Week 16: Professional (28/05/2012 - 03/06/2012)

This will be my last blog about my professional experience in Poland. It has been a real eye opener to attend classes and also to teach here. We have now completed the majority of our classes and only have assignments and placement to complete.

G5 school trip

This week in school, I was split between the G4 and G5 classes. Both classes had started new topics. G5 had begun to learn about ‘Businesses and their relationships with customers.’ This is part of the system introduced by IB schools to allow pupils to learn about living in the outside world. This is similar to some of the ideas introduced in the NI curriculum under the ‘thinking skills and personal capabilities’ heading, where it states that, “Thinking skills are tools that help children to go beyond the acquisition of knowledge in order to search for meaning, apply ideas, analyse patterns and relationships, create and design something new and monitor and evaluate their progress. Personal skills and capabilities underpin success in all aspects of life.” (NI Curriculum)

A walk in a forest for G4

The class went on a school trip to a local clothing business and were allowed to ask questions about how to run a company and the things you needed to implement to be successful. The pupils were really interested in the ins and outs of business and several have already shown a keen interest in creating their own companies when they are older! They will get to showcase their skills over the coming weeks as they have to invent their own product and successfully market and sell it to the school.

Central idea

My G4 class have also begun a new topic named ‘A walk in a forest.’ The central idea of this topic is ‘Trees support life, therefore we should protect them.’ The pupils are learning about the different process that happens in forests that help animals, trees and humans alive. There are strong similarities between this and the Interdependence strand of WAU in the NI curriculum. In the NI curriculum, it states that:

Interdependence of people, plants, animals and place.

• the basic needs of animals and plants for survival (S&T); • to be aware of how people used plants and animals in the past for survival (H); • how people’s actions can affect plants, animals and places (G).

(NI Curricululm)

This topic will hopefully give the pupils a greater sense of appreciation for the environment and the importance that the role of nature plays in our living.

The two topics that the classes are working on are completely different, however they are bound together by the IBO guidelines of what they expect of their pupils:

IB learners strive to be:

·  inquirers

·  knowledgeable

·  thinkers

·  communicators

·  principled

·  open-minded

·  caring

·  risk-takers

·  balanced

·  reflective                     (www.IBO.org)

Away from placement, we have been getting some of our grades from our classes, and I’m delighted to say that all our grades so far have been great, even scoring an A in Polish!!!

After receiving our grade from our ‘Developing teachers critical thinking’ class, our teacher invited us to his house for lunch and to talk about the module evaluation over a glass of wine. It was quite a strange experience doing it like this, but I felt that it made a more relaxed atmosphere and allowed both the lecturers and pupils to be more honest about the course.

Lunch at the teachers house

 www.nicurriculum.org.uk

www.IBO.org