I'm going to post links to good news stories that I find interesting. By doing this, I'm giving full credit to the people responsible for writing such news stories, and obviously, I'm giving the thumbs up to the people who appear in them.
Let me begin by saying that this headline is a bit misleading- the reference to government-funded schools summons images of thousands of schools all applying the same 'new' method. In reality, it is a reduced number of schools in Catalonia that are carrying out a methodological change on the back of university research. Whether the rest of schools will follow suit is still to be seen- but if I was the head of one such school, I certainly would consider it.
It is, after all, one of the most common complaints by both students and teachers. Foreign language teachers complain that they have to teach complex grammar structures in their subjects before the students have been explained the equivalent structure in their mother tongue (do they? this is a completely different conversation). Students complain about having to learn how to do the same thing in a few different languages and it is left to them to make the connections, and only a few of them have the 'eureka' moment when they realise that what they're studying about one language is also useful for a different one. If all language teachers agree on a sequence of contents for each school year, this surely will help students become better at languages. Or maybe not.
I welcome initiatives like the one in Catalonia. However, I think there are other things that can be done to improve the way English is taught and learnt. And not just English, but also Spanish as a mother tongue, and any other languages. The solution, I believe, is to make the subjects more practical than they currently are, stripping them from any unnecessary jargon or theoretical concepts with little practical meaning for students.
I agree that some concepts are necessary and that teachers need to establish common ground with students just so we all know what's what. The level of technical knowledge, however, doesn't have to be the same for all subjects. I think that the practical side is far more important: learning how to speak in public, how to conduct an interview, how to ask for directions, how to write an essay, a letter or a report, how to speak to people in formal situations, how to give a speech, how to do voiceover, how to interpret different texts (fiction, poetry, factual, journalistic, etc)... these are a lot more practical and language patterns should be taught using the communicative tasks as a way to bring context to purely theoretical language points. This, I think is far more important than establishing who teaches relative clauses and who teaches the passive voice.
However, if cooperation between different teachers brings benefits to their respective subjects, I'm all for it. After all, the teachers will benefit from working as part of a team and if the content of their subjects is streamlined, it will probably simplify their jobs and make it easier to work with the students. The students will also benefit from this. Taking this to the next level, with teachers from different subjects cooperating with each other and developing common projects would be even better.
In Primary, the school I work at started a Neurodidactics project three years ago. More and more schools are implementing this teaching method, and El País came here to find out how it works in a practical way. You can check their report by clicking on the link.
Entrevista a Santiago Atrio (28/03/2017, Educación 3.0)
El colegio milagro que revoluciona la educación en España (19/03/2017, El Mundo)
Santiago Atrio is Vicedean at the Faculty of Education and Teacher Training at the UAM (Vicedecano de Ordenación Académica y Desarrollo de las Titulaciones) and he recently gave an interview in which he talks about classroom/school design. In this interview, he questions the traditional classroom set-up- individual desks and chairs, all students looking at the board, enclosed classrooms... This is one of the hot topics in education these days. I believe that classroom furniture allows for flexibility, therefore it can be moved in order to enable students to do different tasks- collaborative work, discussion/debate, pairwork... the trick is to know when to move furniture. Some students are reluctant to doing this because (in my experience), they have to move the furniture back at the end of the class...
Back to facing the board, or worse, facing the teacher's desk in front of the board.
Let me digress for a bit. Teachers are not the centre of the class. This heliocentric misconception is the legacy of old fashioned teaching methods. We do not irradiate heat or knowledge (at least I don't), and by placing us in a particular place, we do not make it easier for our students to learn. My least favourite place for the teacher's desk is just in front of the board. In fact, we teachers don't need a desk! I stand and walk around (yes, I do hover around the board for a bit), but I can leave my stuff anywhere out of the way, and I definitely don't need a padded chair. The teacher's desk belongs in a corner of the classroom (the least useful corner, if possible, far away from everyone and everything!)
In my opinion, students should be seated in groups. They should face each other to enable communication between them. Thanks to the use of new technologies, if they have computers or tablets with access to the materials discussed in class, they don't even need to look at the board. An occasional look at the teacher when asked is sufficient. Boards are useful, but their role in today's classroom is changing.
There's another piece of news published in El Pais today, in which two schools that have adopted roughly the same approach to teaching (large classrooms, several teachers in the same classroom, focus on the student, shift in teacher roles...) have a 'summit'. One of the schools is a modern, Danish school; the other, a semi-private Spanish school located in an underprivileged area.
España-Dinamarca, cumbre en el aula (El País, 02/04/2017)
This is another hopeful news story. It shows that the change is driven by the right leaders, and that the financial investment is not as important as having the appropriate attitude. School leaders need to drive this change before it inevitably engulfs them.
El colegio milagro que revoluciona la educación en España (19/03/2017, El Mundo)
I loved reading this story today. Against all the odds, this understaffed government school has managed to create a community in an underprivileged area of Barcelona, outperforming wealthier schools in the same city. This is an excellent example of how committed staff can make all the difference. They were ready to change methodology in order to get through to their students, and in the process, they got the whole community involved. Hats off to these people- they're heroes!
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