Today I was very curious about my new adventure to come. The thing is that I was going to start my training course in order to become an English language teacher.
So I took a shower, I dressed up and I went to my new School Font de Sant Lluís. The High School director received me and other masters’ students in a big room and described us the characteristics of the center. At the moment, there are 68 teachers and 630 students. The courses studied are E.S.O., 4 kinds of baccalaureate: science, humanities and arts (music and dance-theater) and a Course on Design of Web Apps. He also explained us the working philosophy of the center. He told us that a couple of years ago, they had a problem which was that the average of failure in the first courses was very high (1st and 2nd of ESO). They solved the problem by organizing the year’s plan within areas instead of subjects. That means that the subjects of Spanish, Valencian and Knowledge of the Environment were fused in the Sociolinguistic Area. In every lesson, two teachers as well as several volunteers participate so that they have to negotiate with each other the organization of the lesson. Along the years they have realized that the motivation, the quietness and consequently the number of failures have decreased drastically. In reference to the English subject, this is tought as usually.
The director also made very interesting reflections that I would like to share in this post. He said that nowadays the Educational System in Spain is obsolete because we are living in the Technological Era. So we have to provide our students with what they are demanding: "if they need you to teach them how to search information properly on the Internet, you will have to". As teachers, we have to develop the critical thinking (for example, make them aware of the subliminal messages which are transmitted in the media, films, news, advertisements…) and the cooperation among our students. For these reasons, in Font de Sant Lluís School there are far fewer books used in class and sometimes teachers and students generate their own materials. The AMPA of the center has done a campaign for the parents to buy their children tablets instead of books: "a tablet costs you 100€ and your child can have it for his/her all life, and an amount of books costs you much more money every year". The teachers, the students and the parents can keep in contact to each other through email and have a fluent communication through other platforms such as Google Drive or Moodle. Another idea which this center has developed is working in projects for a week, as they have already started to do in Finland this year 2016. This year’s topic is "trips experience". It will be held from the 18th to the 22th of April. Then there is the “Primavera Educativa”, a congress organized by the Conselleria in the bed of the River Turia (Valencia), where Schools can present their projects. It will be celebrated the 13th, 14th and 15th of May 2016. Font de Sant Lluís School also works a lot with volunteers. In the evenings, the Library of the School is open for those students who need help with homework and have not this support in their families. So the volunteers are retired people from the neighborhood, parents… The School also organizes free activities for the people living in the neighborhood and the teachers: yoga, film meeting discussions, etc.
For the moment, everything seems to be very innovative according to the content I studied in my Masters' subject IDIIE. It surprised me because I'm talking about a public School in Spain. Let's see how it goes!
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