Mobility 3: ireland (1) - Job Shadowing (Buncrana)

Participant: María Concepción González Colino

Dates: From 5th to16 th March 2018

Place: Crana College, Buncrana, Ireland.

Link to the Final Report

My job-shadowing experience at the Crana College, Donegal, Ireland, has been frankly positive. At the beginning I felt really unconfident, mainly due to be in a foreign country with another language, and I was not able to enjoy completely that experience. However, once I could get over that inconvenience, the communication and the learning were fluent and calm. I was given all the advantages to develop my observation:

· A diverse timetable, both in Maths and in Spanish subjects, and both in a large number of shadowing teachers and in various educative levels.

· Access to all the School areas as well as the attendance to a Staff meeting.

· Answers to all the questions I made, both about the College functioning and the Irish Educative System.

The Principal, Mr Kevin Cooley, the Mathematics Department as well as two of the Spanish Language teachers collaboration was absolute and efficient. Moreover, I felt really useful and valued because I was given the opportunity of teaching. I realized, once again, that there are not linguistic obstacles when it is spoken or teaching in terms of Maths.

As a conclusion, the schedule, the classes and time to rest, is, really stressful, because a teacher changes from one level to other in very short quickly periods. However, the student behaviour is clearly better than ours students, that is, basically, due to a bigger involvement of the families and the society in control it. Both teachers, themselves, and the teaching job are socially well valued, as I could observe. There are much less bureaucratic papers to be filled by teachers, but, definitely, the Programs and Syllabus must be achieved, compulsorily. The facilities of the School are poor, small and insufficient to fulfil the needs of such volume of students, nevertheless, the specific classrooms and the workshops are well equipped.

Finally, I want to point out my total support to the development and design of this European Program, “Learning mobility of individuals-Mobility of staff in school education. KA1”. There are two main reasons for that, this is an educative, rewarding and open-minding experience and the time (12 days) is a suitable period for doing it.