Generic Competences are the concepts that define the capacities that every human to be able to solve, effectively and autonomously, every problem or situation that could happen in his/her life. In education, the concept of competence is shown as a broad conceptual net which makes reference to the comprehensive education of the citizen through new perspectives like the meaningful learning in diverse areas such as cognoscitive (knowing), psychomotor (know-how, aptitudes), and affective (knowing how to be, attitudes and values). In this sense, competence cannot be reduced to simple work performance, not to the mere appropriation of knowledge for know-how but also encompasses a set of capacities, which are developed through processes that lead the responsible to be competent to perform multiple actions.

Specific Competences are the abilities that a student must have when he finishes his career to meet ethical and quality standards.

Source
Tuning, P., Temáticas, A., Europa, T., & Latin, T. (2007). Proyecto Tuning América Latina. Recuperado de http://tuning. unideusto. org/tuningal.

Show me and I remember

Involve me and I learn

In late 1960 at McMaster University in Canada, an innovative teaching method was developed to avoid demotivation in students and help them get more involved in their learning. It was the Project Based Learning (PBL).

Definition 
A PBL is a pedagogical approach or didactic strategy that consists in focusing the students to face a problem or situation which will allow them to learn from it, comprehend and understand it better. The PBL help students to identify principles that sustain the knowledge and reach the learning objectives, especially those ones related to reasoning and critical judgment.

The project should be focused on teaching students' knowledge and key competences that derive from educational standards. It should also be focused on developing 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, multicultural understanding, self-direction, communication, and collaboration.

       2.  Question or challenging problem

The project must be grounded on an essential question or a real-world problem to solve. The question should be appropriate for the level of the students and should be interesting, motivating, open and challenging.

       3.   In-depth research

The project should encourage students to generate more complex questions and develop and seek answers to them. 

       4.  Authenticity

The problem of the project must be real, authentic and genuine. It must be linked to the real world. The project must have a real impact within the school community or outside of it.

       5.  Voice and student's choice

The more voice and choice is given to students, the better John Lamer and John Megendoller (2010). They will feel that the project is theirs, they will seize it and become more involved in it. This will make the project become a meaningful one for them. 

       6.  Reflection

The project should provide multiple opportunities for students to reflect on what, how and why they are learning (Buck Institute for Education, 2015).

       7.  Criticism and review

The project must include processes and the necessary spaces so that students can give and receive feedback on their work. This will allow them to improve it. 

      8.  Final product

Students must create and present a product through which they will demonstrate what they have learned. This product must be public.

De Graaf, E., & Kolmos, A. (2003). Characteristics of problem-based learning. International Journal of Engineering Education, 19(5), 657-662.

Thomas, J. W. (2000). A review of research on project-based learning.

Donnelly, R., & Fitzmaurice, M. (2005). Collaborative project-based learning and problem-based learning in higher education: a consideration of tutor and student role in learner-focused strategies.

Bell, S. (2010). Project-based learning for the 21st century: Skills for the future. The Clearing House, 83(2), 39-43.

Newell, R. J. (2003). Passion for learning: How project-based learning meets the needs of 21st-century students (No. 3). Scarecrow Press.

Barron, B. J., Schwartz, D. L., Vye, N. J., Moore, A., Petrosino, A., Zech, L., & Bransford, J. D. (1998). Doing with understanding: Lessons from research on problem and project-based learning. Journal of the learning sciences, 7(3-4), 271-311.

DeFillippi, R. J. (2001). Introduction: Project-based learning, reflective practices and learning.

Grant, M. M. (2002). Getting a grip on project-based learning: Theory, cases and recommendations. Meridian: A middle school computer technologies journal, 5(1), 83.

Markham, T. (2011). Project-based learning a bridge just far enough. Teacher Librarian, 39(2), 38.

Scarbrough, H., Swan, J., Laurent, S., Bresnen, M., Edelman, L., & Newell, S. (2004). Project-based learning and the role of learning boundaries. Organization studies, 25(9), 1579-1600.

Drew Perkins August 2, 2018 Project Based Learning

The method will be applied by exploiting the wealth of fields the school has, to cover one of their primary necessities: The food. The animation will be focused on making orchards to be exploited by planting and harvesting vegetables and different kinds of plants that can be consumed by the students or sold in the market. In this way the students not only will get food but money. Four groups of students will be formed, by grade, to build every orchard and keep it working and producing. These tasks will serve them to stay healthy and get more energy to study, endurance, and raise their productiveness.

 
These activities will not only teach the students to produce food for their consumption, but this intervention method will also teach them how to generate economic resources too, showing them the way to apply similar procedures in different areas, not only in the planting field.

                          Area                   | Percentage of the grade
           Exam                                 | 40%
           Participation and effort | 20%
           Behavior                           | 20%
           Book                                  | 10%
           Notebook                          | 10%

The students have to meet certain parameters to fulfill the quality standards of each item, and  which will describe, in the rubric shown below, named Collaborative Work Skills:
(Source) http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php

Self-Assessment

The students will be provided monthly with the same rubric, the same one the teachers will use, to promote the self-assessment and make them become more aware of their performance and progress, and what they need to do or make to get better if needed. 

The school chosen is named Secundaria Federal Águilas de Anáhuac, Federal No. 8. The school code given by the Sep is Clave 21DES0095G, and the address is Calmecac 4205, Momóxpan. Telephone number: 2256127. 

Principal – Professor Fabián Hernández Munive

Sub principal – Professor José Antonio Barranco

The school is located in an area where several private schools around. A block away is a plaza (Serviplaza Momoxpan). Small businesses set up in some of the INFONAVIT houses that make up most of the neighborhood housing provide income to the families that live nearby. 

As we live close to the Institution it would be easy for us to make it on time to offer our social service and at the same time, eliminate transportation or gasoline costs. We would be working on our own, starting from the basics as the school has not had an English teacher for six years approximately under SEP¨s claim that there are no resources to pay one. There is a person at the moment who is trying to help with the subject but will be leaving in a few months. 

There is a particular interest in preparing a student who won the 5a Copa de Ciencias de la BUAP in Robotics, and as he must give a speech in English, he is memorizing what his teachers help him with so he can present his project.

Besides, there is a child who has a hearing and speech impairment; however, progress is being made as he has begun to read out loud, but the school would like to give him more opportunities. 

In the Montessori philosophy, the child is seen as an independent entity with the potential for immeasurable learning and development, and the students selected for this project will be the ones who are interested in developing the following skills and behaviors:

In the Montessori model there is no traditional teacher, but a “guide” who takes the student by the hand and guides him to find his own learning and knowledge, through the whole Montessori philosophy and material.

This proposal is intended to give an educational solution for a school grouped in a low economic level since it is situated in a neighborhood that has a precarious economic status. It has been designed to work with children in the Secundaria Federal Águilas de Anáhuac, Federal No. 8, in which students come from different ages and diverse backgrounds. Both, the activities and the methodology, as well as the evaluation methods, proposed objectives and skills to be achieved, pursue a contribution to their physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development. The main purpose of this project is to serve progressively to their self-control, social integration with mates and relatives, and the discovery of the environment that surrounds them, all of this through the English language. The English lessons are science that studies everything related to the teaching-learning process, in conjunction with the Montessori and the social constructivism model, coupled with the music, can be used to create a preventive program that can be developed to help the students to overcome their situation and opportunities. Moreover, it is prepared specially for children who are in this precarious economic situation and lack of chances, to improve their educational level enormously.

