What is the most important thing you would teach your students?

In my English course I have to think about:

If you were not limited by the demands of the national/regional curriculum, what would you say is the most important thing you would teach your students about your subject (in a CLIL context)? How would you assess their learning?

Sometimes, I think that education would improve if teachers were not such limited by the demands of the national or regional curriculum which don´t take into account the student needs. The curriculum changes depending on the government interests and it damages the teachers’ work and especially the pupil teaching-learning process.  Despite of that, the education content have to be regulated because everybody have his own way to teach and it could be a problem.

However, now I am free to explain what I think is the most important thing I would teach to my students without any demands. From my student experience, I think that our education system is based on more content than practical purposes. For that reason, a lot of students ask themselves why they have to learn something that it is not relevant in their lives. The teaching-learning process have to be meaningful for the pupil, because he needs to feel that everything he is learning has a usefulness in his life. That’s why I think that practical contents and aims are the most important objectives that teachers have to achieve in their CLIL classes.

The CLIL methodology could help this practical contents, because the principal aim for CLIL is integrate a language as the vehicle to transmit content in a specific subject and this content also has to be integrated in children lives.

Communicating in a different language from our mother language is a practical purpose for pupils because they have to live in a multicultural and globalized world. In some subjects could be useful to learn the specific terminology in their original language in order to understand the correct meaning. For example, technology has an English vocabulary. Words as play, pen drive, hardware, software, notebook, smart tv, tablet… are so difficult to understand if we don’t have any contact with this language. We only memorize the name but not his meaning. 

In addition, the assessment also have to be based on practice. There are several ways to check if our students are learning a meaningful knowledge. In this case, I am not so keen on doing memory test in which students write as machines and in a few seconds they don´t remember anything. There are other methods such as oral presentations about a real context, compositions, role games… Everything that make them think it’s a proper method of assessment.  And the most important: we can´t forgot that we have to assess with the four basic skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking.