Friday, 23rd October

 A relevant part of Kathy’s class this morning was focussed on revising all the activities we learnt so far in our training course. She asked us to discuss how we could possibly adapt them to our own learning environments when we go back to Madrid. Interestingly enough, when talking about these activities, the first thing we came across with was the remarkable list of obstacles that make this adaptation so difficult. When teachers have little time, they tend to focus on the content rather than on the language. Many of us, especially if we teach in the last years of secondary education, have to stick to a very broad and demanding syllabus. As we feel that many of these activities are highly time-consuming we are afraid that putting them into practice will make it very difficult to cover all the prescribed contents. Moreover, the physical structure of our own classrooms does not favour a dynamic, interactive approach to teaching. Our students are sitting on rows, according to a teacher-centred approach which is connected with a vertical transmissive model of the educational process. There are additional difficulties related to our CLIL approach to teaching. For example, when working in groups, our students tend to talk in Spanish, not in English, so this is an important issue that the teacher should be able to control. We also have to face the big challenge of teaching our contents in English to students that have very different levels of knowledge and fluency in this foreign language. But perhaps the biggest difficulty is connected with our own frame of mind. For example, my own teaching is focused on keeping control over the educational process – and I find that this interferes with a student-centred teaching style.

In any case, I am sure that we will need some time in order to make our students understand how this new methodology works. We need a scaffolding strategy in order to put all these new techniques into practice. Shifting from a teacher-centred approach to a student-centred style is not easy. We should find a realistic way to implement these changes little by little. For example, we could foster peer interaction and mushrooming groups, that would work. Other activities, which involve movement, will be – at least for me - much more difficult to put into practice.

However, I will not let all these obstacles stop me from improving my way of teaching. As Francisco very kindly asked me to do, I am trying to figure out how we could possibly implement some of these new techniques in our old-fashioned schools. For example, creating a bank of activities, techniques and resources would be very useful, as it would help us to prepare our lesson plans and to combine different options and possibilities. It would be great if we could share these materials and resources, fostering collaboration and creating an active network of bilingual teachers committed with methodological improvement. The wiki that we have created, and which can be accessed at http://chichestermadrid.wikispaces.com/, is a good example of what can be done. I hope I can find more exciting and promising ways to make the most of our training programme here in Chichester.