What do you most urgently want to know about teaching or program coordination/supervision?
How to make all the teachers participate with the sharing of ideas without making them feel forced to do so. How to make the school staff aware of the importance of the bilingual program, as some of the teachers are still reluctant.
2. What steps have you taken in the past year to assess your teaching or program coordination?
I always ask my colleagues to be critical and honest with each other, because that’s how we all learn. Unfortunately, we do this reflection after the lessons, during our meetings, because there are no free periods for us to observe each other’s lessons.
I would love to do it next year, because I used to be assessed almost every week in England, at the beginning I panicked, but now I feel really confident having someone in the classroom to work with.
3. What methods do you use to learn more about your teaching or coordination/supervision in order to improve it?
Ask my students, they are always going to tell the truth, because of their spontaneity. If I feel they are not going to be honest, I can ask them to write an anonymous comment about me and my teaching strategies.
4. How do you weigh your work as teacher/coordinator and researcher in your daily work?
I love my job and think I try really hard to make my students enjoy my lessons, while they learn, but I feel that we should have better training as teachers, because our teacher training courses in Spain are not practical at all; most of them are theory oriented. I think I have a lot to learn about how to be a coordinator.
5. How and how often do you collaborate with colleagues in your school and other in programs related to research about your teaching?
We have a weekly meeting, but most of them are not about reflecting, but organizing school events, writing school paperwork… I would like to have more meetings where we don’t have to work on boring paperwork.
BILINGUAL COORDINATOR FUNCTIONS, ACCORDING TO THE LAW
a) Provide at least all the weekly hours from the foreign language and those areas for which it is enabled, one of the school units where the program is developed.
b) Collaborate with the management team in the review and completion of Curriculum Project, the Annual General Memory Programming and end of year.
c) Coordinate the development of programming areas taught in English with the other teachers involved in the program.
d) Establish contact with the language assistants assigned to school, facilitate the reception in the center and guide them in their adaptation to the environment.
e) organize, together with the Director of Studies, the allocation of language assistants to the respective teachers and groups, and to ensure optimal utilization of this resource in the center.
f) Check the appropriate coordination that must exist between teachers and language assistants.
g) To convene a weekly meeting of coordination, when teachers must stay in the center.
h) Maintaining contact with school mate and exchange work, experiences
i) Encourage reflection on teaching practice at the center and promote initiatives of pedagogical and methodological innovation.
j) Select the resources and materials for the Program, in collaboration with the teaching staff of the program, ensuring their proper use and maintenance.
k) Organize in the center, together with the management team, the management of external assessment tests (dates, registration, protocolos) following the instructions established by the Ministry of Education.
l) To promote the participation of faculty members in seminars and training courses that result in the improvement of teaching practice.
m) Maintain promptly informed the director of all aspects of the program and operation. The director, as head of the bilingual program at its center, take the appropriate decisions in each case.
HOW CAN I IMPROVE AS A BILINGUAL COORDINATOR?
The main idea I have learnt about during the course is that I must bear in mind all the possible jobs that I could help my colleagues with in order for them to improve their teaching practice.
Some of the most important roles as a bilingual coordinator are the following:
- mentor new teachers,
- attend professional development courses,
- identify an issue in my classroom, talk about it with colleagues and decide a course of action,
- implement lesson study with new approaches learnt recently,
- implement a new instructional strategy in the school,
- share a teacher research plan and implement it,
- improve help sessions to make them more accesible to the students
- more experimenting and reflecting,
- coach other teachers,
- collaborate and reflect together on collective work,
- engage in collective school-wide improvement, resources