CLIL Seminar in Getxo

Let's start eTwinning!

Last month, a total of 2644 eTwinning projects received the European Quality Label 2016 for their outstanding work and I am very happy to write the names of the teachers and projects from the Basque Country below these lines:

- Amaya Alonso

IES Antonio Trueba

Project: Go look in the mirror

Amaya is one of our CLIL Seminar participants and she has kindly shared their project with us. You can access it from here.

Another three teachers whose projects have been awarded the European Quality Label are the following:

- Idoia Ajuria

Artxandako Trueba Ikastetxea

Project: IC what UC

- Maite Elejalde

CEP Virgen de la Guia

Project: Our eTwin diary

- Izaskun Insausti

Txingudi BHI

Project: My grandmother's stories

I would like to express my heartfelt congratulations to these teachers and encourage all of you to start taking part in eTwinning. How can you start? I will gladfully spend some time in our next seminar session on this challenging project but in the meantime, I am sure that the following video will be highly clarifying:

Therefore, you can start joining the eTwinning Community by registering on https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm. Then, you can catch a glimpse at the eTwinning Europe youtube channel so that you check how eTwinning is perfect for CLIL contexts because it can be carried out in different languages and it can be applied to any content area.

To be continued in January 2017…

Meanwhile, please let me say to all and each of you:

“You are a dreamer, and you are an achiever. May you dream and achieve bigger feats, with every passing year. Merry Christmas and Happy New year 2017.”

International Day for the elimination of violence against women November 25th 2016

Even though decades of mobilizing by civil society and women’s movements have put ending gender-based violence high on national and international agendas, not enough is done to prevent violence as we still witness too many cases of domestic violence, sexual assault and other forms of violence. From these lines I would like to suggest some activities and lesson plans which can help us to arise awareness on the topic in our classrooms.

The first classroom proposal I would like to suggest is based on an empowerment song by Katy Perry called "Roar":

You can find some activities I have developed to work on this song here. The lyrics of the song can be downloaded from this link.

My second proposal is based on the huge impact celebrities have on our students. Therefore, we can choose some celebrities that have taken a stand and support the cause to end violence against women. You can ask them to read this handout in pairs and vote for their favourite. Then, in groups of four they will have to reach an agreement and later report to the rest of the students giving reasons for their choice.

If you like quotations, you can make students read the ones here , which were said by famous people belonging to different fields in life. Ask them to work in pairs and print their favourite one on a sticky note. You can find an easy tutorial that describes how to print onto sticky notes directly from your computer. Students can then leave inspiring quotes either created by them or said by a celebrity they admire around the school.

If you wish to develop a deeper approach on the topic, this lesson plan from Amnesty International is a very good option since it offers a range of activities for use in different curriculum areas for 11-18 year old students.

I hope that our classroom practice on November 25th can contribute to a faster solution to the social scourge of violence against women.

WORLD SCIENCE DAY FOR PEACE AND DEVELOPMENT 2016

UNESCO encourages us to celebrate the World Science Day for Peace and Development. It is annually held on November 10 and its purpose is to renew the international commitment to science for peace and development and to stress the responsible use of science for the benefit of society. The World Science Day for Peace and Development also aims at raising public awareness of the importance of science and to bridge the gap between science and societies.

The WSDPD's objectives are :

To strengthen public awareness on the role of science for peaceful and sustainable societies
To promote national and international solidarity for a shared science between countries
To renew national and international commitment for the use of science for the benefit of societies
To draw attention to the challenges faced by science and raise support for the scientific endeavour

In order to raise your students' awareness on the topic, you can place the official poster on your classroom walls and develop an activity that highlights the important role of Science in society. If you wish, you can use this reading comprehension activity that describes how researchers from Virginia Tech attempted to reforest post-mined soil using biochar. Teacher's notes and answers can be downloaded here. This activity is an example from www.readworks.org, an excellent website to improve students' reading comprehension skills.

I cannot end this post without sharing the UNESCO Science report towards 2030 with you. It provides more country-level information than ever before. The trends and developments in Science, Technology, innovation policy and governance between 2009 and mid-2015 described here provide essential baseline information on the concerns and priorities of countries that should orient the implementation and drive the assessment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the years to come. Therefore, a must-read for Science and Technology teachers.

Happy WSDPD and let us hope that our young students become aware of the essential relation between Science and Peace and Development and fight actively for it.

One! Two! Three! CLIL-to-go!

