Please click in the link: http://www.care2.com/send/pickup/412/817/400/139/972/194/

Enjoying the course. Students are really working hard preparing their chants and activities for practising intonation. Tomorrow´s lesson is on Integrating Pronunciation in everyday classroom activities. Yay!!!

 

 

Critical thinking and problem solving

 

This was the second session of the workshop

 

Widening Our Real Learning Design has become a real passion in education, since most linguists have found that Learning English through content makes our students broaden their minds and develop skills which will be beneficial for later life.

 After defining CLIL as a dual focused approach to teaching which aims to introduce pupils to content areas such as Science, Technology or Social Studies using a foreign language as the medium to teach all or part of the subject, it is clear that we cannot separate CLIL from life skills such as Critical thinking and Problem solving.

Critical thinking definitions:

·         Critical thinking is thinking that analyzes thought, that assesses thought, and that transforms thought for the better.

·         A way of thinking that enables a thinker to think regularly at a higher level (than most people are capable of thinking

·         Thinking skills used for determining the accuracy, or authenticity of something and the ability to look for reasons and alternatives

Teaching critical thinking skills is an important goal of the modern educational system.  Teachers are no longer content to have students simply memorise facts, figures, and dates, they expect  students to  analyse situations and  ponder it with all available data.     

Questions are important catalysts in the critical thinking process because they encourage students to reflect on the knowledge they have acquired and to apply this to new situations, as it is one of the features of CLIL. Students are asked to understand, analyse, synthesize and evaluate content to reach the outcomes

A critical thinking approach helps students to ensure understanding and to express their ideas I their own words. They also get used to analysing what they have learned and to “think” about “thinking”.

 Problem solving:

Finding the solution to a problem after analysing, finding the best way of action, trying it out and evaluating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLIL workshop 1

From February 20th to 27th, I ran a series of three workshops for Macmillan and the Language Centre of Universidad de Piura. The first session was about basic definitions of CLIL and CLIL Geography. This is a summary of the most important CLIL definitions.

CLIL(Content Language Integrated Learning): Teaching subjects as Science, History and Geography to students through a foreign language. This can be by the English teacher using cross-curricular content or the subject/content teacher using English as the language of instruction.

 Conceptualisation of CLIL: There is a shift from language learning to language using by which all teachers are teachers of language.

 

 

Students need the language to communicate with the teacher and one another so as to access or apply content. If the tasks are cognitively demanding, this would require students to call upon the knowledge they already have which includes concepts, skills and strategies.

By doing so, students strengthen the connections between language and the previous knowledge increasing learning and retention, a form of acquiring knowledge in a friendly way for the brain.

Language can be defined as:

Language of learning: the language needed for learners to access basic concepts and skills relating to the topic.

Language for learning: the language all learners need in order to operate in a foreign language environment.
Language through learning: learning cannot take place without active involvement of language and thinking.

Scaffolding: the process of helping learners move “into the new by using a little of the old”.

 

 

 

Projects: bring together content and language. The finished product can be displayed in class, included in a portfolio and often include collaborative tasks. Projects tend to consolidate information from different parts of the curriculum in a natural way and provide variety for both students and teachers. They also integrate the four skills while, at the same time, promote learner autonomy and cooperation.

Summing up:

CLIL  has a dual focus: introducing students to content areas such as science, music, art, maths or geography using a foreign language to teach all or part of the subject curriculum.

CLIL learners need language to assist their thinking and they need to develop their higher-order thinking skills to assist their language learning.

 

Summer Course for Top Language Teachers of English - 2014

From January 20th to 31st we ran a 200-hour summer course for teachers of public schools and small private schools. The material we used for the workshop was based on the textbooks public schools use here in Peru.

 

The subjects we offered were: Making the most of the English textbook, Pronunciation, Developing Communicative Competence, Classroom Management and Language for Teachers. The most welcome were Pronunciation, Classroom Management and Language for Teachers.

It was a blended-learning course so at this stage we have finished receiving the participants´tasks but are still uploading some of their work in the different course blogs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good things are a product of collaborative work so we would like to thank Colegio de Profesores del Peru, Región Lima Metropolitana, Instituto Nacional Pedagógico de Monterrico, ELTeCS Peru and ELTeCS LatinAmerica (a very warm hello to my dear Renate for her continuous support). We must also express our gratitude to Mr. Guillermo Rivas from SM and Marita  for their support and offer. We are really pleased to know we have such good friends we can rely on.

 

I am not going to say  how successful the course was since that opinion belongs to the participants  and also because I believe that the outcome of this kind of events is seen in the medium or long term when participants  try out ideas and improve their teaching practice. Perhaps the fact that the participants treated us, tutors, to a pizza and sodas may indicate how satisfied they were with the course? Anyway, we are following-up this group of teachers and offering more opportunities for increasing their possibilities of development.

 

It is  almost a month since the course ended and we received participants´contributions until a couple of weeks ago, we would like to share with you some of their contributions shown in the blogs we created for each course. Needless to say that we have tried to include the use of IT in the course, we used blogs and some mobile apps that were accesible to almost all of the participants. The initiative was very-well received.

 

The main blog is Summer Course for Top English Teachers (http://summerenglishcourse2014.blogspot.com/)    and from here you can link to each of the other course blogs. I  cannot tell you how proud we are of the hard-work and the effort participants displayed in their blog tasks trying to deal with time constraints but working collaboratively to fulfill all of them.  This has certainly been a very interesting learning event for all of us and we are looking forward to repeating and increasing the experience with new groups and levels.

 

This course is for

If you made some  New Year Resolutions, you may find it interesting to know the statistics about this tradition in America.   This non-scientific information may also serve as a  light ice-breaker for any of the summer courses that have been organized for our professional development.

 

As for me, I will stick to my personal motto inspired in Mahatma Gandhi and that from time to time I use as my personal signature : “Live as if you were to die tomorrow, Learn as if you were to live forever”.

 

“Long life and Prosperity”