PROJECT 1
Title: Playing around the world
Authorship: Josep Grau (PE teacher) and Patrícia Puebla (English Teacher) [collaboration with Andrés Garcia (PE Teacher)]
Physical Education Project (Task 1 and tak 2): GEP1_Physical Education_Escola Ramón y Cajal_VOC.
PROJECT 2
Title: Inventions & Street Art
Authorship: Patrícia Puebla (English Teacher) and Irene Fenoy (Class Teacher) [collaboration with Emma Pont (English Teacher)]
GEP Project (Task 1 and tak 2): GEP1_Inventions & Street Art_Escola Ramón y Cajal_VOC
School and context
Ramón y Cajal is a public school which includes infant and primary education. Its mission is to educate and form integrally boys and girls so that they become competent people and have a good level of personal and academic preparation. It also has the objective of creating a participative and motivating environment which ought to ease the integration and implication of all members of the educational community and the functioning of the centre. All that is reflected in the PEC, where is specified that the school has to work so that the education of pupils becomes personalised, integral, affective, and cozy, coeducational and not sexist, socialising and pacific, catalan, solidary and tolerant, plural, participative, committed, communicative and respectful with the physical and natural environment. The school is located in the neighbourhood of the Industrial School in the second ring of the centre of the Terrassa town, in district 1. It is a public school with complexity level B (middle) and it has two lines of levels. The AMPA offers diverse extra-curricular activities and the reception service.
There are 31 teachers in the Teacher Team including tutors and specialists.There is also a teacher of catholic religion in the center, a technician of Infant Education and the figure of a watchman. The personal of administration and services (PAS) which has the center are the official of services, the administrative worker, the cleaning staff and the kitchen staff. Many different specialists from External Services intervene at the school such as psycho-pedagogues, physiotherapist, LIC assessor, speech therapist, one person from the support for the blind people (ONCE) and the nurses from the medical center (CAP).
The socio-economic level of the families of the pupils varies a lot.
In the present, the English language is taught from P3 to 6th cycle and from the 1st to the 6th level of the primary education is also taught the physical education in English.
The evaluation of the English Language is done through direct observation of the teacher and by the level of participation of the pupils. In primary education, the evaluation is done by observation and by continuous evaluation and final exams.
GEP Reflection
- Irene Fenoy Romero
This course has been an opportunity to learn a new way of teaching a foreign language, through other subjects. CLIL offers opportunities to allow students to use another language naturally. In a standard way of teaching the students are only focus on the learning topic but with this new approach they have the opportunity to learn the content but also, do it in a new language. The language and the content have the same relevance.
We have been able to learn and put into practice new applications, methods, scaffolding strategies and delve into the many benefits of ICT tools. It has been a challenge for me, my partner and my English Commission colleagues to design CLIL programming taking into account all these aspects: the content, the progression of the language, the previous knowledge of the students, the cognitive processing and knowledge acquisition, materials and resources, the assessment, the teacher role… Additionally, we used a lot of new ICT tools that we didn’t know before the course but have been very useful in our didactic units. Despite all the complexity of this new methodology, the experience was very positive.
The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic has left us with the impossibility of implementing all the tasks that we had created for the students. We were only able to carry out two sessions of task 1, but it was not enough to obtain clear results. Despite this weird situation, there are some things we can value. For example, the usage of the ICT tools encourage the students more, and they feel more motivated but, on the other hand, they are not used to apply these new tools and it requires some extra time to tell them how everything works. Also, in this case is basic to work in smaller groups or with two teachers in class. Otherwise, with big groups the process becomes much more complicated.
To conclude, I believe that this way of working will be part of our near future and that will be, for sure, the way to follow for our school. For that reason, it is important to continue learning and improving our knowledge.
2. Patricia Puebla Madrid
The first year of GEP has been a great opportunity to grow as a teacher and enrich my way of teaching. Next, I am going to expose you all the positive and less positive aspects after finishing GEP’s first year.
To begin with, I would like to point out the great opportunity to share this experience and develop this project with my colleagues (English commission). We have been developing the different tasks and implementing new plans that involves more English in our school. Secondly, this course has given me the opportunity to learn, not only how to teach a subject in English, but also many different resources (like ideas, activities, strategies, ICT tools…) to implement in the ordinary classes.
Meanwhile, I want to mention that the course has been hard because of the demanding work, but we have worked with many good and positive expectations. Unfortunately, we could not implement the tasks with our students due to the current pandemic conditions. Just before the quarantine, we could implement two sessions. As a conclusion of those two sessions, I can say that the students enjoyed a lot with the new type of activities, but we had some troubles while using some of the ICT tools. The students are not used to work with these programmes, and they required too much help from the teachers, this fact slowed us down and we should have dedicated an extra session. Maybe a possible solution could have been doing this type of session with a smaller group. Even though the use of this methodology is great, the school needs to have the proper technology equipments such as computers, laptops, tablets or the wifi, working in a perfect software and hardware conditions, and depending on this fact, it can be a problem. The laptops in our school are old and very slow, so we had to change in the last minute the strategy, in order to achieve the objectives of the session.
To end up with it, say that I am looking forward to starting the second year of GEP and at the same time try to implement with our students the tasks that we have programmed this course.
3. Josep Grau Armengol
The first GEP course has been a very useful experience that gives me new strategies and new ways of teaching. It helps me to know more variety of resources and how to introduce new content in a non-linguistic subject that we teach in English.
New technologies are very important in CLIL, and our GEP teachers and the other colleagues of GEP course show lots of different ICT tools that help us as teachers. But the most important thing is that ICT tools could help students to learn English in a better way, playing with it, learning new vocabulary and sharing with their classmates.
Our experience working with Task 1 and Task 2 in GEP project has been an opportunity to improve and it makes us to think about how to teach using different materials and how to teach different contents in English, working in more collaborative activities and helping students to work together.
Unfortunately, the actual situation with coronavirus doesn’t allow us to implement our proposal at school, but we are sure that we will implement it as soon as we can, because it will be very useful for our students and it will help them to enjoy learning English.