Next Tuesday I will have the pleasure of meeting a new group of Secondary teachers and develop the first seminar session of eight that willl take place during the year course 2016-2017. It is always an inspiring challenge for me because I will have to cater for what they need for their classroom practice and they belong to different schools, teach a variety of subjects through English and different levels too. Therefore, the beginning of a new CLIL seminar is a type of cooperative game that allows all of us to develop our problem solving skills as a team and is awarded with the best prize for a teacher: increase learner's motivation.

As I have just introduced the concept of games, In this first entry I would like to encourage CLIL teachers to make their students take part in healthy competitions - those that will help them develop important skills they'll use well into adulthood, like taking turns, developing empathy and tenacity.

Let me provide you with three of them for different subjects:

- "We are different, not indifferent" is a contest to fight against bullying and it is organized by the ONCE. All students from Spanish public, private and government-subsidised schools can participate. The contest is open to all groups of non-university students: Special Education, Primary (years 3 to 6), Secondary, Basic Vocational Training, Baccalaureate and Vocational Training (intermediate and higher levels).

- The European journal for Science teachers Science in Schools organizes a writing competition on the strangest species on Earth. (If you are a Science teacher and you do not know about this magazine, please have a look at it because it is really worthwhile: the contents include teaching materials and projects in Science education, up-to-date information on cutting-edge Science, interviews with inspiring scientists and teachers, reviews of books and many other useful resources for Science teachers. Online articles are published in many European languages and you can download them for free)

- For Math teachers, Math counts Foundation organizes a series of competitions but this time you have to pay if you want your students to take part in them. However, the resources section of the website provides you with a huge variety of problems and the video library offers a collection of videos that pose very interesting topics for Maths.

We will develop the topic of healthy competition in length in our seminar session, among other essential topics for our CLIL contexts: classroom language, planning a CLIL lesson, developing the 4 Cs, task types in CLIL, etc.

Therefore, One! Two! Three! CLIL-to-go!

The language of Mathematics in Science

The Association for Science Education (ASE) is the largest subject association in the UK. As the professional body for all those involved in Science education from pre-school to higher education, the ASE provides a national network supported by a dedicated staff team. Members include teachers, technicians and advisers. The Association plays a significant role in promoting excellence in teaching and learning of science in schools and colleges. Working closely with the science professional bodies, industry and business, the ASE provides a UK-wide network bringing together individuals and organisations to share ideas and tackle challenges in science teaching. The ASE is an independent and open forum for debating science education, with unique benefits for members. It provides a unique range of services to promote high quality Science education by developing resources and fostering high quality Continuing Professional Development.

From these lines, I am very pleased to inform you that The Language of Mathematics in Science: A Guide for Teachers of 11-16 Science is now available to download from the ASE website http://www.ase.org.uk/resources/maths-in-science/ . The aim of this guide is to enable teachers, publishers, awarding bodies and others to achieve a common understanding of important terms and techniques related to the use of Mathematics in the Science curriculum for pupils aged 11-16.

This publication provides an overview of relevant ideas in Secondary school Mathematics and where they are used in Science. It aims to clarify terminology, and indicate where there may be problems in student understanding. The publication includes explanations of key ideas and terminology in Mathematics, guidance about good practice in applying mathematical ideas in Science, along with a glossary of terms.

The main part of the guide consists of ten chapters, organised around the "kinds of things we do in Science":

Collecting data
Doing calculations and representing values
Choosing how to represent data
Drawing charts and graphs
Working with proportionality and ratio
Dealing with variability
Looking for relationships: line graphs
Looking for relationships: batches and scatter graphs
Scientific models and mathematical equations
Mathematics in the real world

You can download the publication directly from here.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your active participation in the CLIL seminar in Getxo and to remind you that I will let you know about the new seminar sessions for 2016-2017 next September. Meanwhile, we will go on meeting through the diverse virtual learning spaces we share.

Last but not least, let me wish you a very well-deserved summer break and remember that “ rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” (John Lubbock, The Use Of Life)

Developing thinking skills: what Socrates would say to Bloom

I do not know whether you have read a superb book that was awarded the Espasa Essay prize in 2003: "Lo que Sócrates diría a Woody Allen", by Juan Antonio Rivera. Each of the chapters of this book focuses on a film that arises an ethical issue/dilemma and the reader is offered several possibilities to make him/her take a stand on it.

Why am I writing about this book today? We started our seminar sessions last October and it is time to reflect on the work we have carried out to contribute to develop the so-called "thinking skills" in our students. For instance, have we used the Socratic method and exploited its benefits by questioning our students to help them develop their own understanding? Let me give you an example for a Geography class.

Why are questions so important in teaching?

Research leaves no doubt that instruction which includes posing questions during lessons is more effective in producing achievement gains than instruction carried out without questioning students.

