PLATO, ROUSSEAU AND DEWEY

 After we were having been speaking of the curriculum, and its covers ideas for two or three weeks, we started to see some philosophers since the time of the Great Greece (fourth century BC) have been telling their theories about how it should teach or "schooling"  members of society so that it was not corrupt . The authors who we were talking in class were Plato, Rousseau and Dewey. Surely they would not have in mind to give a class on a specific subject as we do now in our days, but they did the same to us in some respects, as to prepare our students to form part of a better society.

There are some strategies used by Plato in his academy (taken from his master Socrates) that we use today to implement them in the way we teach. One of the most important Plato’s strategies is to teach your students through dialogue and on the basis of prior knowledge. This we could use, for example, in a math class where we teach to multiply. Making problems that can be solved by adding, but also multiplying, we see that use prior knowledge to learn something new.

On the other hand, Rousseau said that the education of children should be natural, and we could not force them to do something they should do an adult. This is something that is very evident today. If we force a child to do something that is not appropriate for their age, will not develop in the same way that another child if they do something suitable for their age. We do activities that entertain our students so they can learn much more and better.

Finally is Dewey. The most important thought of this author was that a person's education never ends. A child who is learning something new in school, it won’t be something that stays in your memory and you're done. It will be something in the future which will be developed and improved. Even as an adult he will have more knowledge, but he will still learning new things every day.

With the ideas we catch from these three authors and other many more we can get our students to learn more and better, because they are the future that will make our society better.

REFLECTION ABOUT HOW TO TEACH

The other day in class we were working with an activity about some authors that reflect about education. It was a difficult activity at first, but after we worked on it, it was easier. We were talking about what is the best way to teach, and everyone agreed that the best for children is to be active learning, not just listening what the teacher is saying, because this doesn’t mean a meaningful learning and they get bored. In that moment I remembered a case that I had last year. I made a comparison between two teachers I had: my Geography’s and History’s.

My History teacher was a man that didn’t make the classes funny. He just worked with power point, but always with the same boring letter and without enough pictures. It was always the same. Every day we had class with him, no one had wanted to bear a full hour because we just wanted to sleep. But that wasn’t the only problem. When we had to study for the exam, which there were very longs, we started to read what the papers said and we didn’t understand most of the information. It was terrible for me, because I spent a long time to have just a five in the exam. It was frustrated.

Then there was my Geography teacher. He was totally different to the History teacher. It’s true that we had to work hard too, but when we were in class with him we always get involved in the activities (participated). The time passed faster and we weren’t bored. We always were doing something different. And when the date of the exam got closer and we had to study for it, it wasn’t so hard. We had memory about what we worked in class before. If we had some doubts about the exam he was glad to answered the questions, because he wanted us to pass.

In the final grade I had a 5 in history working very hard and a 7 in geography working not so hard.

With this example I want to illustrate how active learning can become relevant to students’ learning. It doesn´t matter if they are at elementary school or at high school level. Children don’t learn just because they listen to the teacher when she/he speaks. It is important to get involved students into relevant activities to allow them to learn having fun.  

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED UNTIL NOW?

Since we begun the classes we were talking about the LOE-BOE and the curriculum. At first I didn’t know what was that. I thought it had something in common with the curriculum vitae, but it is nothing like that. I read the document she sent us by email and I thought: what the hell is that? Even wrote in Spanish I didn’t understood what was it mean. So, the day that Mina asked us what we understand about the curriculum most of the class didn’t know what to answer to that question, including me. After that Mina started to explain that the curriculum is a document where we put some objectives that children for primary (in our case) have to pass. She explains that there are different levels of curriculum: the first level is the national curriculum. It is made in order to all the country. The primary children have to have some educational aims to have the minimum level for their age.  It must be like that. The problem is that the people responsible for doing this don’t understand the situation of our country. They don’t know how schools are. They just say that children have to learn math, sciences, art, etc. only content. But the thing is that children have to learn some values. Besides, the books are not only the most important thing to teach children. It is more important the teachers or their parents. A book only has information, but teachers have the knowledge that kids need to develop.

But this is not the only level that curriculum has. It has more little levels that depend of the school, the departments of the school and even the teachers. In order to the knowledge of the kids, we must put some objectives that children have to pass to continue their develop.