Task 4: 5 challenges when implementing my teaching unit
In my school, as I said before they do the CLIL lessons in arts and crafts. They do it once a week and the session lasts one hour and a half. At the beginning they changed the Arts and Crafts sessions from Monday to Tuesday for me to be able to attend them but the result of this change was not beneficial for some student and they decided to change it again and put the class on Monday as it was initially established. That is a problem because for many reasons at the end I have only seen one CLIL lesson and with that I do not think I have acquire completely how they develop their methodology inside the classroom.
Another problem related with time and sessions is that they do just one lesson per week, yes, it is true that their lessons last for one hour and a half but as it is Arts and Crafts this time is reduced as many times they have to make sure the class ends up completely tidy. Also, they come from the lunch time and that is also a problem because this group comes basically very excited and nervous from this period of time outside the school or the class and sometimes is quite difficult to get them to sit down, be quiet and listen to the teacher.
The number of sessions that I have to plan is 6 or 8 but I don’t think they can spend 6 or 8 weeks working on carnival, in my opinion, it is too much time to work on this topic.
My group has 25 students, someone can think that in Arts and Crafts there are not many problems regarding the different levels, needs and rhythms but in my opinion Arts and Crafts is just the same as any other subject. In Arts and Crafts, kids have different levels, different visions and different understandings. The language makes it more difficult for students to understand the meaning of the explanations and the purposes of each task and activity.
The English level, as I mentioned briefly, is quite low. They have been learning English since they were in P3. The level of understanding the explanations is not high at all, they need extra explanations to understand most of the concepts, but if those explanations are given by the teacher in English some kids complain they are unable to understand what the teacher is saying. That is why, the CLIL lesson quickly becomes a regular lesson, the teacher always tries to explain and speak in English but she rarely receives answers from the students.
Most of the times, translation is almost compulsory to ensure comprehension.
One of the things that worries me is the assessment. I have always wonder what a teacher assess during an Arts and Crafts project. The final product? The dedication and motivation? Everything? Why does a student get more points for the final product than another? What makes an art piece better than another? This is something I wonder about since the teachers told me I was going to be doing Arts and crafts. In my opinion, I need to plan everything very carefully in order to give a fair assessment.
All of this is difficult, the topic, the carnival is not much easier. They decide the carnival's theme on the 24th of November and I have to plan a whole DS on this topic without having it… not easy… Will I be able to do so? I really hope so!
In a school there are always many challenges but as Dory said...
