Antonia Dolcet, Alba Rodoreda
Antonia Dolcet
Antonia Dolcet is a teacher since 1984 in a state school. She has a Diploma in Education by the UAB Barcelona. Since 1998 she works as an English teacher in Font de l’Alba school in Terrassa. She became from the SetMesTres group as the begining in 2010.
Alba Rodoreda
Alba Rodoreda is a teacher since 2008. She has a Diploma in Education by Blanquerna in Ramon Llull University. She works as substitute teacher in different schools in the Vallès Occidental. She starts in SetMesTres group in 2011.
website: setmestres.es
email: setmestres@gmail.com
Abstract
Interaction, reflection and competencial work
Our goal
This work group goal is to apply a research method for the classroom’s work in order to generate projects, teaching units and competence activities.
Consideration of the educational practice
The consideration we made of our educational practice based in the model of mere transmission of contents, moved us to conclude that such model didn’t allow us to guide our proposals towards a competential development model. For us, the proposals must be rich, significant and interdisciplinary.
The debate
The group SetMesTres started a debate about how could we make a significant change in the our teaching practices; a change that lead us, and others, towards a competential model of work.
We took into account:
- Finding an active methodology based in reflection, teamwork and sharing experiences.
- The importance of permanently reflect upon our practice.
- The possibility of encouraging other teacher to carry out small changes in their daily work.
- Generating proposals that would allow us to enrich work in the classroom.
When we talk about a teaching unit, we are talking about planning the teaching-learning process around an element of content that becomes an integral point, providing consistency and significance.
We know that, generally, in school, the contents take us basically to a conceptual work and that it hardly generates competences in students: they learn the concept but not how to apply it or use it. This is why we talk about context based proposals that support the construction of knowledge, empowering autonomy, teamwork, research and the transformation of knowledge into learning.
In our group seesions, we hold a permanent debate that, day by day, helps us change our beliefs about the educational role. We reflect upon the pedagogical aspects that we are interested in: evaluation, tutoring, routine, etc. This help us to continually feed our work and to visualize new proposals of class work.
Difficulties
We know how difficult it is for the school to allow these changes, so we thought that if we are able to “draft” sequences of context based activities that enhance research in our classrooms, we could enrich our teaching units and promote, little by little, significant changes in the methodology used by the rest of staff.
We have chosen 10 contexts in order to organize our proposals: Seven (Set) that easily allow us to locate the proposals in defined fields that are close to traditional curricular contents. Three (Tres) that are comprehensive and general, and that favour an interdisciplinary development of the proposals we are elaborating.
Methodology to develop the educative proposals in the classroom
In the contexts that we have defined before, we generate a problem situation in a question format. Then, based on this question, we develop small research orientated activities that allow us to work the contents of the curriculum in a competential approach.
Context Based curricular approach
First, we decide the context from which we want to work, and then we formulate the question and create “the problem situation”. It’s time to create the educative proposal following our own model:
- Question
- Description of the activity
- Contents and competencies
- Documents for the teacher (educative sequence)
- Documents for the students (work proposal)
- Resources and bibliography
Finally, all our creations are uploaded in our Web Site: http://setmestres.es/