I spent an exhilarating 5 days in the Emirates last week, Feb 23-28th, working on a packed and intensive programme of meetings, focus groups, presentations and workshops.  The groups were carefully identified in terms of their relevance to content and language integrated learning and that organisation is due to the preparatory work of Karen Ryan at the British Council in Dubai.  Thanks Karen, www.britishcouncil.org/me.

I don't think Karen physically could have set me with up any more meetings than she did in the space of 5 days, nor could the people involved be better targeted.

What is going on in the Emirates?

Well, the educational system has and is introducing English-medium Maths and Science from year 1.  The schools I worked with are part of the Madares Al Ghad network of schools and they have been teaching English Maths and Science since September.  It's a time when the Ministry of Education is taking stock of its achievements in this programme, looking at future directions and organising training and resources for the year to come.  It was also a week with two major conferences at which I presented and there were meetings with a number of key stakeholders in the system of education in UAE.

Ministry of Education in Dubai

http://www.moe.gov.ae/english/pages/default.aspx

Day 1: Sunday, 24 Feb 2008

The American University of Sharjah, AUS, held its First International TESOL Conference: TESOL in a Globalised World: Exploring the Challenges, February 23-24, 2008.

www.aus.edu

The abstract for my presentation was:

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) - Is it important for you?

Developing appropriate materials for ESOL students is something language and content teachers alike have to deal with.  This workshop will look at the issues involved in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). The workshop will present examples of good practice and materials from a number of CLIL contexts around the world, and both language and subject teachers will be given the opportunity to create CLIL activities of their own.

I quickly got used to being impressed by the architecture of government and academic buildings.

Teachers and colleagues came from all over the country for the workshop and there were 40 participants.  I had prepared an overview of CLIL issues, an outline of what is going on in a variety of CLIL contexts around the world and intended to follow this with some tasks for teachers identifying content language and structuring input text.

The group were very focused on the issues related to CLIL and much of the time they really just wanted to talk and the teacher tasks developed into an open forum discussion about teaching Maths and Science to Grade 1 (6-7 year olds) through the medium of English as a Foreign Language.

There are many many things the colleagues wanted to discuss.  Money and time aside, the teachers were very positive about their experiences, mostly about the success they see in the learners everyday in the classroom.

Day 2: Monday, 25 Feb 2008

Karen had organised two school visits for me to see first hand what goes on in the Grade 1 English Maths and Science classrooms.  I went first of all to the Al Saada Primary School where I saw three classes with some Science, some Maths and some English. 

The curriculum has been organised to have these three subjects 'integrated'.  This means that Maths and Science are taught in English, but Maths and Science may also appear in the same lesson.  The schools have been provided with a curriculum guidelines document for the process, science kits, Mathematics resources and an English language course book all of which come from publishers in the US and Australia. 

The schools have 4 days with 2 hour blocks making up 3 lessons per block and so 12 lessons over a week dedicated to this project.  It's a lot to fit in to such a restricted time and so the teachers have been provided with very detailed lesson plans by the MAGs office at the Ministry which, with practice and experience, they have gone on to use as templates to write their own plans.  The planning is a very important issue since there is too much in the three courses to fit into the amount of time given and so the colleagues have to be very selective.

Another important aspect of the project is the support structure.  Each school has a teacher mentor who works with the teachers and supports them in a variety of ways.  The schools also have a learning coordinator who oversees the work of the project in a group of schools in a region.

One of these learning coordinators, thanks Linda, took me around the Al Saada school and as we observed classes we also talked over the major issues in the project.

The classrooms I saw were very well equipped with data projector and PC for the teacher and also with three workstations for the children at the back of each classroom.  The walls were extensively used as a resource with areas of the curriculum posted in most spaces available.  The classes also had a carpeted area at the front where the children would sit with the teacher for certain activities. 

There were 22 girls in each of the classes I saw and the relationship between the teacher and the children was excellent throughout the visit.  The children clearly love their teacher to bits and their joy at working in English was obvious.  I think the children are most likely the strongest factor in the project, closely followed by their wonderful teachers.  It's worth mentioning that the teachers are a mix of English teachers, Science teachers and Maths teachers and those I saw managed very well with doing their subject in a foreign language, or in the case of the English teachers doing the Maths and Science in their classrooms.

