Always ready for the Demo Friday
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We have classes every single day, and sometimes they are very traditional, which is kind of ironic because we are studying to make the education a little bit more dynamic. But the demo Friday catched my eye because it was a good way to teach appropriate ways to give a class and emphasize only on the really important matter when you give a class: the dynamic aspect. Among songs, stories, activities and games, the teacher made the class more interesting and engaged students. For me, as a pre-service teacher, Demo Friday was a great example of how to teach my students when I start to work in the near future. In addition, that technique serves as a very modern and pragmatic didactic that more teachers should use in order to improve their teaching practices.
Furthermore, teaching in didactic and modern ways marks students more significantly than traditional methods and commits them to the course by making them want to assist class, participate in the activities and apply the knowledge acquired in class to their lives. In addition, dynamic approaches like the Demo Friday also foster creativity in students and test creativity in teachers. However, there are exceptions in which this method cannot be used to transmit information, such as subjects that require a more traditional approach or complaints from closed-minded parents who do not conceive a different learning way than the traditional blackboard-student relationship.
I can recall some outstanding activities from Demo Friday like the slam poetry, which generated sensibility and approval among students because I think it was something more than an activity: it was a way to naturally express what we felt and thought. Furthermore, the slam poetry activity was a social intercourse and integration fosterer due to the personal connotation and the emotional impact it had on us. Managing to know other in a better way improves tolerance and convivence among students, as well as writing skills and communicative competence. To summarize, the slam poetry activity is a didactic an holistic method to improve specific knowledge on a subject as well as convivence and the class environment.
Looking back, I can tell all those activities and all that information worked as an illustrative example for us to know what didactics and tools we could use and, based on that, arrange a lesson plan more creatively and pragmatically because it is important to maintain the students’ attention to engage them more exhaustively. We, as teachers, must be aware that we will have to face some situations in which classroom engagement will be hard to reach and knowledge will be difficult to transmit because students may not have the adequate basis and they might not feel attracted to the topic because they feel they do not understand.
To conclude, all the facts stated above made me love Demo Fridays and await the whole week to have Methods class on Friday. On the other hand, I think this kind of creative activities should be replicated by other teachers in order to improve classroom engagement and diminish failure rates due to the students’ lack of interest on the subject.
