Week 10

Here we are, almost finished with our wonderful course… I guess no good-byes should be expected since this is not the end but the beginning of our journey as better teachers!

Who do we have to thank for this? Deborah absolutely, for her wonderful guidance and all the others who, together with her, worked to make this a course to remember! And of course the US Department of State for this wonderful initiative and the American embassies through which we were nominated! But don`t forget our group! We are also to thank to each other for the ideas, the help, and the suggestions!

I found a very nice quotation from John W. Gardner which I would like to share here “Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”

When I read this and think about our course I can see why it has been such a success: we have really been taught how to grow our own plants, here! And furthermore, we have also been given the tools to do so with our students!!

I guess we are all aware that “Many children struggle in schools… because the way they are being taught is incompatible with the way they learn.” (Peter Senge), so it is up to us to bridge this divide by changing our way of teaching but also by taking what we have been learning here to our colleagues and fellow workers in our schools so they can profit from it as well!
Ours has been such a rich course that it will be impossible to pass all its content on all at once to other teachers, but I guess that little by little it will happen. Even in our daily practice we won`t do everything at the same time… but the future is ours to explore all this, and much more that is continuously being created.

Something I think we should do is, keep in touch and continue developing our course wiki with resources links and suggestions! Since we can`t create new topics on Nicenet, we should use our Google page to leave our comments and keep track of each other! We could even think of doing some projects together, especially those who have the same age level students, some kind of e- twinning!

I`ve really learned a lot with this course, what have I learned? All my participations on Nicenet show that a little, and all the time I spent reading the materials and everybody`s opinions show that as well, my project and everybody`s wonderful projects are the living proof of it!

As for an advice…, I guess that some advice to give would be: don`t stay alone at home desperate because you don`t know what to do in a certain situation, talk, write, collaborate, exchange your ideas, I think I can say we will all be here to listen and help each other!

I have grown a lot as a person and as a teacher thanks to my participation here. Just one thing comes to my mind right now: thank you for all my Learning, Unlearning and Relearning!