Demo Thursdays

One thing I was always looking forward in class, were the demo thursdays, as I read in the course syllabus, they are a new fixture added this semester so I guess it is kind of an experiment but don´t qoute me on that one. What we did these days were, professor Mora would bring an specific classroom technique related to language teaching and we as future teachers would do the activity with him but i wasn't just doing the activity, it was looking a it with a teacher’s perspective, it is like when a the professor gives you back a paper he was grading and has all his commentaries alongside what you wrote so you can see what the professor thinks about and what he expects from it. I remember one, it was a reading activity, professor Mora gave the title and asked us some questions like what do you think the story is going to be about ? or who do you think is going to be the protagonist ? all this we had to answer based on the title. When the reading started, the text had some stop marks on it, some question where solved but other appeared, this engaged us in an active reading.

That was just the activity but what made really important part for our formation as teachers was the professor Mora´s perspective, he was telling us what was the purpose of the activity and what we should expect from the students if we do an activity like this our classes, thing like “ let everyone express what they think and do not discard any idea of the students”. It was not just how we should do but how to do it in an effective way

Retaking the Demo Thursdays, one day I would like to have something like it in my own class and have something that my students as I was are eager to do, moreover I think fixtures like this should be implemented more in today's classrooms, for me, I felt it was more or less an escape or even better, a different essence of the same class.