Analyzing not only the LOMCE, but also how we work!

Hello bloggers! I'm Alba García and this week I'm the group's analyst. As you know from previous weeks, the analyst is in charge of analysing how we have worked as a group and also as individuals, and also what we have learned.

The task we have had to do this week has been about the Basics of the Spanish Educational System. We have analysed the LOMCE, which is the new Spanish educational law. As it has been recently introduced, we only knew some aspects of this law, which actually were very few. As future teachers, this activity has helped us to know how the situation will be (if the law stays the same) when we arrive to the classrooms, what we will have to face and deal with. It is true that educational laws don't stay the same for long, but even if they change some aspects of it are likely to stay the same (as it has already happened between the LOE and the LOMCE, for instance), so it is never a bad idea to know about them beforehand.

It is vital to know about the law, about what will be demanded and expected from us, and what we will have to do with our students for them to achieve their best in the current educational system. This also happens in any other job. This way, any employee will have to know the business' rules and what will be expected from him or her so that person can perform his or her best in the role they are performing at work. We can't just act freely. In order to succeed, we have to stick to the rules  and try to don't go beyond them or otherwise we will have to face the consequences of not doing what we were supposed to do.

Thanks to this activity we have also realized that we don't have to read the hundreds of pages a law contains, but we can instead look for official websites which offer an understandable and complete summary of the law we want to know about. Besides, this can also be done with thousands of other topics. This way we won't have to spend too much time reading a document which we hardly understand because of the complex vocabulary. 

The best part of this activity was, without a doubt, getting to know how things at schools are nowadays, as they are very different from when we were at school (which wasn't long ago). Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the initiative to read a document about the new educational law and know a bit about it. On the other hand, the worse part of the activity was having to read so many documents, especially for topic 1! But, luckily, as we are six members in the group we divided the documents between us so it wasn't as tiring.

As a group we almost always tend to agree on what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. However, sometimes we discuss a bit because one of us thinks that doing a different thing is better, but I suppose that happens in every group and it will also happen when we become teachers at a school. This week's activity hasn't been a problem with that aspect, as we all knew how the programme we were going to use (Cmap Tools) worked and we all had a common idea of how we could do the conceptual map for each topic. 

Furthermore, dividing the big group in two smaller groups of three members each was a great idea as we could work on both topics at the same time and profit better the time. But not all that glitters is gold. As one of the topics was longer that the other, one of the groups had to read and analyse more information than the other group, but overall we all worked hard on the topics we had to do.

 Because of that, although we tend to work well together, something we could improve on is looking well at the documents and what the task is about before dividing the work among us, as at first sight it may seem longer or shorter than what it really is. This way, we will make sure that the work will be divided equally between us.

To finish with I would like to stress the idea that for doing our best we have to know what is expected from us and how we are expected to do it not only in the professional aspects, but also academically. And remember, you can always improve what you do. The sky is the limit!