1. Reaction Paper Reflection
This was my last assignment in the course. The five texts we were assigned to
read made me deepen on ideas about professional development as a teacher and also
about the appropriate communicative competence for teaching a language effectively.
I agree on the idea of teachers being agents of change in the world, since we have the
important duty of developing learners’ minds and transmitting our knowledge.
However, if we want to develop professionals through teaching, I consider essential to
be professional first. In this case, having the necessary skills, using the appropriate
strategies and techniques in lessons and being constantly updating our knowledge are
one of the various aspects that teachers should accomplish for becoming professional
and competent when teaching a second language.
Equally important is to know how students are behaving during the lesson,
their social environment and interests. I realized that research is actually a good
strategy if teachers want to know which activities work and which activities do not
work, or even more specific, which activities make students really produce English. I
believe that teachers should be constantly making classroom research in order to get
this type of information from students, which will eventually benefit not only the
teacher’s effectiveness at teaching but also the students learning process. In addition
to this, from my point of view it is important to be collaborative teachers. For instance,
getting feedback from colleagues in order to notice what are the strengths and
weaknesses of our lessons, and also the aspects we can improve or even the things we
should omit when teaching. All of these elements make a competent, professional and
successful teacher, with the particularity of having a good relationship with learners.
Gary Torres