CLIL in Piemonte 2026

CLIL in Piemonte, 260518-260522

I spent three intensive days recently working with children, students and teachers in the Piemonte region. Each of the three days was crammed with school visit, classroom teaching (grades 4 and 5 primary and secondary grades 3 and 5), and workshops for teachers (face-to-face and online) at primary, lower secondary and upper secondary levels.

Each day left me slightly exhausted, totally exhilirated and with new insights and thoughts about CLIL in state schools in Italy and beyond.
I have to give special thanks to the office of USR Piemonte for making this all possible. But, I have to step back and tell a story because this all began back in October 2025 when USR Piemonte funded through Erasmus mobility grants 10 teachers to come to my school for a course in Putting CLIL Into Practice for Young Learners. 



The product of this week of intensive experiences and emotions was the FACT Journal 44, a collection of sequenced activities and lessons focused on the UN SDGs. It was during this week’s visit that I was able to bring the printed collection and hand them over to the colleagues with many thanks for their hard work and contributions. Here, I dare claim, is the essence of good ongoing CLIL professional development. Teachers largely attend a training and go home but in this case, colleagues attend CPD, are connected by the resources they produce and which are edited into a published collection, which then is the focus for a follow-up training in their home locations and during which they receive the published copy of their work, all the while the pdf is made available for wider dissemination and, by my reckoning, this week a further 150 teachers have been involved in ongoing CLIL professional development with the workshops, talks and online events during the visit.

So, what did we do in Piemonte?

USR Piemonte set up a busy programme of events as follows:
In Pavone, I visited IC Pavone Canavese - Scuola Elementare Statale: Alfredo D'Andrade, hosted by the delightful Michela, who handed over her 5th grade classes to me for CLIL experiences.


These intrepid young people were given the task of building, designing and naming 3 paper planes with a view to launching and recording the flight distances of each of their group planes.





Each of the three planes had to be group numbered, designed and named.

There were many very creative designs.



The school let us use its playing field for our flight research.

And we had a record of 15 metres.
Back in class, we calculated total flight distances, average flight distances, and best distances, all this on the backdrop of the recent world record-breaking flight of a Chinese team reaching 98 metres for a paper plane flight in January 2026.
I had previously used a clip of the South Korean record which was 70 metres. But, the Chinese team smashed this record by quite some distance..

The learners reported individual flight distances, and then calculated total distances, and average distances for each group of three planes.
Well done to everyone (links to all the notes and resources are at the bottom of this page!

The afternoon here had us welcome primary teachers for a face to face workshop in CLIL materials and methods for communication.

Afternoon Primary CLIL Workshop, thanks to Francesca for the photo! 

We even had the chance to have dinner together with good friend and colleague Silvana Rampone, and Loredana Mandru from Romania.

On day 2, I visited IC Castellamonte and specifically the primary classes of the Scuola Media Olivetti in Aigle, famous for many things including some delicious biscuits.


I was hosted by Gessica, extremely busy with end of year celebrations and festivals but still able to take care of me and give me her 4th grade and 5th grade classes to work with.


We did the same workshop on paper plane construction as the previous day.


But, there is a major difference here, and that is that one boy, Alex, smashed all previous distances with his 21 metres in the school yard. Well done Alex!!!

The afternoon took us to Aigle to the coordinating secondary school for the cluster of schools in my visit for an online workshop where we had 83 teachers.
Here, I raised the question of the extended blocks of CLIL for learners with the audience and they were given the task of coming up with a theme from their content areas which they feel they could easily extend in this way.
Another great day!!!

Day 3 took me to Torino and here we had a lovely dinner bring together some of the Plovdiv group, and so I was able to hand over the FACT Journal collection of their resources - good travels! 


In Turin, the fabulous colleagues at the Istituto Tecnico Sommeiller received me into their History and Maths classes with grade 3 secondary and grade 5 secondary.

Many thanks to all the school colleagues for giving me such a warm welcome!

I also presented the colleagues with FACT Journal resources.

I had been asked to prepare classes which focus on King Charles II’s speech to US Congress on April 28th 2026.

Blank timeline of US-UK relations
Grade 3 was to focus on a timeline of US-UK relations to the present day, and Grade 5 the soft power politics and language of the speech.


Trumpisms v Charlesisms
The third lesson had me as interview subject for a Maths class on the Break-Even Point using my school company as object of the analysis. This flowed into a presentation by two students on the Break-Even Point in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

The afternoon workshop at ITS brought together a wide range of teachers from the region for a workshop on activating academic language through CLIL.


By this point, I was coming back to the idea of building more extended sequences of learning for CLIL in the schools as part of my introduction.
While I had prepared CLIL activities to share, it felt like it was my role to offer advice to colleagues on how they might explore ways and means for the most efficient CLIL time management and implementation.

What are my takeaways?
Drip feeding language lessons cannot go any way as far or as well as extended sequences of lessons in blocks for learners.
In both Pavone and Castellamonte, and then also at the ITC, the students experienced collaborative content (where the language teacher and the content got together to produce the lesson) and/or where learners had lessons through English for 3-4 hours in one go.
The children were anxious about being able to understand the visiting ‘Englishman’, but you could physically see the children relax as the session went on and they realized they could follow what was being presented and asked of them to do.
Phil Ball and I talk about ‘stretching’ language lessons in Cafe CLIL (link to podcast).
This refers to the construction of learning periods where learners engage with a sequence of concepts and where each subsequent concept is linked with the previous and develops on it while leading to a new concept. In CLIL, these sequenced connected concepts allow for language to be embedded in and anchored onto this progression.

There is a lot of good will among the teaching community I met, around 150 teachers, for a CLIL approach, and I look forward to following-up on this intensive week.
Everyone has been invited to come to Bulgaria to join our courses in Putting CLIL into Practice. I look forward to hosting yet more great teachers from Italy in our wonderful home town Plovdiv!
 
Notes and resources:
Paper plane building and testing with all instructions
The King’s Speech – a timline notes and resources
The King’s Speech – soft-power politics and language notes and Resources