Taking into account our personal experiences about learning a language, as well as the debate held in class when we shared the good and bad practises we had experienced in the process, we have selected a set of objectives and principles regarding what we would like to achieve through our project, together with some practises and outcomes we would like to avoid or we are not interested in obtaining. We have added some objectives that our fellow classmates mentioned in the debate held today.
Goals and principles for students
- To develop a positive attitude towards English, and gain self-motivation.
- To become the main actor of one's learning process.
- To maintain and increase a curious and open mind.
- To feel that English is useful, attractive and fun. For example, it can be interesting to get in touch with a school from and English speaking country and share a project or a workshop, keeping in touch through Skype, or even travel abroad.
- To feel that one has improved and learnt new things.
Goals and principles for the teacher
- To be passionate and positive about your work and about children.
- To create equal opportunities for all students.
- To have patience.
- To be creative and flexible when it comes to selecting methodologies, as well as critical.
- To integrate evaluation into the learning process as an intermediate step geared towards the improvement of the process itself and it's outcomes.
- To evaluate the quality of the learning process, not the academic results of individual students.
- To be a researching teacher who will reflect on his/her practise in order to improve it.
- To set students' interests and their experiences at the heart of the learning process, taking advantage of particular things that are of interest to students to reach wider concepts.
- To see and manage diversity as what it is: an advantage and richness, respecting each one's rhythm and qualities.
- To be aware of each student's Zone of Proximal Development and create learning opportunities for all of them.
- To encourage cooperative learning and peer tutoring.
- To apply meaningful learning, relating new knowledge to what they knew before.
- To use activities that encourage children to experiment and play with the language.
- To use body language to help children understand, and encourage them to use it as well.
- To make students aware of their progress.
- To integrate English within the regular activities and contents of the class, so children will not have the feeling that there is a specific time and space to learn English.
- To achieve optimal communication, collaboration and coordination among the tutor and the English teacher (if they are not the same person), as well as other teachers.
Goals and principles for the group
- To learn things by doing, using English in everyday life.
- To create a fearless, warm and welcoming atmosphere, where everybody will feel secure, accepted and respected as he/she is, and will feel part of a team that has common goals, but at the same time allows space for individual goals too.
- To have fun in class, to enjoy it.
- To put social learning into practise, to learn in a cooperative way within a free and creative environment.
- To actively engage all class members in every activity and decision.
- To put dialogic learning into practise.
- To extend the process of learning out of the classroom's walls, and to bring the outer world into class.
What we want avoid
- Learning without fun.
- Focusing too much on vocabulary.
- For the teacher, to focus only on marks and exams.
- Comparing one child to another.
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