire sets of warm up, signature, information gap, role, follow up, reading, pre and post-reading, writing and listening activities, pre-test, and mock exams. Also, as part of the course, students had to complete written compositions and essays developed in three graded phases which helped them to draw an initial draft and convert it into a final version. Each one of these phases was corrected and graded separately, following first a key of errors for the grammar and spelling, and later providing substancial feedback on content and style, which was specially important in the case of the first “essays” written, when students must learn how to write an academic paper.
I usually made (and make), craft, a wide variety of materials, working alone or in collaboration with other colleagues. They varied (and still today vary) from the most basic ones to power point presentations or even media. As an example, I especially like a video I recorded on myself cooking a Spanish omelette which was used as an activity to work on the vocabulary of the utensils in the kitchen, the verbs on cooking and the food, and was focused on the impersonal forms of the verb. So, after learning about the vocab and reviewing the grammar point, students watched the video and worked in groups to catch the information. Another activity asked them to present in front of the class a personal recipe written by themselves focusing on the vocabulary and the grammar of the lesson. Then, they recorded how to cook that same recipe following the model given in my video. As a final summary for the lesson, we all cooked different and simple recipes and ate the output. I must say it. This video became very popular among my colleagues (even many of them asked me for permission to use it in their respective courses and today is available in the public website of Tesoros, which was developed by graduate students of Spanish in UCDavis under the supervision of Linguistics Professor Robert Blake, member of the Royal Spanish Academy in the US). But, more important, this video was effective among my students. Watching your Spanish teacher on a video playing as a new Martha Stewart must be priceless. But in the end they were engaged and motivated in my classroom which is a crucial key when teaching.
So, in order to organize and facilitate an immersive environment I use all the strategies as much as possible. This is why from 2010 I research more and more on technology. Additionally, as new approaches on the use of TICs have been arousing in the late years, I plan my classes using the principles of what I learned in the US along with other interdisciplinary practices that evolve concepts like “collaboration”, “coworking”, “leadership”, nets of knowledge”, gammification, etc.
My goal is to work on connecting students among them, along with other people outside the classroom to enrich their learning process in wider local and global settings. Today, to include in my classroom the concept of “lab” is useful when students explore critical thinking or when they look for reliable sources as scholars. Furthermore, the idea of "lab" gives me the opportunity to think about the classroom in a more flexible, student-centered space of knowledge.
In many ways, current and innovative ideas on education like those spread by people like Ken Robinson, Alejandro Piscitelli, Dolors Reig, or those provided by distant colleagues like Shanon Cristine Mattern, or closer educators like Gabriel Guillén, even the connections found with non academic people on the way we share, exchange and manage knowledge are radically helping me to constantly improve my teaching performance.
I feel teaching requires being always on the search of what we have in mind as the perfect model of classroom. To me, creating the most immersive environment to teach a foreign language, its literatures and its cultures gives us the chance to explore and experiment education as never before. Including multimodal and transmedia resources in my classrooms, exploring with my students new approaches and new tools, new topics or even new subjects in order to understand Spanish canonical and non canonical works gives me the pleasure to share my most precious desire, learning how to became a good teacher, which means a constant and non stop vocational search.