Journal Unit 1 Language 7

Journal Unit 1

There are lots of factors which can affect teachers performance into a classroom, such as professionalism, educational policies, and metacognition. Many of the factors mentioned are ignored by some teachers, bringing negative consequences to their performance during the classes.

It is necessary for teachers to know how students can achieve a better (or the ideal) learning progress. It means, what teaching strategies should teachers apply into the class in order to get a successful students' learning process. Therefore, it is important for a teacher to manage some knowledge on metacognition.

Additionally students need also to know how do they learn better, they need to realize whether they are pragmatic, visual or audiovisual (etc.) learners so they can know how to study at home. Besides, in order to acquire metacognitive knowledge, students need to be honest with themselves because they must be able to recognize when they are studying in a way which do not make students learn as much as they want.

There are a lot of people who believe (not only teachers) that Chilean educational policies do not allow us to have the quality of education we all want. Much to the contrary, educational policies avoid the progress and improvement of our education.

Market expansion has been so high, and impressive around the world that it reached education just in order to undermine it, rather than improving education itself. There are many countries where education is not undermined by market expansion because it is forbidden. However, here in Chile things are done differently. Even though it is illegal by law to undermine education (or profit), the law is not being applied as we expect. People profit with schools as if they were companies and nobody do anything to avoid it.

If we want to enhance education, it would be completely necessary to delete the profit. It is impossible to have quality and profit at the same time, because when you profit with some product, you are only concerned of earning money rather than the quality of the product you sell.

If we need to change Chilean education. We must fulfill the law, take into account metacognition and finally to be good professionals. Teachers' professionalism is very important in education. It is not enough with having a teacher degree to be a good professional. There are some attitudes teachers need to have, attitudes that teachers do not necessarily learn at the university. How to inculcate values, vocation, how to promote metacognition in classes, how to deal correctly with specific situations at school, and event the contents we have seen in this unit are at least some attitudes that teachers must have (and know), which are not taught at the universities (at least in Chile).

As a final conclusion of this reflection, I believe around this semester we have seen crucial topics that a student like me should take into account if I want to be a successful teacher in the future. These are concepts that every student of pedagogy should learn at the university, and put into practice in our future jobs as teachers.