Moral de Calatrava, Ciudad Real
http://ies-penalba.centros.castillalamancha.es/
Our school is located in a rural village of around 5000 inhabitants who basically live on agriculture and building. It’s the only high school in town, with over 300 students aged between 11 and 18, and their families range from midle to lower class. 17 of these students come from a foreign country, although most of them attended primary school in our town too, which means they can easily speak our language. Only 3 of these students have enrrolled directly at our school. The number of teachers this years runs up to 33, and the teaching stages range from 1st secondary course up to the last course before university (Baccaulerat).
Our school has been developing a bilingual programmesince 2008, offering the teaching of some of our subjects in English by highly qualified teachers. These CLIL subjectsare Maths, Art, ICT, History & Geography, and P.E.
French is also offered as a second language and Italian lessons will be implemented as an extracurricular workshop.
Hence, it can be stated that our school is highly concerned with the teaching and learning of languages. Besides, we have developed a programme whereby our school will become an official Cambridge examination center which means that our students will be given the opportunity to take such official exams and get the official B1 and B2 certificates.
Most members of the teaching staff are quite interested in moving from traditional teaching to a more cooperative learning through projects, thatis why a group of teachers have arranged to have some training so that we can start to implement it in our lessons
The marks and scores which our students have obtained since long ago have always been a bit over the average of the students from other schools in our county/region, but in the last two years we have noticed a slight decline in these marks and, above all, a lack of effort and commitment from our students. This has resulted in a decrease in the number of students who used to enroll at our bilingual programme, who now tend to link this programme to difficulty.
All these facts have made us focus our attention on extending our teachers qualifications and exploring new teaching methodologies, both in the subjects included the bilingual programme and those which are not, so that we can increase the number of bilingual students and improve the overall performance.
Granting us the opportunity to join this great project will definitely promote our students motivation toward their own academic life and it will help them get to understand the importance of both a good education and worthy learning of languages.