Wednesday 3 August 2016

Updating my fellows: telling about "Resilience", "Experiment" and "Perfection"

Dears,

I'm back to my place and it is nice. I'm living again in my cozy home and I've just started trying my new Skills about Education in my job. In few weeks, I felt a mix of happiness and sadness about the Vocational Education in my country. Meanwhile, at the same time, I saw how much I improve myself, as a professional, after that time in Suomi. Then, I'd like to share with you my thoughts about three important concepts that I learned from HAMK Staff.

Let me start with "Resilience".



There are many ways to define this concept. But, today, I like to think about it almost as a synonym for SISU! Since I returned to my job, I had to overcome some obstacles related to people, rules and places. Everytime, I remembered my dear advisor, Irma Kunnari, and her words about resilience. For sure, I was warned about it and I found tools from my VET Training to deal with it.

The second one is "Experiment".



Have you some idea about how hard is to convince someone else of a new way to teach a vocational student in Brazil? Brazilians believe a lot in Traditional Education, Summative Assessment, Contents and Punishment. They can't think a different school, because there are so many rules, they need to apply summative assessment each bimester, they must and must other stuffs. Again, I opened my tools bag from Finland, then we discussed about "less is more", Formative assessment and Feedforward. Finally, I found one to perform an experiment with me. It will be about CLIL (Content and Langage Integrated Learning - http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/what-is-clil/).

The last one is about "Perfection".


Brazilian teachers grown up in a traditional school, where they were punished when they failed. Unfortunately, we don't have positive psychology in our school. We tried it in HAMK Visamaki with Essi Ryymin and it was wonderful! So, the absence of positive psychology in Brazilian schools have created professionals that try to be perfect everytime. However, it is impossible and use to bring lots of frustation. This Brazilian teachers' behavior is an obstacle for try new things, new strategies, new methods, new curricula. Because of that, they are afraid of failures. They do not want to be punished! Again, I took some words from Irma and explained to my co-worker: we don't need to be perfect, but we need to try something new to show the changing process working.

This is it! Kiitos, Suomi! Thank you, Hamk team! You have done a great job.

Antonio
#edu4f