SHARING KNOWLEDGE  FOR VOCATIONAL TRAINING TEACHERS

Vocational training education provides numerous challenges in the field of teacher training programs. Our professional competence as teachers will result in skillful students ready to perform their duties successfully. Therefore, some of the tasks which can help teachers improve their teaching methods are:

·         Analyze how procedural knowledge is taught, so it becomes even more challenging for our students.

·         Build a more meaningful learning process reflecting the professional reality that our students will face. We cannot overlook this challenge, especially in the light of the difficult labor market situation.

·         Develop cross-curricular capacities that help show the students’ abilities. These capacities should be developed through the use of new technologies and procedures  related to students’ professional skills, such as assertiveness workshops, creativity workshops, implementation of lean manufacturing, etc.

It should be noted that this vast amount of information cannot be handled by a single teacher, we need to work cooperatively in order to achieve the best results.

Institutions such as CEFIRE in the Valencian Community offer courses which can meet most of our needs; however, we can also request our CEFIRE to design courses that suit the demands of professional modules, which usually involve a high degree of specificity (unless they are cross-curricular courses which are intended for teachers of different modules).

Erasmus+ is also a great opportunity to share knowledge, especially in modules which encourage mobility of professionals across Europe.

Certainly, different resources such as: cooperative learning among teachers from the same field of knowledge, the promotion of discussion topics in social networks or blogs where teachers can share information about their experiences, the establishment of seminars or work groups on CEFIRE platforms where teachers can seek advice, the implementation of projects, or the way new challenges are faced, can serve as examples for a better approach to regional educational reality, to help teachers research different topics and also due to the ease of use of these resources.

MEANINGFUL LEARNING AND CLIL-BASED LEARNING AND TEACHING IN A VOCATIONAL TRAINING HEALTH MODULE

Any Vocational Training health module involves a high degree of hands-on training. For this reason, our core teaching task should aim at acquisition of procedural habits through practical seminars and/or laboratory protocols.

Vocational Training is the area where we, as teachers, need our students learn to learn, i.e., we must promote previous knowledge learning so that the student becomes the central role in their learning process. This process is achieved through assessing previous knowledge, instilling some basic knowledge and providing tools and bibliography so that students can broaden their knowledge. Vocational Training is where the four Delors mainstays are more clearly underpinned,  say, learning to know (through acquisition of basic comprehension tools), learning to do (providing content applicable to Vocational Training reality), learning to be (developing autonomy, judgement and personal responsibility) and learning to coexist (dealing with respectful attitudes, teamwork and critical thinking)

The underlying problem is that in Vocational Training there is a wide heterogeneity in terms of command of English language. Unless our students obtain a relatively high score in an initial placement test to evaluate knowledge of the foreign language, we will only be able to perform reading comprehension activities. However, speaking and listening skills can also be developed through presentation of basic classroom language and the use of cooperative learning between students with a high command of English and those with a lower level.

A large number of the tools we will offer students to increase their knowledge will be websites, blogs and podcasts, some of them in English as they come exclusively from English sources. In this sense, in order for students to be able to understand these sources, our goal will be to display diagrams with specific vocabulary or sets of guidelines to follow a protocol, all of these including the Spanish equivalent of specific terms. At this point, we can show scientific papers which include key vocabulary. Thanks to the tools we have offered, our students will be able to understand scientific papers in the field of health. For the purpose of assessing the quality of our material, student’s reading comprehension and quality of our teaching, we will develop a rubric. This rubric will help us evaluate if our students, with a score of 2 (complete), 1 (partial) and 0 (null):

1.       Have understood the text and the theoretical contents

2.       Have acquired practical skills related to the content of the text

3.       Have become aware of the importance for society of the topic of the paper

4.       Have achieved a specific competence to acquire knowledge included in the text

In point 1 (even in point 2) we will only reflect the reading competence; however, points 3 and 4 will require the development of interactive listening and speaking skills in the form of a discussion. This will be performed either in the foreign language or in the mother tongue of the students according to the circumstances of the group.