Colégio de S. José strongly invests in the internal training of its staff. Apart from the training sessions, which take place in our school, our teachers have been attending other sorts of training, among the big offer we have in Portugal.
Furthermore they also go abroad on job-shadowing experiences and attend structured training courses. The first ones took place in Spain and Poland, in innovative schools (SEK Ciudalcampo and Gimnazjum Przymierza Jana Pawla II) and involved 86% of our teaching staff. In the last five years, the structured courses were also attended by 86% of our teachers, in the United Kingdom, in Canterbury, at Pilgrims Teacher Training. This training has been sponsored by Erasmus+ Program.
Our Pedagogical Model VOAR has arisen great interest both in Portugal and abroad. During the last two school years we were visited by 37 educational institutions and we made 19 presentations of our Pedagogical Model. From these presentations resulted 5 teacher training projects to these schools:
- Academia de Música de Vilar do Paraíso, Porto
- Agrupamento de Escolas de Rio Maior
- Colégio Diocesano de Nossa Senhora da Apresentação, Calvão – Aveiro
- Colégio Pedro Arrupe, Lisbon
- Colégio de Santa Maria, Lisbon
Apart from this short-term training (between 2 days and two weeks), we are developing a long-term training, three years, which aims at enabling all the primary teachers to apply VOAR to their classes. This action is developed together with GoWe and promoted by ADIBER – Association for the integrated Development of Beira Serra and sponsored by the Town Council while financed by the Programme Portugal 2020 (Portugal Social Innovation – Partnerships for the Impact). The training includes sessions for the teachers’ capacitation and mentoring, together with the creation of 5 course books to support their teaching practice.
TRAINING FOREIGN SCHOOLS
Some foreign schools have also visited us, in order to get to know our pedagogical model and asking for training: two Polish schools: Skola Podstawowa nr.112 Przymierza Rodzin im. Jana Pawla II, from Warsaw and Szkoła Podstawowa z Oddziałami Dwujęzycznymi w Tychach in Tychy, together with a group of Brazilian private schools. As for the Polish schools, they have asked us training for two different groups of teachers: Secondary and Middle School, concerning the development of our Pedagogical Model and some methodologies, like as: Project Work, Autonomous Work, Tutoring and students’ shared management of the school.
After the training, the school from Tychy asked us to develop a POWER Project, this school year, sponsored by Erasmus+. It will involve fifteen Polish students, who will be working at our Colégio, for two weeks, developing the multidisciplinary project “Biomes”, together with a group of our students.
Here is the testimony of the Physics and Chemistry teacher, Jan Jonczyk, after his first stay at Colégio de S. José:
We have just finished our project work with the class that we are
planning to take to your school next year. The topic was “Optics and its
influence on discovering the world”. We divided the class into 4 groups
of 6 students and they worked for 4 days (6 hours a day) and they
presented the results on the 5th day.
It turned out to be a real success – they worked hard and they were
really enthusiastic about the whole process. The attendance was
almost 100% which is rather unusual for the last week of the school year.
We also managed to invite for the presentation the teachers from other
schools and they really appreciated the job.
So we’d like to thank you again for inspiring us and for the documents
you sent us. Let’s hope we’ll continue this kind of teaching method next
year as an integral part of our curriculum.
Jan Jończyk and the project team
