Conceptualising teaching acts

1. What do you usually do as a teacher? With what kind of rationale?

I consider myself to be a teacher that looks for the best option that can fit in the students' needs taking into account the learning styles that my students may feel better with. Actually I do not follow any specific or strict methodology because all my students will not learn in the same way. Then, a variety of sources need to be used in the classroom. In view of Kumaravadivelu (2003), I see myself as a reflective practitioner who is all the time thinking what went wrong during my lesson, how my students felt and what can be improved for future sessions. That way of thinking makes me have different activities using different methodologies to teach and to practice the content that I am teaching.

2. What is your mind engagement like in the professional exercise of teaching?

As a professional, I need to be well-prepared for all the difficulties that might be presented in my daily basis as a teacher. That means I need to be able to solve my students' learning problems by giving strategies and giving them constant feedback on their processes. As teaching is an ongoing process, I as a teacher need to be updated by getting new insights from other teachers. Once you become a teacher, you become a learner too.

3. How would you characterise your professional, personal and experiential knowledge of teaching?

Regarding professionalism, I feel that I need to learn more and get more experience as a teacher. That is the reason why I am studying a master in English didactics. Regarding personal knowledge, I feel that I have learnt the basics by the age of 23 but I need to learn a lot more related to my job and life itself. Regarding experiential knowledge, I believe that I have had the opportunity to work in different situations (amount of students, type of school, social and cultural context, among others). I consider those work experiences good because actually I can grow personally and professionally having students with different needs.

4. How do you see the relationship between theory, research and practice?

The relationship between theory, research and practice seems to be very integrative due to the fact that they need to be applied in a sequence. Theory is important to know what experts have established from their studies. Then, we can take it from theory to research. However, we need to place theories in our context when doing research. And last but not least, practice comes to play a role, in which, we  as teachers need to highlight in order to become better prepared teachers. All of the three have to be joined with the same purpose.

5. To what extent is there a cause-effect relationship between teaching and learning?

Certainly there is a cause-effect relationship between teaching and learning because my students' output will be based on what I taught them and how I taught them. Basically my own work will be reflected on my students' final results. In fact, the methodologies that I used to teach needs to be related to the way I will assess my students.