Sharing knowledge

Training courses
In general, I think the key is trying to teach or train abroad by doing a work placement in an training or teaching institution. The training courses I am interested in are the key action 2 and key action 1 that offers the European Commission. The learning mobility of individuals is a common practice amongst students, so why not for teachers?. Cooperation for innovation and exchange of good practices is something that teachers can do abroad or locally.
These kind of experiences provide fantastic teaching opportunities for the teaching staff, not only in their professional careers but in their life experiencies, they are enriching and rewarding. Moreover they are usefull to update or acquire knowledge of work practices and pedagogical skills, ITC skills and allow to improve teacher language skills such as speaking, listening and learn from students and teachers by interacting with them. It is also important to acquire flexibility and adapt us to educational system changes and the society reality regarding the competences and skills required for properly integrated into the same level of success enough in personal, social and working students life. Although KA3 training course is also interesting and important.

Sharing good practices amongst teaching professionals
In my opinion, cooperation with third countries is the best way to share good practise amongst teaching professionals. The idea is exchange good practices by focusing on neighbourhood countries and foster innovation. In a local level, the cooperation amongst different communities is also a fantastic way to evaluate and apply technics. Collaborating learning boosts the acquirance and the construction of knowledge among teachers.
Collaborative learning has a number of advantages over learning individual:

• Increase motivation of all members of the group towards the learning outcomes and content.
• Individual learning increases the whole group learning and all of them get better results.
• It promotes the critical thinking
• The diversity of knowledge and experiences of the group help to reduce anxiety causing individual situations troubleshooting

Sharing knowledge is essential because it allows to increase the employability through traineeships or by enriching or modify the existing practices. Also it help promoting the change we need and trigger policy reform. That is usefull to exchange teaching technics, implement or improve your own technics gathering ideas from other colleagues. But it is important to apply and focus our teaching should be integrated into the curriculum of our institutions.

Why we should all Learn Coding - Infographic

What would I say is the most important thing about science (in a CLIL context)?

The science curriculum requires learning objectives and outcomes, competences and content. If I were not limited by the curriculum in a CLIL context class, I would reduce the quantity of formal assessment (exams) and focus on the improvement of the student competences instead of study mainly to pass the exams. I think these competences are no enough developed nowadays and it is important to strengthen them. What is important now is skills, knowledge is on the internet.
The fact to be in a CLIL context involves work through 4 C’s model of Do Coyle to teach successful lessons. In today’s world the most important thing is the competence acquire and to become independent and self-regulating learner, so it would be very useful to teach the students how to get the skills. I would focus on:

• Communication. To improve scientific communication, Participate in debates, presentations, create reports and communicate in the clearest, most effective way possible and for a real purpose in a real context
• Content. Content knowledge using the simplest form of language.
• Cognition. To provide scaffolding strategies (input, output and transformation) allowing the students build their own knowledge. Specially learning to learn and communicative competence and higher order thinking skill, developing discourse, analyse the information, take decisions.
• Culture: to encourage students to understand themselves as citizens of the world, to strengthen transversal themes, social issues or problems, to promote international awareness and understanding, learning community of a class and school to local and global cultures
• Assessment. It is a big difference between what we typically assess and what we can assess. I find suitable using different kinds of assessment but it does not seem easy taking into account the student difficulties integration. I have read about that and come out issues: should we support foreign L2 or allow students to use mother tongue?, strengthen the content of the course or simplify the content or recess the level of demand? I would introduce the self-assessment for the students themselves measure their own progress, feedback and a mixture of formal and informal assessment.

Education is moving towards open learning and as a teacher I would support the change and get students take charge of their learning being self-directed. It would be necessary to encourage teachers to use alternative ways of planning and designing lessons for more effective learning. The more student output the better.

Resources:
Science CLIL lessons

Advantages and disadvantages of using the EPL in a specific teaching context

After some ELP samples viewed and analysed, no doubt for me about the usefulness of ELP in language learning process. It is possible to see wide range of them, for different education stages and so much information available about it. The portfolio is a way of collecting information that shows the student's skills and successes.

As a secondary school teacher of sciences, I think the key point is to get the idea of the features/actions involved in an ELP such as "what we learnt in every unit", "competences development", "reflections and progress at the end of the unit"... The integration of an ELP adapted to a particular curricular content such as biology becomes a suitable way to help students to manage their learning process, especially in CLIL lessons. Some of its benefits are:

• It is student-centred. It encourages the students to think about their learning process and to be aware about how their learning is being, how to regulate and modify it.
• Offers much information about the student and their learning process that is invaluable evidence for teacher to develop a more accurate evaluation (formative and summative).
• Setting the objectives and the descriptions makes the students know accurately what they are asked for.
• Allows monitoring the student's work
• ELP evidences student's achievements
• It is adaptable to a specific curricular content or be focused on CLIL, personal skills, professional skills...