The education in Mèxico is running through a crisis in which it lacks many essential components that drop its quality levels to the lowest numbers in the statistics at a global level. According to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the performance of Mexico is below the OECD average in science (416 points), reading (423 points) and mathematics (408 points). In these three areas, less than 1% of students in Mexico manage to achieve excellent levels of competence (level 5 and 6). (OECD)

It means that in all the subjects Mèxico has a lag of 2,5 years in its educational system (El Universal 2016), and the numbers are even worse talking about English lessons, as it is stated in the book "Sorry, The Learning of English in Mexico": The Situation of English learning in students. Almost all the participating students - 97% - were located at levels lower than that established by the SEP to accredit Secondary school. After spending at least 360 hours in English classes in high school (and quite possibly hundreds of hours more in elementary school), four out of five showed total ignorance of this language, corresponding to Level A0, a level that does not exist in the CEFR, but that was created to categorize the results of this study. A little more than one in ten reached the level that would be expected for a student in 4th grade (A1), while one in twenty had the level that would be expected for a student in 1st Secondary (A2). Only three out of every hundred students achieved the target level in the curriculum (B1).

We can infer, this causes too many performance issues to the students as they try to get graduated in higher levels of education, struggling with many problems related to the narrow educational circumstances they were exposed. We can say that one of the main factors that contribute to this problematic, is the precarious opportunities that students have in public schools to be exposed to English language lessons in all the levels (Dr Cinto Morales BUAP 2019), causing that many of them drop-out and become one more of the negative statistics. An investigation carried out in 2010 by The Canadian and International Education Institute illustrates much better this situation:

Students from the UPAEP come from different Mexican states - most of them from the centre and the south - and from two different educational systems, the private and the public one. Eighty per cent of these students begins to study English at the University in one of the first proficiency levels (level A1 or A2), a quite negative result for students who have already studied English for 3 or 4 years. (Despagne, Colette (2010) "The Difficulties of Learning English: Perceptions and Attitudes in Mexico," Canadian and International Education / Education Canadienne et Internationale: Vol. 39: Iss. 2, Article 5.)

This situation causes too many troubles when students look for better grades and results when performing their studies. However, the problem gets even worse when we notice that in the English language learning there are not attitude problems with the students, as the results of the mentioned investigation above clearly show that UPAEP students feel great extrinsic motivation in learning English. They are all aware of the fact that English is mandatory in order to find suitable employment and essential in order to study for a master's degree abroad. 

So, this shows that the problems are located intrinsically in the Mexican education system. 

But the questions we need to pose here are: 

We have designed a mixture of three of the best methodologies, according to our experience, to be applied in this project. We intend, through the implementation of these three methodologies in only one course, to create a background for the kids which will support their psychology, enhance their abilities, and provide them with critical thinking to strengthen their behavior, decisions, and sense of humanity, which will take them to become better human beings, create a better life for themselves, the people and environment that surrounds them.

What is intended with the new educational trends is that the students need to be happy when learning all through their development and education

The Montessori philosophy has different characteristics from other educational methodologies. It is based on an all-round education and growth of the child, basing his development on aspects such as the psychomotor, social, affective, psychological, and cognitive matters, having as main objective the human development. Its methodology is based on essential aspects like the stages of development, the sensitive periods, and the human tendencies, which will provide all the  information needed from the student, through the observation, which is the door to the knowledge of the needs of the child that will guide both, him and his guide, to take him to his healthy and whole-rounded learning and development. 

M Montessori - Jogjakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2013 - academia.edu

The observation will help us to know ourselves and to know the needs of the child when doing it with no judging. It must be scientific and spiritual.

The observation must be systematic to be reliable. It is the basis of Montessori education.

Vygotsky's theory is based mainly on the sociocultural learning of each and the environment in which he performs his development. Vygotsky considers learning as one of the fundamental mechanisms of development. In his opinion, the best education is the one that is ahead of development. In the learning model he contributes, the context occupies a central place. The social interaction becomes the engine of development. Vygotsky introduces the concept of Zone of Proximal Development which is the distance between the actual level of development and the level of potential development. To determine this concept, two aspects must be borne in mind: the importance of the social context and the capacity to imitate. Learning and development are two processes that interact. School learning must be congruent with the child's level of development. Learning occurs more readily in collective situations. The interaction with parents facilitates learning. "The only good teaching is the one that anticipates development".

