INTRODUCTION

WHAT´S COUNSELLING?? 

We started checking our previous knowledge: translating"Orientación educativa y acción tutorial" first individually and later defining the concept by teams according to our previous knowledge and experiences.

At first we could think "what can I say?" but then we realize that guidance and counselling is something that everybody had experienced at schools in one or another way...and collecting these experiences we were able to form a reasonable definition in order to gain a general concept of the subject.

I´ve found two poems which reflect the labour made through guidance and counselling

Counselling, The Poem

" When i asked you to listen to me and you start

Giving me advice, you have
Not done what i asked.

When i ask you to listen to me and you begin
To tell me why I shouldn't feel that way, you are
Trampling on my feelings.

 When i ask you to listen to me and you fell you have
To do something to solve my problems,
You have failed me, strange as that may seem.

LISTEN! All I asked was that you listen,
Not talk, or do- just hear me."

Poem to a counsellor! 

Thank you for being there, 
I thought that you wouldn't really want to care.

But you do and my thinking was wrong, 
You decided to stay with me after I had bombarded you for so long.

If it wasn't for you, wouldn't I have made it this far, 
Before you reached out my life was blacker than tar.

Now my life has become clear, 
With you to turn to I no longer have to cry a tear.

I can see that the colour has came back to my face, 
I no longer look at myself as being a disgrace.

I can now go out and have fun with a friend, 
And know that this fun doesn't have to end.

I hardly even get a craving, 
I'm now in control of the way i'm behaving.

But at night I do find it hard and frustrating, 
But and the end of the day it is progress i'm making.

I now belive in myself, 
The Becky we once knew is high on the shelf.

All I have to do is take it day by day, 
All this progress is down to you because you decided to stay! ! ! 

Becky Ginn

Moreover, these are the videos that we used in our web page in order to say what is counselling about:


Why its labour is such as important?







How do they work?

Counselling must be seen as something normal!

* Some of the songs such as "time after time" or "I´ll be there for you" that can be played in the ipod placed on the margin, also remind the labour of the counsellors.

From a web quest to a web page

A webquest to go into the topic

Working in groups you we had to research through the resources that you can get in the Webquest in order to get a clearer idea of the concept "guidance abd counselling". 

What is a web quest?

- WebQuests are inquiry-oriented activities designed to make the most of the student's time. 

- With the teacher as facilitator-

The information used in WebQuests is drawn from the Internet.
Students are provided with online resources and are asked to use this information constructively to solve the presented problem rather than just cutting and pasting material into an assignment or project.
   

Teachers have already done the work of choosing good resources. 

By eliminating the need to search or hunt for information the student is given more time to analyse, criticise and assess the information they find.
 

It allow us not only search for information but to debate, discuss or defend a particular stance with classmates. 

Therefore, I could see how people with the same resources can do such a different work. I didn´t know this tecqnique of using a webquest that save the students the work searching good resources.

It is a first approach to the School Guidance Counselling concept. The objectives to be achieved are:

1. Understand the concept of school guidance counselling.

2. Know the main functions of the school guidance counselling services and the areas in which they are developed.

3. Identify the people who receive school guidance counselling services.

4. Know what  the main responsibilities and roles of the school guidance counsellor are.

Once the information was gathered we had to prepare a digital product (presentation, blog, video, webpage...) to be presented in the room class to your professor and the rest of the group.

The following are the criteria for assessing the work which will have to be presented to the class group:

- Precision and accuracy in describing the concepts worked.

- Technical quality of the digital product developed.

- Communication skills demonstrated during the presentation.

- Self-evaluation.

- Evaluation of the presentations by the other groups.




We chose doing a web page (which know it is not a web b page because it expired)

https://www.dropbox.com/home/COUNSELING/COUNSELING%20PRACTiCE




THEIR GUIDANCE SERVICES

THE MAIN OBJECTIVE

How was the experience of this work?

We had never done a web page, but we considered that this could be the best way of presenting our work.

In doing a web page we found the advantage of how comfortable is being able to work from your computer whenever you want. The changes on the web page will be save, and it is not like if you have a "word" and we have to send ir each other in order to have the progress of the work.
The only difficulty that I can mention is that we lost it because we didnñt pay for mantaining it. We should have looked for another web page to transfer it, but at least we copy the main of our work in a "word".