When we think about the nature of our questions, we also need to consider the purpose of those questions, that is, what are we trying to achieve in questioning students at any particular point in our teaching time?

There are a number of purposes in asking questions, among which I would highlight:

to determine the level of knowledge students bring to the lesson to help activate prior learning
to encourage motivation through active, democratic participation in the classroom
to demonstrate that we (teachers) have an interest in students' thoughts
to foster cooperative learning, by helping students learn from one another
to help us (teachers) with classroom management since students get so involved with the task that behaviour issues are reduced significantly

We cannot ignore the huge difference between "skinny" questions and "fat" questions, i.e. LOTS (Lower Order Thinking Skills) and HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills). The following video summarizes Bloom's everlasting theory in a very visual way:

Tomorrow I will deepen on the use of "fat" questions that stimulate critical thinking in our students and I will show you some activity types that are bound to fulfill the same purpose of strengthening thinking skills. For an appetizer, click here to see an example on a Technology lesson on batteries.

eTwining projects which are great examples of CLIL developed by one of our CLIL seminar members

It is a true privilege to share several eTwinning projects in which one of our seminar members, Amaya Alonso Cabria, has taken part and has achieved high standards of performance as you will see when you look into the projects.

"Los misterios del bosque" was chosen among the 12 best projects in Europe and was awarded the European Quality Label in 2015. The aim of the project is to let students know about the legends of different places and countries by following the forests paths. Really original, isn't it? It is indeed impressive when you see that the teachers who take part in it are a Biology teacher from Barakaldo (Amaya Alonso), a Spanish teacher form Ukraine ( Olena Baluba) and a Spanish language and Literature teacher from Melilla ( José Antonio Sánchez)

Amaya is currently taking part in Science Timeline. This project is for 16-17-year-old students and the countries that are taking part in it are Italy and Spain (Basque Country, Antonio Trueba, Barakaldo). The aim of this project is the study of the progress of Science in human History. Students from different countries are working together in order to research the scientific developments from the prehistoric times (discovery of fire, stone axes, etc) to current progresses (new materials, smart cars, artificial intelligence, etc). The pupils are going to create a timeline of Science in different formats (Power point, calaméo, thinglink, etc) in mixed teamworks. Then they are going to show their results in their own schools to spread the project. Besides, they are going to take into account more intensively the advances in Science made by different scientists or researchers from their countries.

Go, look in the mirror is another project developed by Amaya and another colleague from her school, together with other members from Ukraine, Melilla and Tunisia. The project is in English, Spanish and French. It is aimed at 12-16-year-old students and they research about the basic emotions (fear, sadness, hatred, astonishment, disgust, anger) and the secondary ones (embarrassment, love, anxiety…), how they affect teenagers and how they are reflected in our cultures (traditions and different artistic expressions).

Amaya, our heartfelt congrats on having successfully demonstrated that languages are a fantastic vehicle to develop projects related to very diverse areas and cultures while developing students' basic competences such as the interpersonal competence or the ICT competence.

The best eTwinning project in English 2016

Today I would like to write about an eTwinning project that has been awarded a "special category prize": the best project in the area of teaching a curriculum subject through the medium of English. This prize has been awarded to the project entitled " AIMS Alternatives for Innovative Math Study"

AIMS is an eTwinning project involving 7 Secondary schools from Romania, France, Holland, Italy, Poland, Greece and Spain.

I have chosen to write about this project because those of you who attend my CLIL seminar know I am a firm believer in the theory of Multiple Intelligences and the participant teachers in this project use the MI theory to discover and develop each student's particular skills, needs and interests, differentiate and adapt the teaching methods to them.

Besides, AIMS uses cooperative learning methods, which is not so common in Maths classes, fosters autonomous learning and promotes mutual respect, tolerance and understanding for students with different abilities.

Last but not least, students who have taken part in this project create their own learning materials for each type of MI by using motivating ICT tools or modelling real-life situations so that mathematical contents become relevant for them.

Below you can find an example of the use of mind maps, developed by the Greek team:

It is, indeed, an ideal project for our CLIL classes. It focuses on Maths and it aims mainly at making 11-16-year-old students see the connection between Maths and real life but it covers many other subjects: Design and Technology, European Studies, Foreign Languages, History, / ICT, Mathematics / Geometry, Natural Sciences, Physics.

You can access the teaching guide below:

You can download the publication above in pdf format from here.

My heartfelt congratulations to the participants and my deepest gratitude for having shared their activites and outcomes on the Twinspace and on their blog.

CLIL THROUGH VIDEO VIEWING (ii)

In this post, I would like to provide you with some video channels for different content areas.

