Job Shadowing - Järvenpää Wednesday 25th January

The program for today has been really complete: monitoring sessions of English and Spanish and a long meeting with Principal Marja-Liisa.

In the Englsih class of Marjo Uotila I have been able to see again some utilities of EDISON, the pedagogical platform that the municipality has created for primary and secondary schools. It is used to upload materials created by the teachers and also those offered by publishers.

Then in the Spanish class with Marjo I made another presentation of the school, of our peojects and, of course, of the city of Valencia. It has been a kind of promotion of both the Erasmus+ projects¡ of the school and the exchange of students that we carry out with Finland.

At twelve I have met Principal Marja-Liisa and we have had lunch at the school. Afterwards we have compared the way we make timetables for students and teachers in both schools.

In Finland the managing board, in this case it is the principal, distribute the subjects according to most reasonable election of compulsory courses and trying to give as much choice as possible for the optional ones. Then each group of teachers of a subject negotiate which courses is teaching each one, so they create their own working timetable; if they do not get to an agreement they ask the principal to distribute the courses.

In my school, we make a study of the groups we think we will have the following year, and according to that we are assigned a number of hours per group and a number of teachers. At the same time we have to make the distribution of subjects so that students have the maximum range of subjects in a way that they can get the best selection to fulfil their interests. Then we give each didactic department the numbre of courses they will have, they choose which they want to teach and with that information the managing team make the timetables of the groups of students and of each of the teachers.

In both schools, it is a very hard work because we two want to have the best offer for the students.

The next two sessions have been with Tuija Haappala who is developing a new approach in her English classes.

The tasks are set at the beginning of the unit and the due date is settled. The students have the freedom to upload the tasks as they complete them. They have a brief guided task at the beginning of each sessions and then they work on their own. The teacher uses EDISON and digital resources.

As with many new things and methodologies, it is hard in the beginning and little by little the students get used to the method and the teacher can implement all the resources he has prepared.

Angels Romeu

Coordinator Erasmus+