Related to the web quest, I,ve never heard about this technique but I really, really liked it. It save the students the work searching good resources, and at the same time, as I have already mentioned, it allow us to see how people with the same resources can do such a different work. 

I think that it was a good way of getting clear the main concepts of the subject, while we developed our ITCs knowledge and we get used to working in teams.

GUIDANCE PLAN

GUIDANCE PLAN




The final group work consisted in making a a guidance plan. In this guidance plan, we had to expose our main objectives and the way we have planned to achieve them.  It should reflect our target groups, so we focused on: familiar, academic, psychosocial and multiculturalism problems. 


Moreover, we developed a program related with  the multiculturalism problem. What we wanted to do was to create a class that could be both effective and productive for children who knew the mother language and for people who did not know it. This kind of situations are sometimes avoid, but with teachers training and effort it would not be seen as a problem.




OUR EXPOSITION

This is a description of our exposition that we were going to give to the teacher (but I don´t know if we finally gave it to him):

Lansdowne Bilingual Public School is placed in the South of Cardiff. It teaches in English and Greek. We are the components of the Counselling Department. Our aim is to develop a session in which we will explain our guidance plan. In it we propose objectives and activities for different target groups but our specific work is focused on the immigrant students who come to a bilingual school without knowledge of any of those languages and want to have the opportunity of learning them.

At the beginning of the session, we are going to start with a video to introduce the topic. Then, in order to get our audience attention, Athina starts talking in Greek. With it we want our listeners feel what the immigrant students would feel in this situation. Our audience will be totally confused because they will not understand anything. At this point they will be able to put themselves on the shoes of immigrant students.

After it, we will start presenting our Guidance Plan supported with a Prezzi presentation. We want to give the most important points in order to make the audience have a clear idea of what are the next activities going to be about. We will give a dossier to the audience in which the most theoretical information will be collected. That way, it will be also easier to follow the session; it will be more dynamic and interesting at the same time that they will have all the concepts of our Guidance Plan.

Our session will finished with some activities in which we will expose the importance of visual and gestural communication in the case of immigrant integration in a bilingual school and more generally in every context to achieve every student to understand the lesson. Our objective is to mix this kind of communication with activities which can be adapted to the students that know the mother language of the school and to those who do not know it.

This activity has been thought for first primary grade students. It is about reading a book in Greek supporting with gestures and images of the most important words. To assess if they have learnt it,  we have made a domino game in which they have to join the Greek concepts with the English ones. . For immigrant students there is an image next to the English word due to the fact that they do not even know English.

Finally, to close our session we are going to teach and sing a Greek song about the parts of the body, which is also an example of teaching with gestures.


Materials used


This is the guidance plan that we developed
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hedo4o8fc0beh0n/P%C3%A1gia%20web.doc
This is the prezi that we used as the base of our presentation 
http://prezi.com/qgx2e87zpevn/copy-of-school-guidance-plan/?auth_key=eb0ceea0eeeeb6444896a294aa596cbe4b23abc8
This is the dossier was a support for the audience during the presentation. As we were not going to list in the exposition all the objectives and activities of our guidance plan. We decided to include in this dossier the most theoretical parts to give them the information at the same time that we make the exposition more dynamic. It also included the lyrics of the song that we teach them at the end.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqnhoananei6mp0/DOSSIER%20GUIDANCE%20PLAN.pptx

This is the video that we were going to play at the beginning (but it didn´t work) in order to introduce the topic. In it appear immigrants talking about the "problems" or curious aspects of the educational system that they have to cope with. The idea was to play it until.... after a woman mentioned this "trilinguism" that could be also a problem for parents. We considered that at it was precisely the "problem" that we want to solve with our specific program this video could have been a good way to introduce and link with our exposition.

This are the greek activities that we developed at the end of the class (the story told, the domino, and the lyrics of the song).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ecwh1zjud46cfiq/greek%20activities.docx

Finally, this the video of the song that we also used during the presentation in order to teach it.

 

   

Why I´m very happy with this work!


First of all because it is OUR guidance plan, we have really worked on it. It is not a "copy-paste", it´s the result of mixing the aspects that we found interesting from many different resources. I think that the idea of doing an specific program directed to favour this "trilinguism" was a good idea. Actually, we were experimenting something similar with Athina (the greek Erasmus student) and it was what inspired us to do it.


I have learnt that it has as or even more important the way we communicate our work than the contents. We tried to break the traditional way of exposing in order to capture the attention of the audience.