ASSUMPTIONS OF THE THEORY OF LEV VYGOTSKY.

The three main assumptions of Lev Vygotsky are:

• Building Meanings:

• The community has a central role.

• The people around the student significantly affect the way he or she "sees" the world.

Instruments for Cognitive Development:

• The type and quality of these instruments determine the pattern and the rate of development.

• Instruments should include significant adults for the student, culture, and language.

Zone of Proximal Development:

According to Vygotsky's theory of development, problem-solving capabilities can be of three types:

For Lev Vygotsky, the psychological instruments are all those objects whose use serves to order and externally reposition the information so that the subject can escape the dictatorship of the here and now and use their intelligence, memory or attention in what could be called a situation. Cultural representation of the stimuli that can be operated when we want to have this in our mind and not only when real life offers them to us. For Lev Vygotsky, psychological instruments are the knot in the handkerchief, the coin, a ruler, an agenda or traffic light and, above all, the sign systems: the set of phonetic, graphics, tactile stimuli, that are they build as a great instrumental mediation system: language.

The state of a child's mental development can only be determined by establishing a classification of his two levels, the actual level of development and the potential development zone.

It can be seen that these concepts suppose a completely renovating vision of many assumptions of psychological research and teaching, at least as they have been understood for a long time since they start from the idea that what an individual can Learn not only depends on our activity. Lev Vygotsky thinks that the latter is conditioned by social learning. Thus, it maintains a conception that shows the permanent influence of learning in the way in which cognitive development occurs. Therefore, a student who has more opportunities to learn than another, not only will acquire more information but will achieve better cognitive development.

Scientific studies have proven that Music affects not only our emotions but our intelligence and cognition. The reward system located in our brain is activated when we dance, sing, listen to Music, or play a musical instrument, making of this an enjoyable experience every time we are in touch with it. What if we take advantage of this for English lessons? Music changes enormously the emotional system of people and activates neural zones all around our brain. Scientific researches state that no other activity activates such an amount of neuronal connections in so many different areas in the brain. When we listen to Music, the auditory cortex and the cerebellum is immediately activated in order to process all the full range of stimuli they receive (sound), such as frequency, pitch, spatial location, Tambor, amplitude, and duration among others. One more benefit of Music is when reading notes of staff or watching a musician performing because this activates the visual cortex. When we listen or play Music we think, and we display images in our mind stimulated by Music, this activates the brain’s sensory cortex. Even if we have expectations about where the Music will go activates the prefrontal cortex. The motor cortex and cerebellum are activated when listening to a sticky song, that is why we feel the need for dancing or moving, and the amygdala and the cerebellum produce emotional reactions. 

The discipline of practising and studying on an instrument strengthens brain functions since it requires the auditory, motor, sensory and visual systems work together at once, which increases the activity in the hearing, memory, and motor areas of the brain. One of the main points here is that those strengthens can be applied in many different non-musical activities; researchers found that this kind of training can increase IQ by 7% or more. Another benefit of Music is that it increases the connections between both hemispheres (corpus callosum), allowing the information goes from one to the other hemispheres through various routes and at a higher speed. It is scientifically proven that musicians have higher function levels of these abilities, and it can be seen when they plan, strategize, pay attention to details, or memorize. People who play an instrument show more control in practical activities like processing emotions, learning new tasks like another language or creative problem solving, which allows them to be more propense to think out of the box.

However, the idea in this research is that not only musicians can get the benefits of these effects on their brain, but this information will also be used to help enormously the set of strategies to be applied when teaching English to children. Taking advantage of the power of Music to capture the attention of children, and their pleasure for it, we can establish activities to rehearsal the four skills such as listening to the missing words, introducing new vocabulary, translating the lyrics they are listening, and comprehend parts or the whole idea of the lyrics, and at the end singing the song. Next, to the benefits of Music, the kids will be learning a new language.