REFLECTION ON IMPLEMENTATION
The project worked well enough, I think that the objectives set at the beginning were achieved more or less for the majority of the students. Furthermore, they practiced English a lot, as I said that I would take into account in their marks, they spoke all the time in English.
What made learning more interesting for them was not only the way how they worked: in cooperative groups working together to achieve the same goal, they are used to work in this way, but the final product was real: prepare a class for other students. From my point of view if you are able to create a real project with a real product, you can promote the learning more than with other things, because it clearly makes sense.
Moreover, apart from being a project with an innovative methodology, it must be in English and it should promote the speaking. In this regard, the cards of language support were very useful,since the students used them, especially those who have a lower English level, and gave them confidence.
It's important to highlight another point too, the evaluation: I used 2 rubrics that I gave to them from the beginning, so always they knew how they could get a good grade. In addition, I evaluated the everyday work, that’s also important because I wanted they worked in class not in their places. It should be great to do a self-assessment or coevaluation in teams to promote their own assessment and regulation, and probably I will do it next year.
A recurring problem in this type of projects is the timing, generally the implementation of the project takes longer than expected, it was no different in this case, and it took 7 sessions instead of 6.
Finally, just a little reflection: we ask our students to work cooperatively, and it is sometimes difficult for them but we insist that is very positive to them. We need to learn as teachers how to work in cooperative teams as well. Using this learning methodologies, the necessity of working together with other teachers increases, not only to create the projects but to implement them as a team-teaching. In this project it would be fantastic to have another teacher in class, to help them with difficulties and also to evaluate their work. Some sessions were a little bit stressfull for the teacher, for example in the laboratory where there were some people finishing the infographics and there were some doing the experiment, or in last session which they had to explain to other students, it was difficult to be everywhere listenning to them and evaluting, I missed a lot of things.
