Which training courses would you like to have access to as a teacher? Why? Which is, in your opinion, the best way to share good practice amongst teaching professionals? Why?

As a teacher I would like to have access to lots of resources and courses that I haven’t got in my school. In my job as a music teacher for me the best courses I would like to do are about CLIL and music in CEFIRE because I think that I need more information about my area to know how I can apply CLIL in my subject, using the correct vocabulary and different motivating activities.

Other courses I would like to study are about cooperation groups and dialogued practices because I think that reflect together in an egalitarian dialogue is the best way to learn by doing and to recycle yourself constantly.

Sharing knowledge it’s difficult if we closed the doors when the class starts so now we have to change by using different methodologies and the problem is the way are we going to organize to share knowledge. Also we have to change our mentality because we maybe don’t know how to work in a group.

In my opinion the best way to share good practice amongst teaching professionals is to have a program like Erasmus plus in which all European teachers can go to other countries and see how the teaching practices are there. As a teacher this experience is perfect to share different resources and knowledge in order to open our minds and enrich our practice with different ways of working in our classes.

And Erasmus plus is even better because all this knowledge can be experienced with the pupils who can travel with their teachers to other country to share different experiences in a school to then receive the exchange friends in their schools and show them the school and the way they learn and what they have.

Other platform that it’s really interesting is a program of Cooperation called Etwinning which is used in order to look for teachers that are interested in the same topic you are interested so that you can talk with them in order to work with them with the project or to share information about the matter.

what would you teach without curriculum? and... how would you assess their learning?

If you were not limited by the demands of the national/regional curriculum, what would you say is the most important thing you would teach your students about your subject (in a CLIL context)? How would you assess their learning?

If I had the opportunity to do my classes without any curriculum the most important thing to teach for me it would be the importance of communication through language and through music as well.

The thing is that if we use CLIL in classes we need to evidence the importance of the communication and what useful it is for the society. In fact nowadays we live in a large network of relations between countries and we need to know different ways of communication so in my case, in a music class, I would try to teach English and music as a useful ways of communication.

Another reason why I would teach communication use as the most important thing to my pupils is because in Spain we hardly ever have English in our normal life and we forget what the true reason is when someone learn a foreign language. In my opinion, if we don’t let them see the usefulness of the language they are not going to learn a language as they should.

The same happens to music, we all think that we like music but most of the time we don’t really realize about what is music for and actually we need to know that music is a language as English or Spanish and we need to see it and use it as what it is: an instrument to communicate something (as English).

About how to assess their learning I would try to create real communicative situations and record them and I will do it with instruments and English, for example doing an instrumental improvisation where someone is the director and he or she tell them different rules in English to change the bit and then we would do a reflection in group.

In this example activity I would assess the utility of both (English and music) because they are saying something with the instrument and also communicating with the director and we can create a rubric and do a portfolio to promote self assessment.

ELP: ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

Taking into account my personal teaching context, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of using the ELP with my groups?

Nowadays Teachers have lots of resources to use in their classes and one of them is ELP, European Language portfolio, which is a document for the pupils that contains diferents parts linked to the standardized levels of languages.

It’s like an individual diary about your progress in English and it shows pupil’s capacities in a language and linguistic experiences. Also, it’s made for different levels so that the pupils can have it to follow their progress in a long term.

Personally, as primary teacher in Valencian Community I believe that ELP it’s a good resource for my groups because it make self-assessment helping students to be more independent and to understand a language as a lifelong learning, not as a thing that has to be studied only for a level certificate or to finish the studies and then forget everything, and this is an understanding problem on today’s language students that has to be avoided.

ELP is good for the evaluation also because with it the teacher can have an individual document from each pupil about how he or she believe her or his progress is, and what capacities the pupils think they have, so the teacher can have a specific view in the evaluation and can have a look in each capacity comparing the student’s opinion about the knowledge or experiences with the teacher’s rubric for example.

Another good view of this source is that it’s so motivating for the students who are writing their progress and levels and this causes a special interest from them to go up, step by step comparing their previous levels with the new ones.

On the other hand, in my opinion it’s difficult to apply this resource in our primary classes because we don’t have enough time to let the students write the ELP so maybe they would have to do it a home and it’s difficult to control that every pupil has controlled her or his ELP.