Important announcements

Reminder

Please remember that a session of our February Professional Development Workshops will be devoted to your best practices. As you start to wrap up the year, please think of possible material you'd like to share with your colleagues then. If you have any idea you'd like to discuss with me, please go ahead and do so. This session will be shared with the primary school teachers, some of whom will also present.

Evaluation

This last year term, we agreed that the Global Studies final will be comprehensive (integrative) and will cover the contents for the last term only. In the December finals, Language will be comprehensive, and Global will be divided by the terms, i.e. students will take a final on the contents of the term they failed during the year. In February, both subjects will be comprehensive.

Entrance Exam

Please, make sure you select six (6) sample texts from your literary texts and your thematic units. These packets should be submitted to me by Monday November 23.

Let me as well remind you that when you administer the oral exam, you should ask the prospective student to give you their packet of texs. There will be five (5) texts in it. You should choose ONE of them. Along with this one you should give them ANOTHER one that they will not have seen. I'll pass this one to you - the 'unknown' text will one from the packet you submit to me. I'll run the copies and give it to you before the exam. Should you have any doubts about this, please let me know and I'll be happy to explain it further. Anyway, we are likely to have one more meeting for the annual department evaluation, so we can discuss this further then.

Minutes Meeting October 29

Members present: Carolina, Paula, Pimpa, Grace, Elvi, Norita, Adela, Silvia, Sofía
Absent: Alina, Cecilia, Janine

Agenda
Updates: EGB 3, FCE, IB
On-going projects: Hairspray; SSR program
Curriculum: Language, Global Studies, Lit

The meeting started at 12:50.
Updates
7th Grade / 1st Year Secondary School
The group in general seems to have gotten a bit worse than at the beginning. They are not as attentive and responsive as they were when the year started. Paula and Pimpa agreed that the number of students per class -higher than last year- has had an impact on the level of achievement for the whole group. One of the three groups is noticeably weaker than the other two.

8th Grade / 2nd Year Secondary School
In general, all groups are doing well. They have gotten considerably better at reading. They had a good transition into reading unabridged texts. The fact that they are small groups has allowed teachers to help each student better. In general, they seem more organized than at the beginning of the year.

9th Grade
The three groups are quite different: one being really good, the other one average and one of them is pretty weak. Kids in the latter group do not seem capable of abiding by class rules and constantly break them. There are five or six cases of boys showing serious discipline and attitudinal problems.

1st Polimodal
The attitude and all groups in general have a positive attitude. They have been working diligently in preparation for FCE. The main problem seems to be their grammatical skills, esp. reflected in their achievement in the Use of English paper.

2nd Polimodal
Students in the FCE groups are not so good. The students well-prepared to succeed at FCE are vastly outnumbered by the apathetic cases who lack motivation to improve their level.
Students in the A2 group have been doing really well. They are a hard-working group, several members of which may become well prepared to eventually take the A2 Higher level exam.

3rd Polimodal
In general, the group as a whole has become a serious case of "Senior Syndrome", i.e. showing lack of motivation, little energy to improve their skills. Due to this attitudinal problem, teachers report not being able to cover as much material as in other years.

On-going Projects
Hairspray: 2nd Polimodal teachers have had their audition session and have spotted some good actors for the main roles. There seems to be better singers than last year and hopefully we'll be able to have all of the voices we need. The team now needs to decide what kind of work they will do for the remainder of the year. We know that in March we are likely to start systematic rehearsals with actors and dancers. Hopefully, Julio will have worked on the complete sound track by then.
SSR program: Carlos informed that he was making a presentation on the SSR program to the Parents Association on Monday Nov 2. (It went really well. This is a nice group parents, actively involved in their children's education. They said that they would provide a budget for an annual purchase of books for the Secondary and Primary sections. They truly value our efforts to implement this program. I did present the problems we have encountered this year, which did not allow some of the groups to enjoy the benefits of this kind of reading, however I also stressed our determination to make it work better next year. The authorities and school owners are truly committed to improving facilities so that we can make better use of time and space for reading purposes.)

Curriculum
Carlos informed that out of the team meetings he had in August and September, there is an apparent need to seek a better balance between Global Studies thematic units and Literature.
The proposal to use grammar practice embedded in the Global and Lit units had a lukewarm reception. There was a misunderstanding regarding this. We would not need to develop full materials apart from what is already prepared in each unit. Rather we would need to spot recurrent grammatical structures and use them to allow for further practice, which can be obtained from workbooks such as Nelson's and Vince's. We shall keep discussing this after summer break.

The meeting was adjourned at 2pm.