I consider that we fully exploited the resources that we have at our disposal. We took advantage   of the fact that Athina speaks greek, as a tool to capture the attention of the audience. Moreover, as we didn´t want to bore the audience with decided to give a dossier, because we wanted a dynamic class but also consider that we could avoid the contents. As well as we used the other materials to support our presentation.


Criticisms


I think that despite the video that didn´t worked and the fact that we were stressed because of the time, the exposition ended well.
Related to the contents I think that we get to "connect" everything that we said during the exposition but if I had to do a criticism I would say that I don´t know if our guidance plan is completed, I mean, as the teacher was making as questions we realized that maybe we had focused too much on the objectives and activities with the children, forgetting aspects such as the teachers´ training.

Group of experts

BECOMING EXPERTS




This was a collaborative activity whose aim is to focus in the Spanish context what the students have learned in general about School Guidance and Counselling.

These are the files that we were given in order to become experts in the Spanish education:

Guidance and Counselling in a Lifelong Learning Approach

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Guidance_and_Counselling_in_a_Lifelong_Learning_Approach

Guidance and Counselling in Higher Education

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Guidance_and_Counselling_in_Higher_Education

Education Staff Responsible for Guidance in Early Childhood and School Education

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Education_Staff_Responsible_for_Guidance_in_Early_Childhood_and_School_Education

Support Measures for Learners in Adult Education and Training

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Support_Measures_for_Learners_in_Adult_Education_and_Training

Description of the activity: These are the instructions that we had ro follow in order to develop the activity "group of experts".

1. The group of the class is divided in the ordinary groups: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

2. In each group it’s going to be an Expert of one specific topic related to Guidance

and Counseling

3. The topics are:

1. Spain: Guidance and Counselling in Early Childhood

2. Spain: Guidance and Counselling in Higher Education

3. Spain: Guidance and Counselling in a Lifelong Learning Approach

4. Spain: Support Measures for Learners in Adult Education and Training

4. Each of the experts will receive a document titled as the topics above. Actually the documents are what they need to read to become an “expert”. But not individually, they have to read them with the other experts of the other groups.

Therefore, all experts number 1 will work together, all number 2 together and so on. Besides learning and understanding the document, they will have to decide

the best way of explaining their topic to the members of their group. (45 minutes)

5. Once the experts go back to their groups, they will have to explain their topic as it’s been agreed. During the the explanations the participants can take notes, ask

questions, etc., in order to get as much information as possible. (45 minutes)

6. By the end of the process,  the teacher will ask about any topic which everyone

should be able to answer. (30 minutes)

An extra exam

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eck3cvqpgbdts69/EXAM.jpg

The experience was not good at first. We did not have the time we wished to prepare it. In part because one of the members of our group was not in class. Therefore, I think that we were not able to face an exam, and we were worried about the mark.

Nevertheless, I think that the exam became useful when we were asked to mark our own exam. Because it was then when we had time to review our errors and look again through the information given in order to find the right.


Related to this, my correction was not good enough. The teacher told me that what I should had done to rewrite again all the answers that there wrong, and actually, I had thought that we just had to write down some notes of each question (and just rewriting those absolutely wrong) in order to show what was wrong, at the same time that we justify the marks. 

Personal opinion

Through this activity we were able to place the theory that we have learnt in a real context "the Spanish education". I like this activity, because sometimes as we are studying a bilingual degree, the samples that we learn are from other countries and this oe has allow as to know the situation in our country.

Furthermore, it make us realized that the education is not only reduced to Early school, the one that we are studying in our degree, but there are other other periods in life and in which situations guidance and counseling is given.

For the activity, he class was divided in groups, and each one was assigned a specific field and asked to join with the other members of the other groups that were assigned the same field as you in order to understand what was about. Finally, once the topic was clear, each member of each group had to join again his or her first group in order to explain the others what you  have learnt , and the others also had to explain to you their respective fields.

 However, I think that I learnt a lot about my own topic, but I could not learn as much as I would have liked to about the others’ topics.  From my point of view, the idea of working in groups in order to understand our topics was but I think it would have been more beneficial for each one of us if the task had been centered in groups working together about all the fields in which guidance and counseling is developed. Nevertheless, as I mentioned, the individual tests and the work done when marking it provided me an overall of all the topics.

As a transversal competence, I consider that it make evrybody participate, and it make us become responsible of our part, as we were goint to have to explain it to the rest of the members of the group.

GOING DEEPER!

I also want to mention that I found really useful and interesting the web were we could find this resources (eurydice). In   you can find information not anly about the spanish educational system, but also from other european countries. I found this two articles are specially interesting, related to the labour of counselling an also with actual polemics about the educational system (such as how can we provide an education of quality in this time of lack of resources...).

Quality Assurance in Early Childhood and School Education

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Quality_Assurance_in_Early_Childhood_and_School_Education

 Early Childhood and School Education Funding

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Adult_Education_and_Training_Funding

Moreover, this is the index  of the web page "eurydice" just you to know all the topics that you can find there related to the educational system.

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Index

Class proposal

OUR PROPOSAL FOR A CLASS


Attention to diversity´ is the principle which should rule the whole Education. The LOE stablishes the implementation of all the necessary means to ensure that all the students reach their highest capacities and skills. Student's needs range from those with a more ordinary nature to others with extraordinary nature.


Paying attention to this principle, this activity allow us to know the extraordinary situations that the education system has to face.

Each group was assigned one of the following topics with each link where we could find information about them:

Special Education Needs provision within Mainstream Education
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Special_Education_Needs_Provision_within_Mainstream_Education

Separate Special Education Needs provision in Early Childhood and School Education

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Separate_Special_Education_Needs_Provision_in_Early_Childhood_and_School_Education

 Support Measures for learners in Early Childhood and School Education

https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice/index.php/Spain:Support_Measures_for_Learners_in_Early_Childhood_and_School_Education

Moreover, we were also given a power point, which contained different teaching strategies:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rrfeicjqze77thl/proposal%20Anexo_3_Estruct_Cooper_Simples.ppt

With this resources, we were asked to made up a class proposal that we would have to put later in practice with our own class.

The topic that we were assigned was the last one " Support Measures for learners in Early Childhood and School Education".

We decided to start introducing them to the topic through this power point:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ldle9m4gz3nqq2l/TARGET%20GROUPS%20presentacion.pptx

Moreover, I´m going to summarise the way we develop later the class, our aims, materials used, and main factor of the activity.

CLASS PROPOSSAL (GROUP 5).


Objectives:
1. To learn the contents about Support Measures for Learners in Early Childhood and School Education.
2. To be able to put in practice the contents explained.
3. Cooperative learning by working in groups.
4. To develop the critical capacity to evaluate what other groups have done.


Materials:
1. 3 murals, one for each target group: hospitalized children, children from rural areas and itinerant students.
2. Post-its of three colors.
3. Power point.


Procedure:
Our collaborative activity is based on the “El album de cromos” activity but we have done some changes in order to make it more participative and creative.
We will show a power point in order to give the needed ideas and the information to the class. Before starting presenting it we will advice the class that they have to pay attention because they will have to work on this information without consulting it again.
 At this moment, we will spare the class in three groups and distribute a mural to each group. We will also distribute post-its. Each group will be assigned a specific color of post-its. 
Each member of the group will have to write in a post-it a proposal for putting into practice and for adapting to their target group the measures explained in the power point presentation. The members of the group will have to talk for not repeating the information and help each other. Once it is finished they will stick post-its on the mural and rotate it to another group.
Now what the groups have to do is to correct and complete the information that the previous groups have stuck. They must put their contributions in the other part of the mural.
 The rotation of murals is done one more time and finally each team will have the card that they had at the beginning with posits of the others teams. This way all groups will be able to add things to each mural and to get more complete information.
 If there is time left, each group will expose the mural to the rest of the class.


Assessment:
During the activity we will be watching how they are working in order to help them if needed.
Also, at the end of the presentation, we could make some questions to see if for example the target group “students of rural areas” have information also about “hospitalized students” and to check if they have learned.
Furthermore each student will have to sign their own posit. This will help us to do an individual evaluation of it (this fact could motivate them to do the work properly).
In order to assess the work group is the reason why we have given a different colored posit to each group. Apart from the post-its, the final exposition will also help us to assess their work.




Final conclusion

With this assignment we did not only improve our knowledge about the topic, but also our creativity and work group, when thinking about an original way to make more interesting the activity for our classmates.

I have learnt that when you are giving classes it is more you have to take into account many factors: 

- We have learnt to manage our time, and I personally think that this is a difficult part because as we have seen, the classes can work out different from what you expect.

