A real counsellor's meeting

Two sessions ago, Pilar, the counselor of Miguel's school, came to our class to talk about her work within the school. The meeting left me seriously impressed because of the huge effort that it takes to coordinate a big school like that.

First of all, Pilar's point of view of education is quite different with what nowadays is understood. Therefore, she has to manage to find resources and the staff's support in order to put into practice her idea. Although motivating and convincing everybody is not an easy task, her project has been developed and cooperative learning has being introduced successfully until the last years of secondary education.

Gaudem school is quite unusual because some of the students are deaf and because it is not a bilingual school but a trilingual one! Working in a place like that is very challenging and even more when you understand classrooms as a place in which all the students have to stay, learn and participate. According to this, diversity is regarded as a enriching element and children are integrated in the class instead of going out with a "PT" or "AL". In order to manage a class with these characteristics, teachers are organized so as to try to have two teachers in every classroom. As we can see, diversity is managed in a different way. Pilar explained us that deaf children go to the same class and children with other learning necessities are distributed in the rest of the classes. Although all children learn sign language, those who are with deaf students have a better knowledge of it.

I found the meeting really interesting because we could see how real life is and what the main problems of counselors at schools are. After watching some videos of the classes, I think that Pilar has a very rewarding work. In addition, it also make me wonder if government should support with the necessary resources (not only technological ones but also teacher's training) to carry out the same practice in public schools.