By: maría antonia casanova  (Page 5/8)

At the same time, it is necessary to plead for a descriptive evaluation, which expresses the student’s achievements and difficulties it presents with words. This way, the students and their families know with clarity the aspects which stand out and the things that must be done for improvement. An abbreviation or a number does not say anything. Nobody knows, with those signs, what a student knows or does not know. It is necessary to be more explicit to favor the auto-evaluation of the pupils and its formative evaluation (the legal norms of our system do promote evaluation in this sense).

Organization: a key element for curricular development

It is now mandatory to briefly detail the organizational model of the centers. Schools must allow flexible curriculums instead of rigid organizational frames which prevent the practice of many theoretically well-planned curricular projects. As Brighouse and Woods (2001) say, “Adults of the XXI century taught by professionals of the XX century, in classrooms of the XVIII century” (p.121).

The ideal curricular and organizational cycle of education is structured until students are 14-years-old, and gives attention to diversity. There are a number of groups in the cycle, and pupils can be placed in the most suitable one. The student does not have to always be in the same group/class, nor should the set of students work on the same activities at the same time. The practice of these possibilities demands flexible organization of the school: suitable schedules to permit a change of students while maintaining discipline, and the creation of sub-groups of students within cycles to cater to their variations. In Obligatory Secondary Education, which operates at a higher level of difficulty, activities could be established quarterly. Two or more professors could agree to unite the independent hours of one morning, allowing one or two sessions to turn into target activities.

Flexible organization within the classroom is also necessary. Not all of the students have to be doing the same thing at the same time, as mentioned before. There are methods that allow different levels of work within the anticipated programming of different teams of students based on their educative necessities.

Interculturality in the community of madrid

On January 19, 1999, the Agreement for Quality Improvement in the Educative System of the community of Madrid was signed on behalf of the Community Government and 18 other organizations of diverse types and ideologies. The agreement is equipped with 131,000,000,000 pesetas. Among the programs implemented so that improvement becomes a reality id the planned compensation for educative inequalities in education, for which 15,000,000,000 pesetas (90,150,000 €) are reserved for investment for the next five years. Therefore, 18,030,000 € are incorporated to the annual budget in an extraordinary form.

A Regional Plan was unanimously approved in the Assembly of Madrid in November 2000 after group meetings with signatory organizations and others involved in the Plan, remembering to structure the actions of the following five: