Job Shadowing

This activity consists of a teacher visiting an european school and she would observe and take notes related to the way subjects are taught. The entire chance went to our colleague María Inmaculada Morato González, who travelled to the middle school “Collège Chevreul” in Angers, the capital of the area well known as “The route of the Loira Castles”.

She stayed from the 17 to the 21 October 2022 and she attended lessons of Spanish, English, German and some French lessons too (mother tongue, as you may imagine). The grades she observed are here in Spain the equivalent to 1º, 2º and 3º ESO. In total, she attended 21 hours, with too many different groups. This didn ́t allow her to appreciate almost any continuity through the week; even less if we take into account that they were in a week before their week off: All Saints ́ Day. But indeed, she had the chance to take a picture of some interesting points. There they are:

1) Teachers don ́t circulate among corridors; students circulate, they change classes.

2) Students use the smartphone occasionally.

3) Students train to respond to emergencies: fire, intruders...; they do it once a month. They train every month too ( 3º ESO) for the official exams which will arrive at the end of the mentioned grade level.

4) Teachers work (they started this way of doing almost 40 years ago) with what they call “sequence” which are the brand new in Spain "situaciones de aprendizaje" of the LOMLOE. The students are given an outline of each single sequence with the needed information, especially the “final outcome”, very famous in the new law too. When the end of the sequence approaches, it is assessed with a rubric the students have known in advance as well.

5) This way of working is totally apart from the need of using the text book but it implies a large amount of copies done every day for each subject.

6) Students are used to talk and to explain contents in front of their peers in all the subjects and to work sharing rooms inside the school, using once a week at least the CDI (Center of Documentation and Information); when they use this space, the responsible is the profesional working there, not the teacher.

María Inmaculada Morato González has already tried to put in practice some of the activities, the most interesting for her, the easiest ones to be implemented in our school. Some of them are faster practiced in Spanish (mother tongue) since in English they seem quite difficult (not to say in French, second foreign language). It was the same in Angers, students could do some activities easily in French but they found the same ones hard to be done in Spanish, for instance. Just to mention a few: the prepared dictation, the summary or the young teacher.

We are confident the jobshadowing could be extended, signed by the EU, to fifteen days, as the only way to observe some continuity from a lesson to another; not being affected by the holidays or the end of the period knowing that those students will not ever again be seen.

We would like to thank the EU the opportunity of sending our teachers abroad to visit schools and to observe. We count on repeating the jobshadowing some time soon, since our colleague is entirely pleased with it: her French was reboosted and she saw other ways of doing, not necessarily better, but different.

Click here if you want to read the full file about the mobility.