ESO

In this age strip, boys and girls are in the middle of adolescence and therefore are immersed in a process of important changes, not only in the physical field, but also in the emotional and intellectual field. 
Secondary School is a stage of growth, the school, along with the families, helps and accompanies students in order for them to become adult responsible people, with firm beliefs. We educate them in the values of effort, civility, solidarity and respect towards the world.
Once this stage is finished, they have to be competent and have the skills and capacities to continue their formation, either by taking the baccalaureate, formative cicles or entering the labour market.

• Common subjects, taken by all students.

 

• Optional subjects: from 1st to 3rd of ESO:

1st ESO: French or Learning strategies 1
2nd ESO: French or Learning strategies 2
3rd ESO: French or Entrepeneurship/Classical culture 

• Optional specific subjects: 4th ESO:

Itinerary 1: Physics and chemistry or latin
Itinerary 2: Technology, Biology, Geology, Plastics
Itinerary 3: French, Music, Computer Science

• Work of synthesis: 1st, 2nd and 3rd of ESO

• MORNING:      From 8am to 1:30 pm - Recess: 11am/11:30am

 

• NOON:   Surveilled study from 2:30pm to 3pm

 

• AFTERNOON:   From 3pm to 5pm - Wednesdays afternoon students finish school at 1:30pm - Afternoon without lessons

Achievement of the basic competences:

Competence means being capable of using the knowledge and skills that a person has in daily life contexts and situations.
Being competent implies understanding situations, thinking about what is happening and deciding what the best course of action is. The term competence includes knowledge (theoretical knowledge), skills (practical knowledge) as well as attitudes (personal commitment). It goes beyond the knowledge and the know-hows, it also includes knowing how to be.
For the mandatory education we can identify 8 basic competences:

• Communicative, linguistic and audiovisual competence: It is the base of all the learning and it allows the understanding and expression of reality.
• Artistic and cultural competence: It facilitates the expression and communication as it entails knowing, participating and assessing both their own and other people’s artistic and cultural manifestations.
• Treatment of information and digital competence: It goes from the access to information to its transmission using information and communication technologies (TIC).
• Mathematical competence: It helps decrypt the codes and messages offered by the environment  and the resolution of situations based on research through reasoning.
• Learning to learn competence: The key for the achievement of a good learning is in the study techniques, resources and procedures to procure efficiently a good learning.
• Autonomy and personal initiative competence: It concers the acquisicion and application of a group of values and attitudes (responsibility, perseverance, knowledge of oneself, self-esteem…) and forces having social skills, establishing relationships and working in team.
• Knowledge and interaction with the physical world competence: Learning from the experience parting from theoretical knowledge.
• Social and citizenship competence: Learning to cohabit socially and respecting social, natural and environmental settings.

Insisting on basic aspects for good school performance is necessary, such as:

• Punctuallity in arriving to school.
•  Good coexistence and respect habits for all the established rules. 
• Good work habits:

1. Good work climate inside the classroom: paying attention, being participative. Having a good attitude in class can modify the grade of the subject. 
2. Adequate time management: finishing and turning in the work papers and homework in the dates fixed by the teachers.
3. Work consistency: mantaining daily study and work sessions both at home and at class. 

The teaching faculty bets on the balance between an innovating work methodology, without leaving aside all good issues that can be extracted from the more conventional methodologies. 
Gradually, these methodological changes are introduced into the classroom which are translated into changes in dynamics such as:

• Digital boards in the classrooms.
• Introduction of tablets to the classrooms.
• Introduction of the mobile phone to the classroom as a work tool, nowadays already accepted according to the current regulations
• Use of apps for mobile devices enhance a dynamic and creative learning on both the student and teacher's side.
• Platforms such as: Bones notes, Moodle, Intranet, make it easier to share materials and information research.
• Team work, to encourage learning by competences.
• Work by projects, to encourage learning in a transversal and autonomous fashion, this way knowledge and the different experiences remain connected.  
• Splitting into flexible groups for Mathematics or English class has a very positive incidence in order for groups of students to work at their learning pace.

• Technology: Taught in english. It requires a good control of the language. Alternatively there's another group that can follow the subject in catalan.
• Physical Education: Taught in english.
• Work of synthesis: It is taught inside the center with native english teachers. 
• Second foreign language:

We teach the french language from 5th grade of Primary School to 4th grade of ESO.

This is why DOPP assists to evaluation meetings and participates in the decisions that the school faculty makes regarding these students. Nonetheless, it also assists to parents meetings and maintains work sessions and passes on information with external professionals.
This forces us to pay special attention to the treatment of diversity in the wide sense of the term regarding the following facts:

• Linguistic normalization: Newcome students from different cultural and linguistic environments that will need to learn, as fast as possible, the two co-offical languages: Catalan and Spanish.

 

• Students with educational needs: Diagnostics of dyslexia and/or ADD-ADHD, and others are treated with support inside the ordinary classroom through individual plans or supports in the slightest cases. These more or less important alterations of the curriculum provide us the necessary tools to be able to help these boys and girls achieve the contents in a more individualized way.

 

• Students with emotional needs: With these students the task of tutoring and DOPP (Department of psychopedagogical orientation) is very important. Boys and girls that suffer from family conflicts or health, economical issues, require an attention and individual follow up through which they can feel listened to and understood. They need a proximity not only from tutoring and DOPP, but also from the teaching faculty in general. 

 

• Students with good academic performance: These students only require time and tutoring to accompany them on timely occasions of absence due to sportive or artistic reasons. In very concrete cases of high academic levels, we adequate the curriculum to the possibilities of the student with curricular amplifications.  

•  Individual tutoring: All grade tutors, aside from group tutoring, have several hours set aside in order to carry out an individualized tutoring with students that need it.

 

• Individual tutoring with DOPP: DOPP provides a support to the tutor from the psychopedagogical point of view in order to manage the cases where emotional aspects, low self-esteem and insecurities have to be treated from a psychological perspective, on occasion requiring the help of external professionals as well. Here, the tutor and the educational psychologist have to work in coordination in order to establish acting guidelines for the teaching faculty and the family or institution

 

• Academic and/or professional orientation: This tutoring guides and assesses the student when it's time to choose a modality, as well as when it comes to choosing future academic options. In this sense, in the 4th grade of ESO students take the BEI battery test that informs of the skills and capacities of the students and will be very useful when it comes to choosing between different offers: Baccalaureate in its different modalities or middle degree Formative Cicles.