But the biology curriculum requires students to learn many skills (inquiry skills, understanding, high-order thinking, build, analyze, synthesize ..) so, at first the fact of combine the evaluation of many skills turns it more complex and I see the following weaknesses:

•     Needs long time to elaborate for teachers and students, especially if it is an ELP adapted to a particular curriculum content different that language learning.
•     It is new that the majority of teachers may have difficulties to completely integrate it in the learning process. It needs planification, resources, qualification and preparation.
•     The evaluation is more difficult to set because it needs to be adapted to the student cognition and cover all the skills and objectives required in the curriculum such debate, participation.

To sum up, teachers usually involve more in quantifying the learning and the ELP helps students to learn by assessing themselves. That of course is invaluable for teachers too. But I really think implementing ELP should be useful for the learning process in CLIL contexts and even though it is difficult to adapt the evaluation of science curricular content in a L2 is good practice to combine and try to integrate it.

---

PD: I found on the Internet a work sample about Australian portfolio of sciences (see links below). This Australian science portfolio helped me to have a whole idea of what a science portfolio is, to get some ideas about how to do it and to see a good example of how to combine skills and objectives. In it students elaborate tasks that evidence learning towards the achievement standard. It is said that it is necessary a portfolio for a group of specific assessment tasks and each portfolio comprises a collection of students’ work drawn from a range of assessment tasks.

Resources:
Year 10 Science Portfolio - Satisfactory
Year 10 Science Portfolio - Above Satisfactory
Year 10 Science Portfolio - Below Satisfactory

The best linguistic program in Valencia

In my opinion the best linguistic programs are the PPEC and PPEV depending on the mother thonge. They're great because they face up to the real need  nowadays of english as a essential tool to get a better job, communicate with more people and get access to more information.
Basically PPEC and PPEV teach some curriculum content in a foreign language (usually English), each one has Spanish or Valencian language as a base or vehicular language.

But it is not so easy and simple. Valencian language has not been able to get the same linguistic normality as the Spanish. It is known that, here in Valencian Comunity, we have already a bilingual program with Valencian and Spanish languages that does not work as it should work. The reasons may be:

• lack of prepared teachers to teach in Valencian language that finally prefer teaching in Spanish because they don't feel comfortable o can not express themselves as they would wish. 

• Another reason may be the no aperture of new Valencian language lines because not all centers offer valencian teaching pathways.

• Or just demand is decreasing.

The results from our previous bilingual programs show that only the PEP and PIL linguistic pathways guarantee the students proficiency in two languages (Valencian and Spanish). Now, PEV and PIL will disapear and we will have to talk about PPEV and PPEC.

There are many complaints because the decree does consider Valencian language at the same level of linguistic normality than Spanish language. Valencian language is not recognized as a minority language neither in an unbalance situation. So it seems that the decree marginates the Valencian language.

I totally agree with the complaints but I don't think the problem is the decree nor the English language. It is not fair to get the idea that trilingualism does not work in Valencian Community because with Valencian language did not work. We already had a weak plan to face with our previous bilingual programs and the changes introduced by the new one make the situation even worse.

But the solution, on my view, "seems" clear and it have to do with smart thinking and effort. I think if the State offers all education programs in all centers, people will have the academic freedom and the satisfaction to exercise their rights. Teachers have to be better prepared and follow the law taking the responsibility to be able to teach in official and co-official language like other teachers from other Communities do.

Regarding to English, I think soon or later we will have to deal with, so the sooner the better. Moreover, the students deserve to receive all the tools for end education as better prepared as we can to become a citizen of the world.

The best gym for the brain is bilingualism

I read an article in a newspaper which gives me another reason to keep supporting bilingual education programs. It says that bilingual brains are better equipped to process information so the bilingualism at school become the best gym for the brain. The point is not the more languages you speak the more clever you are. If someone is able to speak at least two languages, will connect with others, will be able to use information in new ways and improve your listening skills among others. In Spain, especially with English language, a person can have access much more information about anything than in Spanish.

Read it in English: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2014/11/bilingual-brains-better-equipped-to-process-information.html

Read it in Spanish: http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/11/14/ciencia/1415985974_376968.html