THE JOURNALIST

“The Spanish Educational System and its recent changes”.  How has T8T work developed?

By Ana Mª Sánchez Clares.

This week #SOyER1314 has started a new term in their course, and the tasks are becoming harsher… Yes, it is never pleasant to analyse a law. The vocabulary, the structure and bureaucracy factors around it make the study really rough for students. 

On Monday, March 24, the T8T team was given the task of analyzing two issues from a given list of six topics:
    Topic 2. Primary school role, general aims and objectives, education policies and legislative references. 
    Topic 5. Administration of non-university institutions; running on three aspects: Pedagogical, organisational and resources management.

These 8 teachers-in-training read the general information on Monday afternoon and, on Tuesday, the team was split into two groups and an innocent hand was asked to extract a paper… And the adventure started! “What a horrible task!”, “Oh gosh, what do we have to do then?” Yes, those were some of the more popular comments between T8T, but it was time to get down to work… And so did they.

The topics were being analyzed while they were searching for a useful tool for creating a proper concept map; not an easy job, none of them seemed to be appropriate!

On Thursday, well, maybe that day could be omitted from the work table… Some kind of a very important event kept the team busy for almost the whole day.

So let´s past to Friday morning, when one of the small groups met at 8:30 in “La Merced” campus…

and the other one at 10:30 in “Espinardo”…(Maybe was it due to that Thursday vital event? No… just a medical appointment).

 

The team members had their part almost ready and it was time to put it all together and deepen into the  LOE-LOMCE differences by helping each other to analyse them. Well, maybe that was not the most successful part of the job… It all seemed to be so similar… Maybe the lack of time and the unattractiveness of such a task played against. 

The “8:30 group” finished their work sooner and when they shared the task, the other group realized that some particles were missed on the maps to be proper “conceptual maps”. Therefore, each one rearranged their work, and both groups tried to make their best. Finally, after exploring and commenting lots of options, they decided to introduce the data in the tool “Inspiration 9” (thanks Ana Ruíz for volunteering to introduce data for "10:30-group").

Last but not least, the group members came on Monday 31 to share their works and they found out that they had to evaluate others topics different from their own ones, what caused them frustration. Half group was “supervising” Education Rush Hour...

...and the other one “supervised” C´mon Tutankamon. (Let´s say for “helping them to be impartial when evaluating their own work in comparison with the others’). 

It was an unexpected job and any of them were too happy with the role they had to play. T8T did enjoyed analyzing the different ways of representing information, but they just think that knowledge improve so much when it is known properly what is being analyzed… Well, don´t worry too much T8T and the rest of the members that were in the same situation! You all have the synthesis of the maps in a forum. Enjoy yourself!

The next step on this journey through School Organization is making questions on the synthesized maps, but this is another story…

Acknowledgements:

After an overview to the #SOyER1314 posts of this weekly task, T8T had congratulated “Education Rush Hour” for innovating the format when presenting their post. Refreshing, guys. Well done. Readers, have a look to it!

 

Personal opinion on the general task:

From the point of view of this journalist this task has had some kind of political bias from the very beginning, what have made her feel upset and have some rejection to it. In the first place, we could compare the LOE and the LOMCE from the BOE, but it was specially recommended to us a document that belongs to CCOO, well, maybe because of the fact that it has an index and it contains not only the LOMCE modifications but the whole text, it´s worth having a look to it, but, what are we learning? Letting others (from a very specific ideology) filter the information we should look up in the original sources? Well, sometimes I don´t know what to think. I have to recognise that I need guide, some kind of light to go through the law, it is harsh, and I´m not prepared enough to understand the real scope of some changes. In spite of that, I do know the results from LOGSE and LOE...  So, which is the purpose of this task? To know what have changed... or  what has got “worse”? Maybe it´s just me, that I´m fed up of this kind of boring play between PP-PSOE in which they are working on the same wrong pattern... What about if we look to others countries like Finland? Have a look to what Oscar Ray (2013) explains in his blog unadocenade... in this sense.

Maybe the reform we need is much deeper than we think, and we need each other for doing so. Do you have an opinion on it? Let me know, thank you.

Ana Mª Sánchez, T8T journalist.