Reflection on Key Concepts (Module 3)

Module 3 was short, but we learned many interesting things that will help us in our future as English teachers here in El Salvador. The most important concepts I learned during this module were the following:

National Curricula: El Salvador's national curriculum refers to the set of principles, objectives, content, methodologies, and assessments that govern the country's education system at all levels and in all modalities, from early childhood to higher education. In our case, Teacher Isaac shared with us the national curriculum for the Technical Vocational Baccalaureate in Primary Health Care and the Technical Vocational Baccalaureate in Tourism Services. These important documents gave us an idea of how to prepare classes according to MINEDUCYT.

Didactical Sequence: Before starting the process of creating the lesson plan, I believed that each class should be different, but now I know that each activity must be related to the previous one in order to obtain better results. As the book says, "a didactic sequence is a set of continuous and interrelated learning activities designed to create a final product that responds satisfactorily to the performance indicator." So, we learned that we must be very careful when choosing the activities we are going to use in each class, as they must all have the same objective.

I Activate: This stage seeks to capture students' attention with activities such as showing pictures or asking questions, so they will begin to think and speak in English. For us as teachers, this stage is very important because it allows us to make students feel more comfortable with us and with the topics being studied.

I Practice, I Produce: In the first stage (Practice), as the name suggests, students use all their acquired knowledge to complete the required activities. This phase not only allows them to practice, but also allows them to correct any mistakes, as the teacher will be at their side giving them feedback. In the second stage (Produce), students can engage in activities such as debates or discussions among themselves to verify what they have learned in the unit and to let the teacher know what needs reinforcement.

These concepts challenged my previous understanding of English language teaching because, as I mentioned earlier, I believed that it was enough to create activities for students to practice what they had learned. However, I now know that each exercise presented throughout the unit or course must be related to the previous ones in order to achieve the desired result. Nowadays, with the help of artificial intelligence tools, it is much easier to create them. For example, we can create a Gem from Gemini that will help us throughout the unit. By having all the information we have studied, it will be much easier for AI to create related activities.

Finally, I plan to apply these concepts in my future teaching with the implementation of the three stages I mentioned earlier. This will be very useful to me, as teaching is a process that requires order. I will not achieve anything if my lesson plans are not effective, so I will take into account all the steps that Teacher Isaac gave us to build the best possible plans.