Fran Gregorio Videos is dedicated to providing teachers and students a powerful new resource to combat student apathy. Here you will find dramatic, visually stunning video "trailers" in the Natural Sciences choreographed to powerful music, designed to motivate and inspire students at the beginning of a lesson to the wonders of Biology, Earth Science, Astronomy or Chemistry.

From mainly visual videos to visual and verbal videos, I would highlight Crash Course channel. Content areas are very diverse: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Psychology, Economics, Philosophy, World History, and many more.

A very useful channel around "eternal" questions is The School of Life. It mainly focuses on philosophical and ethical issues but some videos on figures from Universal Literature are really good too. I have chosen the following one on Leo Tolstoi for you to enjoy:

For specific content areas, look below at the list of channels I highly recommend:

Maths

History

Science

This was the second post on video channels for CLIL classes and I am sure it will not be the last one because video channels are, no doubt, ever-increasing on-line tools that will be very useful in the learning process of any content area in our classrooms.

MARCH 8th 2016: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

The 2016 theme for International Women’s Day is “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality”.

The United Nations observance on 8 March will reflect on how to accelerate the 2030 Agenda, building momentum for the effective implementation of the new Sustainable Development Goals. It will equally focus on new commitments under UN Women’s Step It Up initiative, and other existing commitments on gender equality, women’s empowerment and women’s human rights.

How can we step it up? In my view, there are very simple and effective ways in which we can help our teenagers to build the emotional skills for healthy relationships based on equality, respect and trust. Allow me to contribute by sharing with you a simple lesson plan that you can carry out based on The Hunger Games.

I hope that by incorporating activities that foster classroom discussion on the topic, you will succeed at raising students' awareness of the fact that everyone has a role to play to make gender equality a true reality by 2030.

TEACHING LITERATURE TO ESL STUDENTS

Resultado de imagen de books literature in the classroom

2016 commemorates 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare; this special anniversary year is a truly unique opportunity to work on his work with our sudents. The British Council and the Royal Shakespeare Company have created this pack of resources to help teachers make students see how Shakespeare was a writer who still speaks for all people and nations, addressing big questions and themes about the human experience which have no deadline.

Besides, the British Council has launched a competition on Shakespeare for students of Secondary 4 which is worthwhile trying: students have a maximum of three minutes to act out a monologue on any issue related to Shakespeare. Recordings should be sent between February 1st and March 14th. The prizes are really tempting so I hope you will take the chance.

Apart from encouraging you to commemorate one of the greatest playwrights of all times, I would like to provide you with a series of questions you can use to start talking about Literature with your students. I suggest that you should use these questions to warm students up to the topic of books and literature. Once you know what your students' previous experience about Literature is, you can start introducing poems, short stories and novels or even try a first approach to Shakespeare through a rap on Othello. The following video will demonstrate what I am saying:

If you want your students to follow what they are saying, you can find the lyrics here.

Finally I would like to contribute to your Literature classes by sharing my favourite web resources on Literature for Secondary students. I hope they will be useful for your school contexts.

PLURILITERACIES DEVELOPMENT THROUGH CLIL

The Graz Group from the European Centre for Modern Languages is currently working on the project: "Literacies through Content and Language Integrated Learning: effective learning across subjects and languages".

This project aims to develop CLIL approaches, which teachers can use in the classroom, with a special focus on providing support for academic literacies in Secondary education. Quoting Oliver Meyer, Do Coyle , Ana Halbach , Kevin Schuck and Teresa Ting, the project aims at realizing " the full learning potential of CLIL by focusing on (i) a deeper understanding of the role of subject-specific literacies in enabling and enhancing effective (plurilingual) learning; and (ii) the iteration of a working model which will support new classroom practices and promote the development of learners’ pluriliterate repertoire".

In order to succeed at fulfilling this ambitious goal, the group will develop a guide for transforming CLIL practice, which will be later evaluated, adapted and disseminated by practitioners.

The following video by Teresa Ting will let you know what the Graz group Model on Pluriliteracies through CLIL means:

For a deeper understanding of the model, "A Pluriliteracies Approach to Teaching for Learning" document by OLiver Meyer in cooperation with Ana Halbach and Do Coyle is a must read.

Inside this document, you will find that there are five essential principles that have to be taken into account to foster literacies development:

1. Conceptualising learning progression

2. Focusing on the learner

3. Languaging for understanding

4. Realising cultural embeddeness

5. Rethinking scaffolding for learner development

It goes beyond the scope of this post to enter into details for each of the principles above but we will develop them in next seminar sessions. Right now I would like to say that I firmly believe that implementing any content area through a foreign language makes literacy the centre of the learning process so we should be paying some attention to it in our classroom practice.

