Training courses and exchange of experience in PE

Nowadays, it's obvious that every teacher must renovate his or her knowledge about the subject. I mean not only theoretical facts but also new tendences in methodology, tools of evaluation, and class management.

As far as I'm concerned, I think faithfully that the subject of Physical Education requires innovation and a better teaching quality. Personally the courses about new methodologies like cooperative learning, service learning and others are quite useful, the matter of foreign language and the use of TIC´s must be taken into account too. To the question about why, my answer is quite simply: the improve of these areas will solve some subject´s deficits, and directly will increase the learning quality.

Following this, the sharing of practices between PE teachers would be also a good way to improve the subject. It´s true that every good task, drill or activity may not to work in every educational context, but it can give the teachers great ideas that can be adapted to their classes. Today, internet arises as a perfect area where teachers of all the world can exchange their practices in platforms like Eduland and some blogs. I think it´s the best choice because it´s easy to create, allows to find what you´re looking for, and can gather everybody's experiences just a click away.

PE's perfect curriculum: not so far away

At first, I have to say that the current curriculum of Physical Education is really wide, and luckily offers to teachers a lot of freedom about contents and methodology. Moreover, this freedom it's perfect to carry out a CLIL methodology.

In my opinion, the knowledge about PE is always constantly being updated.  The four current content blocks are physical condition and health, sports and games, nature activities and corporal expression, but nowadays there are a bunch of new sports tendencies, in addition, some scientific questions about the human body in movement are not still answered. I´m agree with this way of curriculum, but I just want to add that the teachers should update the knowledge of these blocks.

However, I'm sure that too many teachers still focus their assessment in non-really useful procedimental contents. Why a student must be able to do 40 abs in a minute? A student must know how the abs works, the correct technique, design a training plan... The curriculum has to provide assessment criteria in order to measure the useful knowledge, not to continue evaluating the student for their physical conditions. It also gives more chances to promote the communication and dialogue in class and, obviously, the linguistic competence.

In conclusion, I think that the current curriculum, in terms of contents, is quite good. Despite this, teachers should reflect on the assessment in procedural contents in order to make this subject more useful.

What should mean CLIL?

In the current course, me and my classmates spend the classes working and discussing about CLIL, these four letters are around all the knowledge and the contents that we are learning . Obviously, the meaning is known for all of us: applying CLIL is to teach one subject in addition to a foreign language, with a methodology that can provides the increase of capacity in order to reach both goals: specific content and linguistic.

In my opinion, CLIL is truly useful as a tool to teach these two topics. This joint leads to a doubtless improve of basic language skills (reading, listening, writing and speaking), and gives a value-added to the subject´s knowledge. Despite this, I think it´s really complicated to get the correct "mixture" between the two things, I mean that if the language level used in class is not adapted to our student's ability, it could lead into the worst situation: don´t improve nor language skills nor the skills of the subject. In addition, thinking deeply on this relation, we must understand that the linguistic job maybe it´s being done in some other subjects, but our subject´s topics will be  teached just in our classes.

Due to this, I think we have to apply a flexible CLIL methodology, always trying to increase the language content, but giving more importance to our subject´s topics. The aim it´s to be effective and useful  in both areas.

Advantages and disadvantages of ELP in secondary school

On the one hand, the informative function of ELP gives us an overview about the language learning and knowledge of our students. In my opinion, that is the first step to know how is our student´s language situation. On the other hand, this information may not be certainly true because is given by the students, and maybe the fear of having a less level in language than their classmates can lead them to lying, specially in teens.

About the pedagogical function of the Portfolio there can be as many advantages as disadvantages. It may lead the students to improve their level in foreign languages, increase their cultural knowledge and establish a self-learning space. However, this work way (self-learning) and its rewards depends on the own students, and sometimes their interest on this can be too low.

As far as I am concerned, the ELP is a useful tool both for teachers and students. Firstly, the master can design their teaching proccess adapted to their student ´s needs, and the second ones can have a reflective vision in language matter. It´s true that have the risk of every implement of autonomy learning proccess: not completely proven information, doubts and specific needs. But I think that it´s important to direct the education towards this self-assessment, particularly in secondary school, and the ELP is a fantastic way to start.

A crew of favourite teachers

I have had a big number of teachers during my educational path from nursery school to college. Because of that it´s really difficult to me to pick just one of this teachers. So, I would like to take advantage of the following lines to thank the different kinds of teachers that I had and by this I hope the reader to could have a vision about what I expect about a "great teacher".

Firtly, some of them turned me into a confident person, they supported me and also taught me to believe in my work, in every task that I did. Other group of teachers showed me the value of the learning process, and they convinced me not to pursue  just the marks but also the useful knowledge. A bunch of innovative teachers opened me up a world of different ways of learning, full of new methodologies and educational tools. Obviously, there was old school´s teachers with some really good theoretical content, and I must say that their experience in the learning world was as useful as the new school´s ones.

Nobody was the perfect teacher after all, but many of them provided me a lot of good things. Now I would like to collect all these things and try to be the best teacher for my future students.