About me

My name María Gómez Benito and from the 1st September 2020 on I will be working as a CLIL Biology and Geology teacher at IES La Laboral (La Rioja). Before, I have experienced many personal and profesional experiences that all together have brought me there.

After highschool, I studied Biochemistry at the University of Zaragoza and got a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the same University. During my PhD, I had the opportunity to do an stage at the Cancer Center in Salamanca and, later on, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in both The Center for Applied Medical Reseach in Pamplona and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI-AvL) in Amsterdam. Being a scientist changed the way I think and take challenges. It made of me a more critical and resolutive person. All in all, it has had a definitive effect on the kind of teacher I am nowadays.

Although my professional career began at scientific research, in my mind I always had a dream: to become a teacher. At the begining, becoming a Univertity teacher seemed reasonable, but after not being very lucky with the outcomes of my postdoctoral projects, I made my mind to become a Highschool and Secondary Education teacher. For this reason, in 2010, while still leaving in Amsterdam, I took the Spanish state exams and I got a civil servant position as a Biology and Geology teacher in La Rioja.

During my training year at IES Sagasta in Logroño (La Rioja), I got in contact with CLIL methodology, taking courses in Spain and England. I have to admit that at that moment my knowledge of methodologies was still quite poor, and I had the tendency to reproduce in my lessons what my teachers used to do at my time as a student. But CLIL changed my mind for ever. It showed me how to combine different methodologies in the classroom, while at the same time integrate content and language. Because of how CLIL open my mind, I became determined to become a CLIL teacher, and I got it, just the following year.

At IES Valle del Cidacos in Calahorra (La Rioja), I worked as a CLIL Biology and Geology teacher for a total of six years. It was a great opportunity to take part in may other projects too, pointing out between them the coordination of a Comenius School Association "Mens sana in corpore sano" and the organization of School exchanges with United Kingdom and Germany.  At the same time, I continued learning about CLIL and other methodologies such as ABP, Flipped Classroom and TPACK. I also got different prizes and acknowledgments, mainly due to the creation of different educational resources.

During the last 3 year I have been working as a Teacher Advisor at the Center for Innovation and Teacher Training of La Rioja. It has been a great opportunity which has allowed me to learn about different methodologies and educational projects, to visit many schools from my region and from other different autonomous communities and, also, to do a professional Teaching stage at an Irish School in 2018.