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
Nice and genuine words, Antonio. At this time, I am very pleased to had the opportunity to be in HAMK and to have lived all of these remarkable professional experiences. I can say that I am a more relaxed teacher in terms of the search for perfection (which unconscious obsession I've abandoned). Very good analysis!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Alexandre! And congrats for the "Giramundo" program!
DeleteI am so touched to read these words about how you have developed as a professional and as a change agent, I think. Resilience is needed in everywhere and it is based on positive approach. Adversities are not problems, but opportunities to grow. Adversities are the essence of life. Hope you can enjoy the challenges, too perfect world is boring ;-)
ReplyDeleteHi, Irma! This week, we showed for everyone our students in a Competence Demonstration (You can check it on Facebook). I mean "we", because we are working in a team teacher (three teachers). Other skeptical teachers finally got our approach. And, after that, I believe the changing process will be stronger next year than today. WR
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