Love: the best way of teaching: Proposals for today’s teachers

Por Eliana Condemarín, Cecilia García-Huidobro y Cristina Gutiérrez

This text was born from the vast experience of the authors and the bibliographic verifications that have oriented their job for many years. In this book, teachers are encouraged and motivated to review their pedagogic practices in order to achieve a good performance in class, emphasizing in the human and the values, without neglecting quality and content quantity of methodologies and learning

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 11 nov 2015
• ISBN: 9789563570205

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Bibliography

Prolog

Certainly, teaching is a gratifying, but difficult and demanding task; since, in order to practice it, it is not enough to have knowledge of what you teach; it is necessary to know how to teach and how to engage yourself with the children and their families in order to help them through the path of becoming the best persons as possible. In any educational level where it is developed, teaching, in order to be carried out, is a profession that requires emotional intelligence. A good teacher must adapt himself to the characteristics of his students in such a way that he can be able to inspire them to learn and to grow emotionally. To get to know the students implies focusing on their needs and connecting with the emotions they experience, synchronizing with them.

The book Love: The Best Way of Teaching is aimed at the teaching method, so that a positive impact is obtained. Since the tittle of this work, the authors (who have long experience in different roles in the educational system) illustrate factors they consider essential to the success of the task of teaching.

From the image of the good shepherd, the factors considered essentials to accomplish a teacher - student relationship will be described and analyzed, so that it can be strengthening for the personal development. The teaching-learning subject is presented both from the student’s perspective, as well as from the characteristics that define a teacher’s profile that favors the relationship with the student.

In relation to the necessary profile needed to fulfill the teaching role, the attributes and skills required by the teacher are enumerated and analyzed from four tasks described as essentials. These are: To Know the students; To Comprehend them from an empathetic perspective; To Look after them, being aware of their problems, risks and needs; and To Lead them to establish a solid and consistent relationship between the world and their personal values.

In the students’ perspective area, the main characteristics they possess in the different stages of their growth are described, as well as some of the cognitive and emotional disorders that can affect their academic performance and emotional well-being. It is especially interesting the classification of the values based on the relevance that should be given to some students and to others according to their age, so that these emphases become a real help in the emotional growth and the ethics training of children and young persons.

In relation to the teaching competencies analysis’ perspective, this book highlights the strategies derived from tasks proposed as essentials and specifics. They are the observable behaviors in teachers, those who reflect the presence of positive emotions from themselves towards their students. The descriptions made by the authors may favor the teacher’s self-assessment and reflection about their work, constituting the possibility of establishing a support material for pedagogical reflection groups in the educational units, which can also be used in the teacher’s initial training stage as a tool to evaluate if university students of the education field possess genuine vocation for teaching, while clarifying their mission and the competences they will need in order to effectively develop their future role as educators.

The role that values play in the educational task is a subject that is cut across in this book; it is also specifically detailed in the pedagogical values that the teacher and the education in general should transmit. Reference is made to various modalities that can be used in the transmission of values, from the evaluation of the values to the formulation of work proposals with the students, destined to promote their training.

In the description of the teaching problem from the perspective of the student, the influence of the postgraduate training of the authors is sensed, who, among having studies in special education area, have had a relevant professional development in this field. Management strategies are provided, strategies that will help the teachers deal with the most common unadaptive behaviors within the scholar system: hyperactivity, distractibility, oppositional defiant disorder, aggressive behavior and avoidance behavior, among others.

The book provides teachers a series of tools destined to plan, organize and optimize time, obtaining an efficient use of this work when applied to the curriculum. Different resources that can be applied to uplift the educational performance are analyzed in the chapter dealing with tools, useful guidance about family-school relationship are given, about communication with the students, and complex issues, such as homework and study habits are dealt with.

This book constitutes an evidence collection that includes a wide range of the main tasks that teaching entails, relying on a model where the commitment to the students is always present in the pedagogical interaction, both in their everyday actions and in the long term. In short, the text rises as a significant contribution and as an encouragement for the teaching practice.

Neva Milicic M.

Psychologist Ph. D

Dedicated to our children who, by being parents,

have the difficult task of educating

Presentation

While writing this book, we thought of collecting attitudes and behaviors through which a teacher enthuse and motivate the student to desire to have more knowledge, broaden their vision, learn new things, explore the world in every area, from the personal, the social, the community, the historical, the psychological, the human, to the scientific areas, math, technology, or investigation.

