Scuola Spinelli
Today we visited a school in the suburbs of Turin called Scuola Spinelli. This is one of three schools in three campuses. There is a kindergarten, a primary school, a middle school and a second level school. This is an international school with children from all corners of the globe and it is very difficult to get a place here. The parents pay €600 a year. The school sits alongside the River Po, the longest river in Italy.
There were five class groupings in the primary school from 1st Class to 5th Class – aged 6 to 11.
There are 23 pupils in each class. There were two 1st classes, and then three of the 2nd class – 5th classes.
There are boys and girls and they don’t wear uniforms.
We sat in the morning in the 2nd class Maths lesson and then the 1st class Coding lesson. The Maths lesson seemed to be at a much slower pace than our lessons at home with a lot of time spent on one area/topic/concept. The children were doing subtraction with simple sums written on the board. They used their fingers to count and then put the answers on a yellow sticky note which they then stuck on their foreheads for the teacher to see. In each class there is the main teacher and then a support teacher who helped a boy with additional needs. There was no whiteboard and a promethean whiteboard.
The school does not use workbooks/textbooks of any kind, they photocopy very little and never laminate resources. They work as a team to prepare the lessons.
The classes are very bare, with very little of the pupils’ work on display. We asked if there was Maths resources or manipulatives to help pupil learn about number etc and they told us that they use natural items from the environment such as leaves, pebbles etc and that this is part of their experimental approach to education.
There was no staff room as such. The teachers work on one level with the class teachers and rarely is there a full staff meeting.
For the purpose of planning, there are three documents that they use which are similar to IEPs.
In the coding class, we saw the children learn to do directions using a grid on the floor and they call this Unplugged Coding. Eventually they move on to use Beebots. The classrooms are bigger with less furniture/learning areas. Outside each group of classrooms there was a big shared learning space and a balcony which they use in the summer weather.
They have some devices which they share as well as lego.
The children have two hours for lunch which extends their day compared to Irish schools. We had lunch with the teachers who sit each day with their pupils in the canteen. The children collect their lunches on trays. We had rice with peas and parmesan cheese, as well as an omelette with tomatoes. There was bread and fruit to choose from. Some children take their own lunches from home.
After eating time, we went outside with the children. Each teacher looks after their own children and they play out in a public park which was unusual as the boundaries and rules were a lot more fluid than ours. The children just played together with no outside equipment. There is a playground next door too.
After lunch we sat in to the 2nd class English class. This was a slow paced lesson again with two teachers, one of whom is a native speaker. The children were doing a worksheet and writing in words under pictures. The actual direct teaching instruction was very different to how we would teach. The teacher explained that in 1st class the pupils learn to write in Capital letters first and then they learn print and then cursive. This seems to be just a school based approach as they explained there are limited guidelines from the Ministry of Education. They also explained that there are no school inspections and no end of year standardised tests apart from at the end of 5th class.
We went to the secondary school after that and met with the Principal who has 1050 pupils. All of the secretaries for the three schools are all based in the second level school which is in a old orphanage. This was a very old building and the principal spoke about the lack of funding for maintenance.
It was a really good experience to visit these schools and you can see the video link of our time there as well our travels around the main landmarks of Turin city here - https://youtu.be/71N-Lo5Vfpk?feature=shared