For those of you who wish to know how to put the model into practice, a powerful bank of materials is provided by the Graz Group on their CLIL section . You can find ready-to-use classroom units for Chemistry, Geography and History. As the group develops more materials, they will add them to this page.

Finally, it is only fair to thank the Graz Group for the great contribution they are offering to our CLIL practitioners and to wish them all the best in the development and dissemination of their project.

CLIL THROUGH VIDEO VIEWING

Happy New Year to you all, seminar members and blog followers alike. Today I am writing to comment on some great sites where students can learn about a wide range of content from different areas through video viewing.

I will start by letting the new seminar members know about www.neok12.com. I wrote a post about it about four years ago so if you hear about this great site for the first time, you can have a glimpse about it here. To sum up, it is very clearly organized and it covers lots of different topics. It includes some interactive games, diagrams and quizzes but you have to pay to access them whereas the videos are for free.

A very nice site where students meet "the crew" formed by four teenagers who teach in a very entertaining way is studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams. The content areas in this site are Maths and Science. Some of the documents are printable and there are some interactive tests, definitions of key vocabulary items and even some karaoke songs.

If you are looking for well organized content, www.watchknowlearn.org is a good choice. There are categories, subcategories and an age filter.

Johnlocker.com was anonymously created in 2007 with the sole purpose of spreading and promoting knowledge. Johnlocker.com provides the venue for the public to “deposit” videos into its virtual video locker. Most videos on the internet can be automatically copied on Johnlocker by clicking on “Add Video” and pasting the URL. The videos you see on Johnlocker are there because someone thought that the video was good enough to share with others.

If you are interested in searching for a good documentary and you wish to know about the content in an easy way, www.topdocumentaryfilms.com is a very suitable option. If you want to find the documentaries corresponding to a specific area, click on documentary list section and you will access the most recent documentaries in each category. Clicking on the category title you will find the whole list of documentaries. A very positive feature of this site is that it provides you with a description of the content as well as with comments by users.

Finally, I reckon all of you know about video.nationalgeographic.com. The reasons why I am mentioning it are mainly two: on the one hand, I cannot skip this site just because it is known to all of you since it offers really top quality. On the other hand, I would like to encourage you to make use of it in your CLIL contexts because it also includes content which is not necessarily heavy.

Once again, Happy New 2016 and welcome to our first session on January 19th, where we will talk about the topic I have just developed and also about strategies to foster academic writing in CLIL classes.

PARTICLE FEVER: A DOCUMENTARY FILM FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES

Particle fever (2014) is a fascinating documentary film that follows six scientists working to see if the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will produce evidence of the Higgs boson, commonly referred to as the "God particle." Although safe for all ages, the subject matter of Particle Fever makes this movie most appropriate for high school students and older. The science presented is top-notch, with complicated physics explained in language that everyone should be able to understand.

Why am I writing about this documentary in my CLIL blog today? Well, I reckon that this documentary conveys in a superb way the passion of some researchers for Science but also the honest attitudes one can adopt to grasp knowledge of our world. Therefore, I would say that we can make use of this documentary in several subjects: Technology, Maths, Physics, Philosophy or Citizenship. You can follow the official trailer below these lines:

If you like the proposal, let me just help a bit with some study questions. You can find them here.

HUMAN RIGHTS DAY 10 DECEMBER 2015

Human Rights Day is observed every year on 10 December. It commemorates the day on which, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Many years have passed and unfortunately there is still a long way ahead to guarantee the fundamental freedoms and protect the human rights of all. However, it also has to be said that there are many organisms and individuals who are working hard to collaborate to protect human rights. Today I would like to write about one of these individuals. Her name is Benedetta Berti. She is a foreign policy and security researcher, analyst, consultant, author and lecturer. Her work focuses on human security and internal conflicts, as well as on post-conflict stabilization/consolidation (specifically integration of armed groups, democracy/governance and crisis management and prevention).

Today I would like to share one of her video lessons to start analyzing the complexity of this issue with students. In less than five minutes, Benedetta offers an accurate insight into the limits of the current mechanisms that aim at protecting human rights. She also highlights the need to update the existing mechanisms if we want to preserve human rights in the current digital world we live in.

Therefore, I reckon it would be worthwhile spending five minutes on viewing the video above with students and I suggest fostering students' discussion after viewing it. I hope you will find this lesson plan useful.

My second proposal for classroom use is based on "Blowing in the wind" by Bob Dylan. Composed in 1963, its message is very much alive in 2015. The song includes a string of provoking questions to make us aware of the fact that the largest cause of human rights violations is mental disconnection from the reality that affects others: "how many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?"