Most of the people in the country agree on what and why to teach, which the teaching objectives and contents are. They also agree on the preoccupation for the perceived crisis in education, a results crisis where the minimum quality and equity standards that society desires and needs are not accomplished. Lot has been written about students getting bored in the classroom because the world inside the schools has nothing to do with the outside world.

How to revert this situation? How to make education useful, cheerful and fun? These and many more questions are made by the unsettled educators, by the education researchers and the ordinary people who see how this crisis is affecting the entire society in the present and, fundamentally, in the future.

Already in the Classical Antiquity, in Greece or in the Roman Empire, in the writings of Seneca’s or Aristotle’s (being Alexander the Great’s tutor) they all questioned the same things and gave each other ideas to success.

Nowadays, there are movies in the cinema that refer to the teacher subject, or to people that have accompanied or guided others until they achieve their own goals. As diverse their stories or formats are, in all of them, the teachers that appear have something in common that we would like to highlight as valuable attitudes to become a good teacher, master, guide, mediator and educator.

For all religions, the Gospel image of the Good Shepherd is a good example of how a good teacher, a good leader and a good guide of his flock should be, where the great tasks focus on knowing who is being guided, on comprehending him, on taking care of him and on leading him through the way.

The four To that we consider essential for the teaching task:

• To Know: is to consider the intimate and personal background that makes each human being unique, original and unrepeatable.

• To Comprehend: is to be able to put oneself in someone else’s position, and from there raise our sight together.

• To Look after: is to protect at every moment the valuable treasure that every human holds in his cognitive, affective, spiritual and psychic dimension, as well as in his individual, personal, social and community dimension.

• To Lead: is to guide, to accompany, to show, to take the student towards the goals and ideals he wants to accomplish.

There are studies that indicate that, regardless of the methodology employed by the teacher, his enthusiasm, his vocation, his joy at the moment of teaching and his positive attitude towards life, are the most influent factors in the success of the students in learning (Cassasus, 2003).

We understand that the quality of Education involves not only an expert and mature teacher who delivers informative and instrumental contents, but also an educator with an adequate self-esteem, vocation, emotionally healthy, with developed social skills so he can be able to tackle the values, the critical judgment, the responsibility, the emotions, the tolerance, etc., making the training of independent and creative children easier; children with the desire to keep learning, with moral, ethics, social and affective values.

You must consider, as Gladys Jadue (1996) states, that family has changed and that the condition of children at social risk has raised, for whom the school must have protective mechanisms through teachers willing to make workshops and have more communication with the family.

We don’t want to think that the task of learning only relies on the teacher. We have the results of the 2005 PSU (written tests performed in Chile for the admission process for university education), where only one student reached the highest score in the 4 tests, having at least 30 more students in that classroom with the same teachers that didn’t get good results. This reminds us the success factors that intervene in the school learning, where we can find multiple variables for an effective achievement.

We question the motivation and behavior of the teacher, his attitude, his vocation, his dreams and his expectations of the student. We believe that teachers motivated by a great ideal, by the dream of educating people capable of developing the potential of each student that has been trusted to them, can fill children and young people with excitement and open a new world for them.

We also want to emphasize the academic excellence of the teacher, which includes being an expert on his subject, manage in the most efficient manner the respective teaching methodology, being willing to continue upgrading skills and keeping update with the investigations.

These are not new subjects and sometimes because they are obvious, they are silenced and because they are silenced, they are forgotten. That is why we would like to resume the discussion towards the requirements for being a good teacher, meaning that one who accompanies and guides the path of the students.

By analyzing the reality of the education in our country from the point of view of different authors, we propose strategies in this book that will be used for becoming a teacher as the one the students want, according to the surveys.

With affection, The authors

Teaching is filling with Sun the lives of others.

Saint Alberto Hurtado

Didactic principles

Whatever the teaching methods and techniques, and whatever the theory they are inspired on, if the educational maturity reached so far is considered, these must be sustained on some common principles. It is possible that tomorrow the perspectives change and then, these rules must be adapted.

To those general rules, to which all teaching methods and techniques must adjust to, are given the name of didactic principles.