Refletir no passado preparando o futuro

Abstract

Due to the growing concern about the phenomena of school abandonment and failure, with this reflection about my career as a teacher, I want to better understand the learning processes that lead to success and failure of basic education students, particularly in the subject of mathematics. During these fifteen years of teaching, I have always sought educational success and this reflection contributes to the improvement of my teaching practice. To fulfill this purpose, I tried to review the literature in order to better understand some of the procrastination themes, the learning approaches and self-regulatory processes used by students, since they are observed phenomena and related to the (un) success. It becomes necessary the adoption, in the classroom, of a teaching model witch defends an interactive view of the teaching-learning process, where both pupils and teachers understand the complementarity of their roles and implement realistic self-regulation models (Rosário, 2001). With this reflective report, I suppose that I may suggest that students, in the classroom, should be encouraged to use self-regulatory strategies, taking responsibility for their learning, and generalizing acquired strategies to other subjects and educational settings. At the same time, students should avoid procrastinators’ strategies, especially if they are not functional for them, once that, sometimes they fail to balance effectively the speed and quality of the performance accuracy when the task requirements are high. Thus, in practice, there is an urgent need that teaching and training strategies constitute a primary objective of work, becoming essential the promotion of success ways, optimizing students’ performance. So, I consider urgent the increasing of intentioned training of self-regulation learning processes, based on each student profile, giving them capable tools of contributing to the assumption of their own responsibility and self-control of the process, resigning intuitive and inconsistent approaches to the study tasks. I believe that students, with academic failure routes, use less effective self-regulatory skills and they often resort to a superficial learning approach, focused on contents reproduction. Usually these students establish less ambitious academic purposes and easily give up when confronted with complex tasks. It’s important, in professional practice, to provide students of ways of becoming competent and to adopt deep approaches to the study so that they can achieve success. The teacher should guide the student to the consolidation of his knowledge, so that he can effectively organize his study time, taking notes and planning on time his academic activities. Another of the teacher´s task should be the building of active and motivating learning environments for students. The participation of teachers in formations that allows them to develop practical strategies witch lead the students to academic success is also essential to the students’ educational success. As far as I’m concerned, the involvement between the different elements of the educational community in this continuous of communication between research and practice is crucial, in order to improve effective self-regulatory processes and deep approaches to learning.

Date of Award	27 Feb 2013
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria Raul Xavier (Supervisor) & Luísa Mota Ribeiro (Co-Supervisor)