Clil4U Final Project Meeting, Cyprus May-June 2016

30th May 2016 - Monday

The meeting started with the introduction by Kent Andersen. He greeted all participants and started going through the agenda. He mentioned the final report and everything that needs to be done by the end of the 5-day meeting.

Following there was a ‘Welcome’ speech by LouizaPapaloizou (European Office Intercollege). She explained what her position at the college is and what her involvement is concerning the project. Then she moved on with the logistics especially those relating to the Aldiana Hotel scheduled for Wednesday.

The teams along with Kent moved on to the Agenda who particularly emphasized the deadline for the financial report which is the 8th July 2016.

The question which followed was ‘What have we done since our last meeting in Madrid?”.

ETI has managed to have the CLIL4u course approved for 40 hours CPD (Continuous Professional Development). This constitutes a valid qualification for EFL teachers, and that is the reason that ETI aims to offer the course to teachers employed in Malta, even in the future. ETI’s main course has reached 45 different countries through clil4u. The total number of dissemination to teachers was 1443 by the end of May. More will follow in June, reaching a total of 1499 TeachersIn total over the project.

ETI also ran a Blended learning Course for initially 25 participants. Later some dropped out due to other commitments, but more than half continued. ETIand Sandra designed a platform called the CLIL4u Blended Learning Platform in order to see how people are actually participating, and to moderate their online classroom. It is an excellent link of communication between the trainer and the trainees. Amongst several other things, such as creating a profile, participants could upload their assignments there as well, therefore everybody could also peer review each other’s work. They could discuss and put in their comments after every module, and fill in a guided reflection form when they had actually delivered their lesson and got feedback, to share with other participants.

KGS has disseminated the project to the teachers of their school. They had cooperation with a teacher-college in Odensewhere they had lessons in English and German languages. Within their school they had the new headmaster and some new teachers introduced to the project. The Odense Schools Intranet was used to have teachers attend the two face to face courses. The new headmaster of the school was very much interested in the project and thrilled with the idea of using clil for the next year.

INTERCOLLEGE has disseminated clil4u in conferences to teachers. October was the best month for us in terms of dissemination as there were a lot of conferences. We tried to approach the teachers of the technical schools but we ended having a third face to face course due to the small number of participants in the second course. The problem faced was the lack of feedback, despite the fact that participants appeared to be enthusiastic about the course.

SUPSI had a total of 5 CLIL courses and 121 participants, including Italian and Swiss primary school teachers, Italian and Swiss secondary school language and content teachers, SUPSI language and content teachers, . The model used was an initial face-to-face session using materials developed ad hoc, followed by six weeks of individual on-line work completed on the SUPSI Moodle platform. For one course we also conducted a second face-to-face meeting, which was very much appreciated. . The following three courses were organized as a result of some intense marketing activity, an article in the Language Centre newsletter Lingue Net ( , and a contact provided by Albalisa. . The question constantly coming was if the participants were going to have any ECTS. . One of the points is that, since in Switzerland English is not necessarily the second language taught most, course material was needed in other languages e.g. Italian and German so it was helpful that at least the course book was also in Italian. The online participant satisfaction survey gave some positive results. For the future, SUPSI now also has a couple of promising new contacts that are interested in exploring CLIL implementation: the Catholic University in Milan, and the SUPSI Teacher Training College.

CECEorganised two online courses, 27 initially but then some dropped. In the 2nd course there were 7 persons. Many of them worked together and katia (Zola School) will give feedback on their final paper. Teachers most of them came from primary schools. Those who finished have already received their certificates. If CECE acquires a good budget the course could also be accredited by the Ministry of education. Katia has put the scenarios in practice at her school too. They will have another training for the teachers at the end of June and will invite Marian to present our project (pre-primary and primary school teachers,45 of them). Marian presented the project during flipped classroom conference. And another conference “Emprendedores” about entrepreneurs the project was disseminated to.

BUSSERO

Albalisa praised her teachers for the good work. 120 teachers participated in the face to face courses. At school 20 teachers are actively involved in the project.

In the last event 69 teachers showed up and had to book a theatre for it. At the beginning of September, they started disseminating the course locally. They chose the landscape scenarios as they have involved 7 schools and wanted a scenario that all schools could share. Thirty-seven (37) classes are following the scenarios overall. In the south of Milan, they are working on a platform and with the polytechnic school support to promote the project. The Ministry of Education allows them to develop the scenarios within 10 months but Bussero took the initiative and finished every scenario within 2 months. A highly ranked officer of the Ministry of the foreign language visited the school from Rome. They also had cooperation with the Japanese school where they showed the 6 videos relating to the project. Each school in Italy prepared a selection of the clil4u materials into story telling. Thirty-five classes have been involved to create new scenarios and new CLIL materials, while Bussero coordinated this project, that is an added result of CLIL4U.