The third class I sat in on was in an open learning centre where the children can choose any of a number of media for their learning.  Heeba (best wishes and good luck with the birth) had the children do a story about a hungry frog.  Heeba is the mentor teacher in this school and described her role to me where she enters the lesson with her teachers and assists or alternatively, Heeba may deliver a lesson or part of a lesson to give a demo of a specific area of the curriculum.

Monday pm

Paul Mason who is Special Projects Director - Schools Improvement, of the KHDA - The Knowledge and Human Development Agency invited me to run three workshops with teachers at the National Institute of Vocational Education - NIVE.  These colleagues are teaching at a tertiary level to students of Business, HR, Finance, Accountancy and many others and they are looking for ideas to help them as the work is very challenging for a number of reasons.

I prepared three workshops based on i) the basics of CLIL, ii) discourse analysis and iii) task design. 

The first workshop with an overview of CLIL looked at CLIL contexts, set out my understanding of the principles and main ideas and gave some examples of CLIL materials and also raised some questions to do with strategy and implementation.

Karen gets us started, Dr Naghy Institute Director, front right

The top 100 words in one secondary Science course book
and the number of times they appear

The second workshop specifically set out to raise awareness of what the language of specific subjects actually is.  This began with a look at words in common usage, most common academic words, and words of less common usage.  With this background we looked at specific subject areas, including those of the participants, and began to investigate what is the 'core' subject language teachers need to teach.

Day 3: Tuesday, 26 Feb 2008

Today I spent the morning at another school, the Al Andaloos Primary School and saw two classes for a substantial period.  The classes were Maths and Science and again the classroom environment and the relationships between the teachers and the children was excellent. 

I also got to meet another teacher mentor and another learning coordinator based at the school.  One of the useful things about today was that I got my hands on the resources. 

The teacher's notes indicated expectations in a boxed field entitled 'what we learned' and this was expressed in the conclusion of the class where the children copied the sentence from the board onto their handouts.  'All paper absorbs water except waxed paper'.

In lesson two the teacher had the children sitting in a circle on a carpeted area at the front of the classroom counting cubes in twos and then threes and then replaced this with coins, and then with breakfast cereals which they got to eat to put subtraction into practice!

Tuesday pm

The afternoon was taken up with a Focus Group meeting with teachers, teacher mentors and learning coordinators from the MAGs programme.  It was set up as an informal opportunity for me to find out from the group what their main concerns were, where they saw their successes and challenges in implementing English-medium Science and Maths at Grade 1.

As you can imagine, there were many many things to talk about.  Too many to write about here, but I will say that the positive energy and enthusiasm in the group for what they were doing, sometimes despite very difficult circumstances was infectious.

Day 4: Wednesday, 27th Feb 2008, am

MAGs office, MoE

Wednesday pm

NIVE workshop 3

This was the third workshop with colleagues at the Institute for Vocational Education.  We had looked at CLIL issues, definitions, and established key principles and we had discussed language discourse for specific subjects.  This workshop was to be practical, getting colleagues to make tasks based on the principles outlined.

Except it didn’t work out like that. 

As soon as we arrived at the 'now make your own' stage, Tim raised a hand and asked if I would sit with him to look through a specific task item from his subject area.  This was to do with describing and analysing features of industrial disputes.  It turned out that all of the colleagues wanted to sit in and discuss the same question.

Though it took us off my planned route, we simply had a very useful discussion on specific tasks the faculty has to deal with.  We actually got to a concrete product from our discussion. 

Tim described to me how the grading system works for one type of task (three grades - pass, merit and distinction, if I remember rightly) and the descriptors which go with the mark scheme.  Tim and the other colleagues spoke of how many students copy and paste much of what they write and getting students to use 'their own words' was extremely difficult.  With this we looked at how they might begin to wean the students off what they could fish from the Internet and provide structures and language to support the students in this writing process.  In short, we spoke of how the teachers might need to take sample written answers for each of the grades, analyse the discourse of the texts drawing out key phrases from these texts, organise them in a way which is relevant to the structure of the whole written piece and offer this structure with the language placed alongside.  This for me would be a pretty good writing frame for this particular kind of task.  There was some talk of whether or not this is spoon feeding and Tim and I agreed that we could at least keep in touch by email and put something together between us which the colleagues could use as a model.

Day 5: Thursday, 28th Feb 2008,

HCT Conference

You can read the official report on the event here:
http://dwc.hct.ac.ae/hcttecon.html

Somehow even 50 people don't look very much in a hall for 1000

It was a lively debate and it is certainly a context to keep an eye on in the future!