When we develop our workshops, one of the characteristics that we always highlight is the versatility of our pedagogical strategies. We always emphasize that these can be applied with different content, in different specialties and also with different groups of students. Applying a strategy with different content implies that adaptations are made, that different material is created and that it is clear that the pedagogical objective that is being pursued should not change. This extra work is what many try to avoid and that is why teachers often ask us for more and more strategies.
Although what I have just said is very common, at the ESFM in Beni we have found a teacher who goes further, her name is Ana Esmeralda Fernández. She is a teacher of the English language specialty and teaches in different years of training. Esmeralda was very enthusiastic from the beginning of our workshops, she accompanied her students and made Alma’s guide her own, which contains the different pedagogical strategies; She was also the first teacher to include assessment indicators to motivate students to apply our strategies.
I interviewed Esmeralda in a pleasant and long call, there she told me that at the beginning her students in the 5th and 4th year of training were a little reluctant to apply the strategies, they read the guide and the examples of the strategies and it seemed to them that they were only for small children and that was when she rightly encouraged and challenged them to use the strategies with content to teach English in secondary school and even to students of the same ESFM. The result? Students convinced that innovation is possible, that new strategies or those created from scratch are not required, but rather understanding what each strategy seeks and adapting it to their content, their needs and those of their students.
In August Esmeralda went further, continued advancing and taking flight. She worked with colleagues and students to come up with a proposal for a national competition on pedagogical innovations for teaching the English language. ESFM Clara Parada de Pinto presented ten strategies in the preliminary phase and five of them entered the final competition. Among the strategies presented in the preliminary phase and others used by students, we highlight some developed based on Alma’s pedagogical strategies: Flash Cards focused on English phonetics and phonology; Image Sequence for Literary Composition in English, a Critical Thinking Question Roulette teaching the use of the 5 “W” in English and Fishbone for learning English rules. Of these strategies presented, her team’s “Always three” strategy won at the national level, a strategy developed based on Alma’s flash cards, a game in which students can learn English phonetics.
Hearing that our work served as a basis for something so important has filled us with satisfaction and pride, but I think what I enjoyed most about my conversation with Esmeralda was when she explained to me that one of the things they took from Alma for this event was that all the strategies they wanted to present had to be oriented towards critical thinking; to make students reason and make decisions. Knowing that beyond the strategies this teacher understood what was important is what really fills us with pride and even more so when we know that she is teaching this same thing to her students who will soon also be teachers of other students.
So Esmeralda flew to La Paz to compete and win, but I think she flew further than La Paz, she went beyond her work, she taught more than what the academic curriculum of the specialty where she is a teacher dictates and of course, she surely made her students go further when she proposed the challenge of creating. Thank you Esmeralda!
By: Andrea Fernández