How to improve educational performance, Tuesday, June 6th
6 czerwca 2023/
Imma and Mercedes were our guides today. We split into two groups. Me and Mirka participated in the meeting of the heads of departments. Heads of department meet every week. They have less lessons.
June is the month to make plans for the next school year. The main problem which was discussed concerned the lack of motivation and engagement among passive students. Physical education teacher and geography teacher presented techniques and methods of motivating passive and unengaged students, like: “fitcoins”, gamification, google instruments, small investigations, manual works, dividing material into small parts, “el fuero” (medieval privileges) – the benefits for good work during the week.
Then the principal started the discussion on how to improve educational performance in the lower grades, how to make the students enter secondary school smoothly. The solution is to join two subjects to reduce the number of teachers, for example maths and chemistry.
Then me and Maciek attended a lesson of the multicultural group of students from Venezuela, Morocco, Gambia, Honduras or Spain when we had a chance to hear about their favourite places in their countries. Some of them have recently arrived in Spain and have problems with communication. We appreciated Mercedes, their Spanish teacher’ approach to and understanding their boundaries in Spanish learning.
The last point of agenda was a Meeting of Spanish teachers led by Mercedes. Fortunately Maciej accompanied me because my Spanish was much too poor to catch the clue from the loud vivid discussion about the use of mobiles during the lessons and new duties of the teachers. Actually it didn’t differ from our school experience. Maybe one difference was the volume of sounds during the discussion.
At the same time Mirka, Maciek and Grzegorz participated in the lessons of history, bilingual maths, geography, and Spanish.