Our Efforts and Accomplishments at Uniminuto

Not only are we trying to be the best teachers as we can be, we are also trying to make changes in our department.  Over the second semester we have tried our best to lead our department into the changes that we believed that it needed.   Some things have turned out to be successful where others have failed.  

The programs that we have started included a common curriculum for all of the English professors to follow.  This was a big fete to accomplish. As new teachers we relied on our fellow teachers to help build a day-to-day curriculum for each level of English. We thought this was important because the department has a problem giving consistent education to their students.   Students were going from English one to English two and so on, learning present simple and pronouns over and over; never building upon their previous knowledge.  

Another way that we wanted to improve consistency was to assign a level to a set of teachers.  Last semester every teacher was assigned to all levels of English so all the teachers had to build lesson plans for each class and each level.  This put a large load of work on the teachers but also made it really inconsistent for the students.  We suggested to have a set of three teachers be assigned to only teaching one level and then these teachers could meet and discuss their classes.  In the end every teacher got assigned to about two levels and unfortunately no meetings have been held.  I still think of this as an accomplishment as everyone’s workload has been significantly lightened and hopefully the teachers can dedicate more time to making one or two brilliant lesson plans rather then 5 mediocre ones.

Another problem for our department is the accountability of the teachers.  Sure we had a curriculum built but nothing was encouraging the teachers to actually abide by this curriculum.  So we decided to implement a standardized test for final exams.  In general, I have never been an advocate for standardized testing, but in this case we felt like it was a good way to begin accountability of the teachers.  Again, in the end this attempt fell short and the exams have yet to be created.  We are coming up on final exam time so I doubt that this will come together.

Another disadvantage the students have is that they only have English class once a week.  If you have ever tried to learn a language you know that this is just not enough time.  Under the universities regulations we learned right away that this was a disadvantage that would not change.  So we had to be creative and work around the system.  Although we could not have more mandatory classes we could have voluntary ones; aka clubs.  We started having two types of clubs. One for the lower level students, the students that needed more time for English practice and another for more advanced students, those looking for more of a challenge.  We have clubs 10 times a week and every club is jam-packed.  The clubs proved to be the most successful of all our endeavors and they are very rewarding.  I just hope that these changes will be continued after we leave.  We do know that the university has asked for three WorldTeach volunteers next year so the university must also appreciate our efforts and want to continue with our advances.