Portfolio G&I: Lesson 5: how to organise students, goruping criteria and classroom grouping models.

Hi guys, I hope you enjoyed the previous post. It actually turned out to be my favourite so far. The next lesson am going to be talking about is the organisation of students in a classroom. As always, here is a small esqueme to get us started.

In this lesson we find it explains how to organise students grouping criteria, classroom and grouping models. It talks about, first of all, the different school levels, the classroom levels, and the methodologies they use to execute their task.

The preliminary ideas that I have about this unit are the rules that students must follow when working together. What I knew about this topic was that students must share everything, they must work quietly and speak only when teachers say they can or with their permission, they must accept most of the decisions and help classmates at all times. They must also learn how to ask classmates help when they need it, do the work that have been designed, participate in teamwork and tasks and follow the rules at all times. These a rules which I believe all of us should know by now knowing that we have had to do many group projects or collective work with our classmates.

What I have learned in this lesson is, on the first hand, that school levels can be seen from two perspective, the first one being the vertical perspective and the second one the horizontal perspective. The next thing I learnt were the phases required to complete a project work. This consists of four steps of development where the child asks himself a series of indirect questions, answering them by completing the task and finally obtaining the final result of the task, completing the project. To help us understand whether this project has been completed in an adequate way, we can ask ourselves a series of questions:
1. What interest does it generate among the students? 2. What degree of autonomy are they assuming? 3. What kind of participation does each student have? 4. Who has a leading role in the development of the project? 5. Are students aware of what they are learning? 6. Are students actively involved in the project?
Another interesting topic I was taught was the corners methodology. This is were the classroom is divided into several physical spaces to carry out different activities in each at the same time. Depending on the activity students must complete, they can work in small groups or even individually. This enables active participation and cooperative work in the construction of the students' knowledge. Other secondary ideas that I understood from this lesson were the workshops and cooperative work, taking into account the rules for students, the aspects that have to be taken into account in cooperative learning and lastly the team member roles (material manager, secretary, spokesperson and coordinator).

I love the idea of project work, but as know, most projects require a certain exposition. This I don't think can be expected from students in the first year of primary school. I would like to learn more about how project works helps other competences such as writing and practising their oral speech as this is a segment which I do not understand. After reading a couple of articles I started to lose hope, but then I came across an article written by María del Pilar García Mayo, a teacher and investigator in the Universidad del País Vasc. What she had to say helped me a lot, she taught me a lot of information that goes beyond the content in the powerpoint. She states first of all that the study was completed to improve their so-called productive skills. It talks about how the second and third year students should start to develop a certain level of writing techniques and start to become familiar with oral presentations done by the teacher. After this, in the years after, students then start to try to speak about what their project is about, how it was completed and how. In summary, after they provided some background to the course, this article comments on the stages leading to the oral presentation of students' projects, their roles as speakers and listeners and the teacher's role in project work design. The article also presents the results of questionnaires in which students provided information about their pre-writing activities and commented on their impressions of the project as a whole. This is something very interesting as it s something I believe is very important to take into consideration when trying to improve the skills of your students.
Del Pilar García Mayo, M. (s.f.). Project work. Recuperado de file:///C:/Users/reyno/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/Dialnet-ProjectWorkInTheESPClassroom-175316%20(1).pdf

I came across a website about nine steps on helping your kid through a group project. Again, something that must be taken into consideration when wanting to set out a project work.
Group projects. (s.f.). Recuperado de https://www.education.com/magazine/article/school-group-projects/