NETWORKING PROJECT ADVANCES

Having an informal conversation sometimes is more fruitful than answering a questionary or being involved in a restrictive meeting or a  work briefing. After listening a wise advice from my teacher Irmeli I decided to take the way of the interview to contact the different participants of the network, today I am going to talk about the interviews with teachers. They were the first to be contacted, and many surprises arose; the first one was the good will that every one of the instructors showed, even the ones that I could expect as reluctant to participate, that was very motivating and gave me the opportunity to listen to the different points of view of the instructors. The interview was done individually with each of the instructors in their own classrooms. During the conversation with them I asked about the perception that they have about the program and the feelings about their students, I tried to send provoking questions as a trigger for the further conversations, in special questions about how successful the students are, or the reasons why they sometimes fail in their companies, then it appear the second surprise, there is a sensation that the majority of apprentices from SENA are successful in the areas of knowledge, but they have difficulties in their personal lives that cause them problems in their workplaces, the three pillars of learning in SENA are “the knowledge”, “to know how to do” and “to know how to be” and it seems that the behavior is the weakest point in this chain.

The last surprise came after the interview with Josefina, the math instructor, we were discussing about ways of improving the contents of the program when Fabio, the technical instructor (who I had interviewed before) came in to participate in the discussion, and  in that conversation we agreed to work together in an activity that would involve programming, math, and English at the same time, and we made a compromise of sharing the information and preparing the activity to be implemented in January when the students were working on “Delphi”  in software programming, and when they were starting “set theory” in math.