MCAST

Since Madrid MCAST completed the scenarios and piloted them with some French students. Julie had a meeting with the principles of the college. Twenty-five (25) people attended and she gave a presentation on the progress of the project and got teachers to be involved in the project. MCAST will participate in the Malta-Expo in end of June to reach parents prospective students on a 3 day period to demonstrate clil4u. John will be including a number of foreign students coming to MCAST (10 colleges) to be trained in English and other vocational classes. They will also be introduced to CLIL. They are in discussion regarding the curriculum development and see the possibility of including CLIL. Julie and Alfred will train hopefully other teachers in order to include the numbers of participants.

SDE

Face to face courses delivered in 2015 and 2016, but the main ones took place online, e.g. with participants from Cuba, and elsewhere.

In Brussels Kent met other project coordinators. The Tools project has been selected as a success story.

They also ran a course at the college and at an agricultural college in April. Kent would like to compile a proposal for inclusive CLIL in primary schools. Another idea dealing with Electricity Safety will be also introduced and some existing partners will be included as well.

Kent mentioned the fact that he has received wonderful scenarios but had discovered incidents of copyright issues therefore he could not put them online.

Then Kent gave the overall numbers of statistics relating to how many times each item was downloaded e.g. the CLIL Guide Book, the databank look ups, and the various versions of the book in the other languages.

The number the CLIL book was downloaded was impressive (over 220, 000 times) and David Marsh has noted this and was indeed very pleased with it.

Survey Monkey by SUPSI

Jan gave the online analysis with 125 responses. The questions were all very short. She also provided a list of all the comments made. Survey monkey only allows you to look at the detailed data for a limited number of respondents. This survey has been in place since November 2015

The survey is pretty quick to complete but the problem is that it is difficult to ensure that the participants actually do it. If it arrived in an email with the link, participants would perhaps be more likely to click on the link and complete the survey.

ETI and Sandra designed a platform called clil4u blended learning platform in order to see how people are actually participating. It is an excellent link of correspondence between the trainer and the trainees. People could upload their papers there as well, therefore everybody could also peer review each other’s work. They could put their comments and fill in a guided reflection form coming from the people who actually delivered their lesson and got feedback already to share.

By the end of the day Kent gave instructions about the final report and what all the teams need to fill in by the end of the week.

31st June 2016 – Tuesday

Work on the Final report:

Section 1

Recommendations from Maria Frigols and David Marsch

We have been in constant touch with Maria and David and have followed their advice and suggestions which is also reflected in their final report. We have dealt with all their suggestions and don’t need based on that report to make any further edits.

Kent will send the e-mail from Jan with the evaluation and comments from survey monkey open answers.

Have any of the participants suggested any major changes or improvements?

The teams should check the feedback from the participants (any negative comments to be considered)

The vocational and primary groups got together in order to evaluate the comments:

Vocational

  • The majority of participants are satisfied
  • Suggestions for the creation of an online platform/Install a Moodle server to help for feedback, monitoring etc.
  • More time for practicing and assimilating and giving back some feedback
  • Peer review would help
  • More time for practical exercise for the language and content teacher

Primary

  • More explanation how to organize the CLIL lesson.
  • How to choose a topic for a lesson plan.
  • More time needed in the face to face sessions
  • Process plan of the online course. Something to create a feeling of security
  • More time to group work and more time after that
  • A platform to share lesson plans, exchange material and interact

Looking at the grant and checking everything for the final report:

Section 2

  • Outcomes delivered
  • Kent has checked the numbers agreed and the numbers created
  • The 5th biannual report should be sent by the end June.
  • Prepare an article for the final newsletter by the end of June.
  • Send the last biannual reports
  • Everything done must be supported by documents.
  • Go through the scenarios and check the links by the 24th of June.

We agreed to continue the work for the sustainability of the project.

Section 3

No deviation

No need to update the plan

Section 4 Impact

Went through the list and discussed the evidence with the partners

Section 5 Involvement of Partners

Changes to be done to the quality management.

For later: Look at the guidebook and the videos.

All partners checked the work packages and corrected the information.

1st June 2016 – Wednesday

We had moved the meeting to the Aldiana Hotel near Alaminos, the hotel offered a bargain price for coffee, lunch and their conference room with superior internet connection.