- I have learnt that you can´t forget teaching the theoretical part neither the practical one. Because if the students don´t know anything about the topic, they are not going to be able to deal with the practical part. That´s why at the beginning we used a power point presentation in order to make clear the main aspects for everyone. On the other hand I think that with the practical part is how people really learn. 

-I realized that, as teachers, when developing a classs we can´t forget the assessment, but that it is an important part. We cannot only pay attention to the final results of the activity, but to the work of each member of a group during all the process, in order to find dificulties, people who have more facilities while working or expressing with the group and people who have more dificulties or just do not want to participate.

*This is the power point that we use at the beginning in order to teach them the main ideas of our topic and inspire for their work in the post-its.
-The most important thing that I ´ve learnt is that it is possible to break with the traditional way of teaching. To develop activities which can motivate our students: creative and different from the ones they are used to.




I think that all the groups had really good ideas for their class proposal:
They make me realize that the competitive activities are the ones that engage more the students. A proof is that the day after the activity where we had to stick together (an remain like this or we would have to read a definition...) everybody´s arms were so stiff nd some of us even had bruises.


I also really like the activity where were divided as groups and we were asked to act as if we represented different target groups (hospitalized children, children from rural areas, inmigrant students...) which requested a grant. I think that staying in the feet of our target groups and supporting why we considered that we deserved the grant/facility offered or not, was a really effective activity.


Finally, just mention that I consider that giving a kind of dossier or extra information related to the topic, is useful to make clear the main aspects of the topic. This an example of the information that they provided me in one activity:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8gk76633bi9khk5/extra%20info0002.jpg

GAUDEM SCHOOL

SPEACH ABOUT GAUDEM SCHOOL
by Pilar Alonso

This is the power point that she used to show us how the school works:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xztwqv5cb1hr1yd/Charla%20DOI_GAUDEM._MAYO_12.ppt

I really like the unusual teaching carry out in this school so I want to include it in the blog.

I think that Gaudem school is an example of how things can more difficult than the ones we are got used to, but it doesn´t mean that this is not possible.

Nowadays, the educational system tends to separate those who have special needs, in other schools or more commonly in the classes called "aulas de enlace". t

We usually think that this technique is "necessary", but maybe is in fact a way of escaping from any difficutly that can bother the teaching process.

On the other hand, schools could take the risk of adapting their teaching. And that is what I liked about the Gaudem school, as Pilar Alonso said:

"Hay que ver la educación no como que el niño necesita X, sino que es la clase la que necesita eliminar unas barrera"

What the school has to do is to adapt their classes to the problems of these children to achieve a class in which all students, and not only a few of them can succeed. In Gaudem school, they adapt the classes and they don´t see differences as problems, actually, they see them as something that can be taken as possitive for school and for everyone's experience. Actually, she told us how the parents tend to prefer their children to be in the class with deaf people.

Collaborative organization

She told us that the first thing to do is choosing a model of counselling. In this case they have a collaborative organization.

Teachers counsellors and families are asked to work in a collaborative way in order to deal with the different needs.

Athe same time, they have to promote a cooperative work among students, It really impressed me how the children were used to for example (as we saw in the video) exposing their work with leaf-mute children, so while one was exposing the work throughgestures, the other one was telling it in loud voice, or the other way round.

This was an example of how they are developing a bilingual project with deaf people, mixing in the same class deaf and hearing people. Moreover, in order to make the lessons understandable for everyone, there are two teachers, one communicates in oral language for hearing people and the other communicates in signes language, but not only for deaf students, but also for hearing students in order to introduce them in this world and to teach them this integration that is so important. I think that they can directly learen values as equality, to not discriminate people and the belief in the right of having the same opportunities.

GOING DEEPER!

Pilar Aloso also emphasized the imporatnce of techer´s role:

"El colegio busca profesionales reflexivos, ETE : con Ética, Técnica y Empatía."

Because this kind of professionals will be able to be responsible and take decisions. The teacher should promote the cooperative work and the constructivist learning. 


She denounces that the fault is usually in the lack of teacher´s training.
Related to this topic I have found this, about what the government offers in order to cope with that, and to check the quality of the education provided:

Institute for Teacher Training and Educational Research and Innovation

http://www.educacion.gob.es/ifiie

 Institute for Evaluation.

http://www.institutodeevaluacion.mec.es/


Moreover, I leave you here some videos just in case you want to start learning the sign language: