My Involvement in the Classroom

At Collegio Reial Monestir de Santa Isabel in Barcelona, I work with 4 different secondary teachers to lead 22 class sessions with 14 different classes during a regular week. The numbers make the schedule sound quite busy, but, in reality, I am only in front of students for 22(-ish) hours of a given week. I have a few other responsibilities outside of the classroom like department meetings, and I try to use my non-teaching hours in the school to better my instruction, but it's fair to say that my work-related responsibilities in Spain have been considerably less time-consuming than my student teaching responsibilities in the States, which is nice because it has allowed me to enjoy the city while still getting to work with many different teachers and students.

My responsibilities are the same in most of my classes. My job is to help students prepare for the Cambridge English exams, which are used to assess someone's proficiency in speaking English. I administer practice speaking assessments (in groups of two or three) during the majority of the classes in which I work, and I provide feedback to the students on both an individual and class-wide basis.

I started giving these practice exams during my first day in the school, which was funny because it was the first day that I heard about them. Being a native English speaker who lived in the States, I knew absolutely nothing about the Cambridge English exams before arriving in Barcelona. This wasn't a problem for me, though; I always want to help students in any way that I could, and their higher education/work opportunities (on a global scale because most of these students know 3-4 languages) depends in part on their success on the Cambridge English exams. I used my extra time in the school to learn everything I could about the assessments by talking to other English teachers at the school, reading official documents from Cambridge, and watching example assessments online. Although I have only been here for two weeks, I feel pretty well acquainted with the assessments at this point, particularly the speaking portions of the assessments that I have administered many times.

I have also developed a nice rapport with the teachers with whom I work (and even some teachers with whom I share no classes). I have even spent time outside of the school with many of them. At the end of my second week at the school, some of the teachers started asking me to give lessons/mini-lessons, and I have enjoyed the opportunity to be back in the driver's seat of a classroom even if only for a little bit. We've been out of school for the past two days because of International Worker's Day (more on that in the next post), but I expect to have even more opportunities to be involved in the classroom in the next week.