Austria - SprachenForum5

SprachenForum5 - CLIL in Austria

I took part in a lively and enjoyable discussion on CLIL in Austria recently.

I didn't really have a good idea in my mind what the event would actually be like before I got there. Of course, we'd had the plenary talk on CLIL past, present and future at the KPH in Linz earlier in the year, and that was to be recycled for discussion during this live interview/conversation between myself and Andreas Baernthaler, our host for the event. I knew that there was to be groups of teachers gathered together in schools around Austria 'tuning' in, listening and watching and that they were to be given focused tasks based on the discussion they would hear, and the things they would see.

But, what I now understand is a very efficient way of getting a plenary and discussion of surrounding issues out to a larger audience. It's very clever, and I'm sure it will be a more common medium of engagement with groups of teachers for the purpose of ongoing professional development. I'd certainly be happy to be involved in similar, more specialized themed discussions. After all, theoretical physics teachers may need ideas on fine tuning their presentation techniques in the classroom, for example. :) Humour aside, imagine a bank of similar videos on a given theme (think - 'guiding students through multi-media content input'; 'guiding students through text input'; 'supporting students in CLIL talk'; 'supporting students in written output', to name but a few) and each video accompanied by tasks for groups gathered in their schools to work on at strategic moments; all of this with intermittent live discussion. I'm off to resesarch YouTube myself for this function right now!

Watch this space for updates!

PS - I made promises to the teachers, who had tooo many questions for us to deal with them all. One of the requests was a list of resource sites. So, I'm linking here a document with many sites, some of my own favourites, some provided by the many teachers I've met on the way. Note please that there are networks and if you are in Austria, you should consider joining the HTL CLIL Google Group (ignore the name, there are HAK, HUM teachers and teachers interested in CLIL from other school types too). See you there.