Main focus was on the scenarios to see which had worked well and what we have learned about the suitability of materials during our courses.

One of the issues with the many scenarios (108) is that links often become outdated after one or two years, another problem was the links between Word and PowerPoint documents, some document file names had accents, which means that the links may only work in countries with the same fonts

After some debate the teams agreed to change all the PowerPoint presentations with the 5Cs so the three buttons (To lesson plan, activities and language) are removed, the user will have all the documents in the zipped files.

The teams started unzipping all the 108 scenarios for checking links and files.

It was agreed that by the 24th of June the 3 buttons on the lesson plans will be replaced by a single button. By then all teams should have checked all lesson plans. (Links on the lesson plans)

2nd June 2016 - Thursday

Long term targets (dissemination and sustainability)

Exploitation:

ETI

  • One CLIL4U course will be run annually.
  • ETI will continue to disseminate CLIL4U within their Teacher Training CPD courses, and they estimate just under 1000 Teachers disseminated to annually.
  • Intend to promote the scenarios.
  • ETI (Sandra Attard-Montalto specifically) will be submitting a paper for a talk in the 4th EFL Conference, Malta, to be held in October 2016. This should target all EFL Teachers in Malta.
  • ETI will continue to promote the CLIL4U Guidebook with all the participants on their courses. They will also put in touch any Spanish participants with the Spanish team, any Italian participants with the Italian team, Danish teachers with the Danish team, etc.
  • ETI will also continue to promote the databank and encourage teachers to add their own resources to the databank.

ICMG:

  • Building upon the success of the CLIL4U scenarios, and the enthusiastic response from teachers, parents and children, ICMG is developing a large number of CLIL scenarios involving other schools.

They are making use of Digital Storytelling to explore a topic (LANDSCAPES) from 4 different aspects:

- Historical

- Emotional

- Biological

- Ecological/Technical

  • ICMG has also applied for and received funding from the Ministry of Education in Italy to continue developing the Digital Story-Telling project in Italy.
  • This project, which is an off-shoot and a result of CLIL4U, will involve a large number of schools (7), a large number of teachers (around 50) and 35 classes. Each child will be expected to fill in a specially-designed customer satisfaction report.
  • Each school will then further disseminate CLIL in a dissemination event, which will reach an even larger number of schools, parents and children.
  • The Italian Ministry of Education has already allocated over 9800 Euro budget to continue the project in the Milan province, under ICMG coordination. Some schools have already requested ICMG teachers to organize courses in their schools, which were not involved in CLIL till now. They will now be available to contribute financially with own resources for the new training activities. Such resources will also allow the continuation of the cooperation between ICMG, SUPSI and ETI for cultural initiatives on the language studies for the Italian schools, and the continuation of training activities in different modes, such as face-to-face, blended or residential.
  • In Italy, the Government has considered allocating a budget in every school for new technologies in CLIL (PNSD). Considering that in ICMG coding activities are already ongoing, and that the Danish Primary School has achieved didactical experience of excellence in this field, a first agreement that will lead to a peer-to-peer exchange has already been implemented. Considering also that in both schools internal funds are available, the CLIL4U activities will continue in the classroom, with new resources, on a technological subject, giving continuity also to the cooperation between ICMG and KGS.
  • A part of this project is devoted to the observation of the learning abilities of dyslexic children involved in the Digital Story-Telling Project. A number of doctors have agreed to monitor the children

SUPSI

  • Following discussions with the SUPSI Language Centre, the SUPSI Department of Education is planning to implement CLIL components into its Master’s and Continuing Education teacher training programmes, from 2016/17. This is important because these trainee teachers currently work, or will work, in the Swiss State School System. The SUPSI Language Centre will be directly involved in the planning and implementation of these programmes.
  • During these programmes, the CLIL4U products will be promoted and used (CLIL Guide Book, Databank, scenarios, video, CLIL main course…).
  • The SUPSI Language Centre will continue to develop scenarios appropriate for SUPSI undergraduate students, collaborating with the content teachers. The following sectors will be particularly involved in this process: Engineering, Architecture, Visual Communication, Restoration, Interior Design, Business Administration, Healthcare.
  • The SUPSI Language Centre will continue contribute to the CLIL4U Databank, and will promote this resource with others.
  • IUFFP (Federal Continuing Education Institution for Vocational Schools) is currently discussing its programmes for the coming academic year. The SUPSI Language Centre is planning to propose a CLIL module for this programme.
  • The SUPSI Language Centre also hopes to continue to cooperate with the Italian and Malta partners in future activities and projects related to CLIL and language teaching in general.

CECE: