El Blog

“Congratulations for knowing how to bring out the words from the kids”

Evaluation of a teacher from the second course of Primary school

Workshop for primary schools

With the completion of the 2014-2015 academic course, so the activities programmed for primary, secondary and baccalaureate schools for this course also come to an end, a task that has generated a high level of activity in the museum, and through which we have attended, during the academic year from September to June, more than 19,000 students, as well as foreign students, university groups, and groups from social inclusion. As follows, we include an analysis of how the academic course has gone, step by step:

Users

The collective which has used our services most has been the students from primary education (from between 6 and 12 years old), who represent a total of 62% of our visitors, whereas the groups from secondary, baccalaureate and university education represent 30% del total, between local and foreign students. The groups from social inclusion and accessibility that we have attended represent 8% of the total, some 1,500 people (about 60 groups) that the museum has received in a personalized way to adapt our proposals to their specific needs.

Workshop for groups from social inclusion and accessibility

Activities and workshops

The activities that we offer to those from formal education are mainly the guided tours and workshop visits. This includes, as the name suggests, a visit to the permanent collection of the museum (or to the temporary exhibition if it coincides with the teaching calendar, which has been the case this year with the exhibition “Picasso/Dalí. Dalí/Picasso“), followed by an activity in the classrooms that allows them to reflect, in a plastic and enjoyable way, on the main concepts worked on in the galleries.  Currently the museum proposes three workshop visits for the primary cycle and two for secondary and baccalaureate.

Each year we carry out a revision of the workshops to incorporate changes and modifications, and one of the changes we have included has been in one of the best received workshops by the teachers, the one called “Let’s be artists!”.  We have improved the material of one of the exercises, with the inclusion of the solid tempera of Playcolor Art, that with their plastic features and ranges of colour have helped to enrich the artistic activity proposed.

Workshop with Playcolor Art

Furthermore, during this course we have incorporated a new workshop, called “One work and a thousand stories”, which allows the participants to explore the infinite narratives that can emerge from a work and to propose to the students to create their own ones. The workshop has been very well received by both the students and the teachers, who see the possibilities that it offers in terms of a transversal work at the school.

Methodology

The working methodology that we have used with our visitors, that we have already explained in a previous article, is that of the Visual Thinking Strategies, and we are very satisfied with the results, by following in an in-depth way and taking full advantage of the possibilities offered to us by working from the centres of interest of the students and with suitable information matched to their interests and cognitive level.

Methodology of the workshops and activities implementing Visual Thinking Strategies

Evaluation by the teachers

Every year we ask the teachers who accompanied the groups to fill in an evaluation form on their visit.  These evaluations are very useful when reviewing the program and for making changes.  Of all the comments, it is worth highlighting the fact that they highly rate the dialogue that we generate with the groups, and the way of enriching their interests and creating long-lasting knowledge based on their curiosity and their observations.

There were also some comments in which they proposed improvements. The most habitual ones were the fact, for example, that they requested the possibility of strolling in a free way around the museum after their visit, which unfortunately is impossible due to the large number of visitors that our galleries (of reduced dimensions) receive on a daily basis.  The other more usual request is that of seeing more works in each visit, and we would also like to respond to this request by explaining that the current number of works which are discussed about in the groups (between 4 and 5 according to the proposal) has been designed in such a way so as to foster the learning process of the students, given the fact that were they to look at more works this wouldn’t allow them to remember well the information received.

Workshops for schoolar groups

And once the academic course is finished…

With the completion of the course, in the museum we have started up the new projects for the summer, such as the training course for teachers “Creative processes: let’s learn by creating”, which we offer from July 6^th to 10^th, the activity for summer camps “Do you recognize yourself?” that we also offer during the month of July, or the activities of collaboration with the neighbourhood centres as part of our task of work with our neighbourhood .

We will be meeting up again with the formal education in October, and those who wish to do so can start to make their bookings from September 1st onwards. We very much hope to be able to welcome you then, and in the meantime we would like to wish you a very good summer, and some well-deserved holidays!

Anna Guarro
Head of Educational Services and Activities