Teachers Baldoni and Casella were involved in the job shadowing’s experience at the IES Serpis school in Valencia. IES Serpis is a very welcoming and inclusive school. Everything is very tidy and quiet. Teachers have many hours available to dedicate to different activities. There are also many spaces where teachers can work in groups. Teachers never work alone, but always in teams of 4/5. There are not strict rules about the dress code. The spaces are new and inclusive. The younger pupils coexist without problems with the older ones. The students appear very motivated. The notions are reduced in favor of preparation
for the university admission exam. The books are provided on free loan. The school is located in an area of medium social level, not particularly affected by migration phenomena.
There is a gypsy component. The difficult integration for these pupils often results in them dropping out of school. The job shadowing’s experience gave us the opportunity to have different perspectives and facilitated the reflection on the possibility of setting up lessons with new methodologies, on the need to reduce the load of knowledge and, above all, on the need to implement non-teaching hours for the support and the organization. A further remark: the need for more dedicated spaces to carry out the teaching function. We believe that job shadowing activities should be aimed at an ever-increasing number of teachers.
Learning and sharing the teaching methodologies and ideas tested at the IES Serpis school was one of our aims during the Job shadowing experience. The project that struck us most concerns what we could define as «inclusive reading» activity: the project called «Formes de Llegir» (attached photos) was born from the collaboration between the parents’ association, represented by the librarian, as well as parent, and a group of teachers . This project promotes reading through a series of texts made up of passages in Castilian, Valencian, English and French. All illustrated by drawings chosen through a competition held within
the school itself. Everyday, the reading is carried out at a given time of the day and depending on teaching needs it can also become an integral part of the lesson. In conclusio, job shadowing experiences help to focus teaching activities, to consider own work as questionable and improvable, but above all to adapt it and reconsider it in a different space-time dimension, in a European dimension. We believe that this activity becomes more effective if carried out over a greater number of days in order to be able to relate and delve deeper into reality and practice new methodologies in agreement and harmony with the teachers.
The ideal would be to build long-term projects with teachers of your own discipline.
Paola Baldoni and Carmela Casella