Closing

In balance, this subject has been very interesting and useful. The way of teaching it in a very collaborative and active way, working in groups and making that groups of peers responsible for the content of their work, learning through discovering, experimenting, listening and exchanging information from our equals, made it dynamic and interesting.

Our group was very hard working and organized (group 7; Hector, Daniel, Alejandro and I), and I think we did a very good job.

School Guidance Plan

This is the third (and most important) project of the subject. As we have been acquiring more and more knowledge about school guidance and counseling along the term, this project consists on developing a real school guidance plan (the document in which the school defines the guidance program it offers).

This project takes a lot of effort and time; although the teacher provided us some real school guidance plans from different high schools and also on Internet there were some, we went to a high school in order to see and understand its school guidance plan from a real resource, and with all this information we elaborated ours the best we could.

 

The presentation we made consisted on presenting our school guidance plan providing  how three real examples were intervened with it, without any special performance, acting, "theatre", or any visual element like that because, although we respect this form of making a presentation, we consider that the content doesn't vary with that, it is simply falsify.

Unfortunately the teacher didn't like our presentation. I believe that although it is true that we do could have done it much better, it wasn't as terrible as he thinks (also our peers from other groups believed it wasn't so bad). The teacher's opinion depressed us and left us with a bad taste in our mouth because everything during the term was going pretty well until this project. At least we have learnt something more about the subject from the project even we didn't it right.

Paretn(s) - Teacher conference

Today class was about a matter that, as teaching, will require our best in the future, but is usually less treated as if it weren't so important (and actually it is); how to run a good parent-teacher conference. This is a meeting between the parents and the teacher to discuss and exchange any information about the children educational, behavioral and personal progress and development, and to try to solve any problem in the most effective and rapid way.

We started showing a video selected by the teacher, where we could see an American perfect run  parent-teacher conference, that gave us some tips about how to do it:

- Welcome the parents.

- Talk about the positive aspects of the student first, then the bad ones. 

-Have material ready to show.

- Improve the success of the student with homework.

- Let the parents know what are exactly the materials their child usually uses.

- Bring a portfolio of the student's work.

- Send home-sheets with questions for the parents.

- Know very well your objectives.

- Prepare students for conference. 

-It is good that parent takes notes.

- State the purpose and the time for the conference.

- Describe the child's progress in major areas and ask how they feel about child's progress.

- Set mutual goals and establish timelines for goals.

- Summarize (thanks for coming, set another meeting day...).

- Evaluate conference: follow up with students and follow up with parents.

We made a last participative activity, which consisted on recreating (with some of the people in the class) some typical and common parent-teacher conference situations, so some roles were: the counselor, divorced parents, a child with an abuse problem, a mother worried about her child... That required some imagination from those actuating.

This class has been very useful in order to teach us how to do a future task in an appropriate way. Also, with the information shown and the last activity we have completely realized about its importance and it's difficulty, something that has encouraged most of us.

The experience of a real counselor

We have in our class a student whose mother has been working as a counselor all her life. Fortunately, she could come to class and give us a speech about this job from her experience. This was the presentation she used:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/odrjij0lc28lzn5/Counselling1.pptx

She talked in a very close and understandable way about some topics such as the last 50 years of education in our country, the present situation in secondary schools of guidance and counselling and what kind of teachers need the society. At the end she answered to some questions we had.

 

Today's class was very useful, it gave us the opportunity to listen to someone's real experiences and know more about a field that is interesting for us but yet a bit unknown, so this lecture has expanded our knowledge about it and the way she did it, showing her love for the job, had encouraged us and had made increase our motivation.

Changing education paradigms

In today's class we saw a video by Sir Kevin Robinson; "Changing education paradigms" in which he criticizes how education is projected today and proposes a change of the paradigms that let creativity of every child flow, not die as it is being currently.

"Alienating millions of kids that don't see any purpose on going to school".

Sir Kevin Robinson is an English writer, educator and lecturer. Doctor in education by London university, he is considered an expert in matters with creativity, education quality, innovation and human resources.

Focused mainly in education as a mean to create a divergent thinking, this video has allowed us to reflect about current education. I agree in the fact that education is at the service of the power, creating "robots" to their models to who has been inculcated the ideology of getting a title before their happiness developing their creativity. I also wonder why children are grouped according to the age.   

 

"Education is the key". "Education is about inspiring one's mind not just filling their head". "There is more than one way to be an educated man". This sentences summarizes the content of this other video played also today in class and of today's class, a very inspiring lesson for us, future teachers that want to fight for a change in education.