Summary
The following is a narration about one of the lines of the project "Innovation for the improvement of management and teaching practice", which in 2012 will be implemented by the Ministry of Public Education, as a pilot, carried out and funded by the Schools of Education Program. Quality (PEC), which was taken to the states of Puebla, Jalisco and San Luis Potosí.
Let's start by pointing out that in the state of San Luis Potosí, the agency that hosted this project was HDT (Digital Skills for Everyone), it was determined that it would be applied within Telesecundarias and General Secondary, with the objective of bringing teachers closer to new technologies, digital resources, involve them in management processes and invite them to reflect and self-evaluate their practice.
Therefore, I consider it pertinent to narrate this experience in the line of reflection and self-evaluation, to justify what Perrenoud addresses in the reading "From reflection in action to reflective practice." The events that will be narrated below took place at the General Rafael Nieto Campean High School.
Awareness exercises
I begin by highlighting that in this project a lot of emphasis was placed on the student, but the human part of the teacher was not neglected, the connection between their feelings and their practice in the classroom. According to Perrenoud (2007) there is much to be gained when “opportunities for reflection are created”, therefore inviting them to voluntarily participate in awareness exercises was an important part of the project, which sought to connect them with their feelings and reassess their work.
The exercises were carried out once a month and only those who wanted to participate did not force anyone. We will explain one of the exercises to clarify this practice:
- Participants were given a flower as a gift, they were asked to observe their flower and think about how beautiful it was, if they wanted to take care of it, its color… (all this while we had some instrumental music in the background) They were invited to They will caress it, smell it, feel it as theirs and walk around the room with their flower in their hands. They were asked to stand in front of a colleague, look him in the eye and say: "I give you my flower, trusting that tomorrow You will give it better than how I give it to you ”. (they exchanged the flowers) At the end they were asked to say in a word how they felt, and they were told that the next day they should return with the flower, the next day they would stand in lines facing the partner they had exchanged to tell him. "I give you your flower better than how you gave it to me."To finish, everyone commented on how they had felt with the exercise. And they explained the end of this.
It should be noted that many things happened with the flower, there were those who lost or forgot it, those who had it dried or burned, but there were also those who delivered them in a vase, with more flowers, with bows etc. The purpose of this activity (which the participants had to discover) was to remind the teacher of the importance of her work, of the treasure that the father of the family puts in her hands and the responsibility she has to deliver it better than how she
We can take the above to exemplify what Perrenoud (2007) calls a reflection dominated by retrospection, because very surely some teachers returned to the moment where they decided their career, some talk they had with a parent or other events that led to them teacher.
With this example we can say that there is an enormous difference between thinking and reflecting, since thinking is a mere process of getting ideas, and reflecting is putting all the senses to internalize what you want to improve and thus be aware of it. why you act in a certain way in the classroom.
Class recording
Another action to which the teacher was invited was to record himself in class, whatever he wanted, wherever he felt comfortable, here there was very little response, (contextualizing the film “De Panzazo” had just come out), however, there were brave ones. In this part, the students should not realize what was happening and the teacher was invited to act naturally. The math class and the Spanish class were recorded.
Afterwards, the video was given to them so that they could see it and they filled out a rubric according to the standards of teaching practice and they wanted to share their experience. To explain a bit what was happening, when the teachers saw each other in the video I rescued what Perrenoud (2007) argues:
"We are not aware of all acts, but above all we are not always aware of the fact that our acts follow stable structures"
We agree in this position, since until now, an analogy with an automatic pilot, and the teachers in their videos discovered many aspects of which they were not aware, such as gestures and movements, which they did on a daily basis. We point out that not everyone shared their experience but of those who did, we will list some points of what they discovered:
- They noticed if their dress affected the student If the tone of voice was too high Threatening looks Some of them turned their backs on the group for a long time There were structured or disorganized classes
In short, everyone saw their areas of opportunity and there were those who changed their way of dressing, tried to implement innovative strategies and improve. The former was a practice that led teachers to reflect on what was being done in the classroom, how they prepared to be in the classroom and the importance of their work.
Lastly, the project did not transcend in San Luis Potosí, due to administrative problems, although the participating teachers did see a desire to improve and a need to reflect on their practice, as a good teacher is never satisfied. Likewise, there were those who were not interested and all believed they were powerful who had nothing to improve.
In this short story, it can only be left as a mere reference of what was tried to do in 2012, but since many proposals that can come to fruition are left aside, we could also say that it was innovative as the main actor was the teacher, reassessing his human part and having respect for his profession, so I conclude with this phrase that highlights just that "being a teacher is not just a job: it is a relationship in which each teacher must feel fully involved as a person, to make sense of the educational task towards the students themselves ”Pope Francisco (2015).
Source of information
Perrenoud Ph. (2007) Develop reflective practice in the teaching profession, Barcelona; Ed. Grao pp. 29-42
