Action
Teachers reflect on their own practice, articulate this with colleagues and others, and make changes so that their teaching is constantly adapted to students' needs.
Students' learning benefits from the application of new ideas from training courses, and literature.
Examples
Using the CLILCOM VLE tool (http://clilcom.stadia.fi/), teachers analyse their own practice in CLIL and follow instructions to design their own CLIL professional development action plan.
Three to five teachers read an article about effective group work strategies. They try to implement some of these and meet later to discuss whether students' learning improved.
Reviewing a lesson for one thing that worked well and one thing to improve.
Cooperating for programme consolidation
Action
Teachers contribute to identifying and approaching those who can affect or be affected by the programme.
Teachers contribute to planning ways of working with programme stakeholders to improve students' learning.
Examples
Teachers and school managers brainstorm who are the school's internal and external stakeholders. They analyse:
1. what each stakeholder group wants or expects from CLIL
2. how stakeholders would like to work with the school
3. how stakeholders measure the school's performance and how they think the school is doing
4. what the school needs from stakeholders.
Talking through planned learning and progress with students
Action
Teachers articulate on a daily basis content, language and learning skills outcomes in cooperation with students.
Teachers guide students in analysing achievement of learning outcomes independently, with other students and with teachers, and work to set new outcomes.
Teachers organise formative assessment of content, language and learning skills, aimed at improving learning and learner autonomy.
Teachers prepare students for summative assessment, including in high-stakes situations.
Examples
Prior to the end of a class teachers and students analyse the extent to which they have achieved previously stated learning outcomes.
Students select three pieces of work per month that represent their best effort and analyse progress being made from month to month. They also indentify what they wish to improve over the next month and establish a plan for meeting that/those goal(s).
Making it real
Action
Teachers fuse learning with students' interests and the world beyond the classroom walls.
Teachers help students to apply learning in the here and now.
Teachers create opportunities for meaningful contact and communication with speakers of the CLIL language.
Examples
- travelling to a community of the CLIL language speakers, and organising a scavenger hunt that requires students to interact with community members.
- exchanges, intercultural projects co-funded by LLP (http://eacea.ec.europa eu/llp/index_en.htm), and work placements
- creating students' own personal and work life plans
- role-playing a parliamentary debate about a critical moment in history
Engaging students
Action
Teachers work with students to jointly create constructive, enjoyable, challenging and useful learning environments and experiences.
Teachers actively seek to identify what is relevant for students and fuse this with learning activities.
Teachers direct learning in a manner that constantly activates students' involvement.
Examples
- surveying student interests in writing, possibly organised as a student project
- asking students how something that is being learned could affect their lives
- planning with students how local history could be accessed, for example, by interviewing the elderly, and comparing the results to a textbook account of the same period
- organising pair work that is followed by two sets of pairs presenting their work to one another, and then creating a synthesised product that is shared with the class
Stretching thinking
Action
Teachers support students in identifying their current knowledge, skills and attitudes.
Classroom activities are mostly focused on applying, analysing, evaluating, and using new knowledge and skills to create something new, which, at the same time, links to previous experience (http://www.uwsp.edu/
education/lwilson/curric/
newtaxonomy.htm).
Examples
- a warm-up activity such as roleplaying to recall events from WWI, or a tableau (freeze-frame) exercise to depict the life-cycle of a butterfly
- filling in a chart that requires students to articulate similarities, differences, dangers, benefits, and/or links to their own experience (this instead of just asking them to recall facts)
- breaking out of the one- question-one-answer pattern, by having students explain and analyse their reasoning.
Managing the affective side of learning
Action
Teachers are committed to every student and believe in their capacities.
Teachers together with students create a climate where all students actively participate without the fear of making mistakes.
Teachers help students develop skills to manage emotions and social interaction.
Teachers foster a climate of respect.
Examples
Teachers and students agree on classroom rules and return to these systematically.
Teachers work to develop a can-do mindset in students by reinforcing effort, planning and progress, as opposed to intelligence.
Teachers and students think about a difficulty they are having or an error they are having trouble fixing. These are shared and the class works to help find a solution.
Teachers and students use benchmarks to measure individual and group progress.
Teacher reinforces students for taking intellectual risks.
Managing language
Action
Teachers make input comprehensible by using a wide variety of strategies.
Teachers have a wide range of strategies to help students learn and manipulate higher-order content with limited language knowledge.
Teachers create a rich language learning environment.
Teachers attend to students' growth and improvement in accuracy of language.
Examples
- graphic organisers for content
- graphic organisers for language
- drawing attention to similarities and differences between the L1 and the L2
- providing books, magazines, recordings, access to relevant Internet sites, dictionaries, thesauri, access to speakers of the CLIL language, etc.
- maintaining high expectations ("Yes, that is clear. Still, how would a scientist say the same thing?")
Systematising integration
Action
Content and language teachers meet on a regular basis to plan the integration of content, language and learning skills.
Teachers agree amongst themselves on ways of building learner transversal competencies including learning skills, higher order thinking skills and interculturality.
Teachers contribute to integrating CLIL into existing programming, and their own practice.
Examples
CLIL teachers meet once a week:
a) to plan content integration
b) to plan joint language goals
c) to evaluate progress, and identify and celebrate success.
CLIL and non-CLIL teachers meet to plan a cross-curricular project.
Teachers returning from training sessions share learning and materials with non-CLIL teachers.
Teachers suggest ways of including CLIL in school planning documents, and make proposals to school managers about CLIL programme development.
These 'Core CLIL Activators' represent a synthesis of key elements of good pedagogy and good CLIL practice. They also depict some of the ways CLIL stakeholders work together to build a learning community, and, in particular, rich learning environments for students.
For more information, please click on various parts of the graphic organiser.
