The Department of Education of the Generalitat will send a briefcase with pedagogical material to the 200 Catalan centers with the worst performance in mathematics so that students can work on mathematical concepts that they have not well understood, as detected in the basic skills tests. These are tangrams, meters, wheels for measurements and others. The suitcase will include programming and guides for two weekly one-hour sessions.
This manipulative material is part of the Florence program approved today by the Executive Council.
It is a three-year program, voluntary for centers and aimed only at those whose basic skills are below average. It will require that two of the four hours of autonomous management (the hours that centers have to do their own projects or elective proposals) be dedicated to mathematics.
The teachers of the selected centers, 120 primary and 80 ESO, will begin training, within school hours, in October and the program will be applied from January 2025 or in the last quarter of the course.
The department plans to assign a team of 12 primary school teachers and two secondary school teachers. In addition, Educació will create a new figure, the territorial reference, who will be a full-time teacher who will diagnose each center, propose training in mathematics and co-teach in the classroom.
In primary there will be 12, one for each territorial service. It has also been approved to improve reading competence with the creation of a network of 250 centers that work on reading and oral skills. The program is also voluntary and must be voted on by at least 80% of the faculty. In this case, the Language and Social Cohesion (LIC) advisory teachers are already trained and can begin to apply it in October.
The first year will work on fluency, decoding, vocabulary and comprehension strategies. And orality will be addressed, guaranteeing linguistic learning through immersion activities such as repeating verbal structures in Catalan, relying on gestures and other strategies.
Finally, for all educational centers, literary reading guidelines will be provided for the infant, primary, ESO and high school stages.
The Government has also approved extending the collaboration agreement between the Department of Education and the Institut Français to carry out training activities in French for teachers and students.
