CLIL : CLIL Team teaching sciences and foreign language Aurelia CAMPEAN* Luminita CHICINAS* Simona BERNAT** Cluj County School Inspectorate “Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking Association – Romania


Introduction: Introduction This is an integrated project that proposes new teaching learning methods and promotes active learning for the pupils’ involved and long life learning for their teachers preparing them live in a knowledge society. The project has been developed in team (Physics and French teachers), in order to experiment the CLIL methods, by means of a Comenius 2.1 project, and it has been implemented in “Mihai Eminescu” High School Cluj-Napoca involving students form IX th grade. The experiment focuses also course and performances assessment based on Benchmarking Content and Language Integrated Learning with the objectives: Trandisciplinary approach of key competences, maternal and foreign language communication; To increase the interest of young students for sciences and technologies; Learning to learn; To integrate educational values such as cooperative learning and acting, respect for scientific and cultural values.


Teaching : Teaching knowledge is inseparable from the contexts and activities within which it develops; physical and social context in which an activity takes place is an integral part of the activity; the activity is an integral part of the learning that takes place within it. every cognitive act must be understood as a specific response to a specific set of circumstances. learning – especially learning in school – is the result of individual effort of each pupil, not alone, but, as a result of the great variety of interactions in class; “what we take as knowledge and how we think and express ideas are products of the interactions of groups of people over time” (Soltis 1981).


TEAM TEACHING: TEAM TEACHING Classroom Space, Materials, and Time Work spaces? Storage? Furniture? Desks/tables? Teacher desks? Materials, books, supplies? Which materials are mine, which are yours, which are ours? Partitions/room dividers?


TEAM TEACHING: TEAM TEACHING Centers? If school doesn’t provide what we need/want, how will we get it? How can we set aside several hours of joint planning per week? Which content should each of us teach? What content should be divided? What content should be taught jointly? How will we keep records? One or two grade books? Who grades which papers? What grading system? Lesson plan book?


TEAM TEACHING: TEAM TEACHING Tolerance of noise level? Personality strengths/weaknesses? What I know about my own learning style? How I feel about my teaching? Things about my teaching I’d like to be better at? Social interaction between us? Things we have in common? Things that make us different? Affection? Humor/Drama? Cooperative learning? Grouping? Level of expertise? (Subject matter? Teaching strategies?) Who teaches what? Interactions with children? Spontaneity/asking for help?


Slide7: TEAM TEACHING Needs/Values/Philosophy Tolerance of noise level? Personality strengths/weaknesses? What I know about my own learning style? How I feel about my teaching? Things about my teaching I’d like to be better at? Social interaction between us? Things we have in common? Things that make us different? Affection? Humor/Drama? Cooperative learning? Grouping? Level of expertise? (Subject matter? Teaching strategies?) Who teaches what? Interactions with children? Spontaneity/asking for help?


TEAM TEACHING: TEAM TEACHING Classroom Management Disciplining? Rules/Expectations? Consequences? Classroom routines? (i.e., lining up for recess etc.) Movement within classroom? Constructive criticism? Communication with parents?


Teaching process: Teaching process Traditional (lecture - demonstration) physics instruction induces only small change in the pupils’ ideas and beliefs about science. This result is largely independent of the teacher's knowledge, experience and teaching style. Much greater changes in pupil beliefs can be induced with instructional methods derived form educational research. Whitehead complained about schools producing too much inert knowledge – with pupil knowing definitions of concepts but not being able to use the concepts when appropriate. Lauren Resnick (1987) argued that “as long as school focuses mainly on individual forms of competence, on tool – free performance, and on decontextualized skills, educating people to be good learners in school settings alone may not be sufficient to help them become strong out – of – school learners”.


Strange answers and explanations: Strange answers and explanations An other challenging result was the unexpected answer of the K-7 pupils given at a qualitative problem at the Physics Olympics County Contest. The question was about the well known poem "The crawfish, the frog and the pike" where the three heroes are attempting to move together a big flour bag from one board to the other one of the river. The crawfish pulled back, the frog pulled up and the pike pulled toward the river. The poet says that the flour bag will remain in the same place since the three friends are pulling in different directions. The pupils were asked to identify the interactions in the scene described, to make a diagram and to explain with their own words if the poet was right or wrong. The pupils with very good results at physics contests were unable to transfer the knowledge about forces and vectors in this rich context problem even they solve very rapidly quantitative problems


Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking : Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking Teaching and learning for critically thinking focuses on the cognitive development of the learner. Teacher’s aim is to help pupils to discover the knowledge development as a process more than as a product. The RWCT methods uses complementarily cooperative learning strategies and techniques (KWL, graphic organizers, jigsaw, Venn diagram, cube etc) with other factors which affect and promote active learning such as: attitudes, values, beliefs and motivations (discussion network, values line, corners etc). What do I want that pupils will learn from this lesson? What pupils actually learned? What kind of mixture of fact information and concept understanding answer at most to the pupils needs? How do I decide which are the most adequate strategies in order to promote pupils’ active learning? How will I asses their learning?


Slide12: The new “model” of education for the young and old learners focus on: Learning to know Learning to do Learning to learn together and with others Learning to be Jacques Delors, 2000


How it works?: How it works? French and Science is an optional module which consists of a lesson a week for 14-15 year old students (9th grade). The main goal is to prepare the students to enter bilingual education in French Academic Branches at the age of 17-18 years old (11th grade) and encourage their interest for following a scientific model of discovering the world. The Science/Physics teacher and the French teacher do all the job together, from planning to developing the class activities. The resources used include a selection of articles from both French (Science et Vie, Science et Vie Junior, Science et Avenir) and Romanian magazines, web pages, a DVD called Planète environnement (CNED 2004), as well as the CD-Rom Fréquence FDM with interviews with French scientists.


How it works?Examples of specific competences and contents integrated in the French and Science module:: How it works? Examples of specific competences and contents integrated in the French and Science module: Specific competences Selecting information and documentation sources Identifying the data and writing questions for an active learning Collecting and analyzing the data for communication sessions on a certain theme Presenting the data in oral, written and graphic form Choosing the appropriate type of text for certain presentation situations Contents Actual scientific information on themes that interest students : the energy, the solar system, the cloning, eye & optical phenomena, year & acoustic phenomena, electricity & magnetism etc. Explicit learning models (KWL, jigsaw, discussion network, values line, Cube, corners, one stay three go) Methods of processing the data and synthesising the results (personal journal, summary of scientific TV news etc) Presentation modes, techniques of graphic organization of the information (graphic organizers, Venn diagram etc) Types of texts : scientific articles, letters, appeals, etc.


How it works?: How it works? Values and attitudes involved : developing the ability to reflect on problems, to solve problems relating knowledge developing the ability to actively integrate in different groups developing functional competences: communication, critical thinking, negotiation processing and contextual usage of certain information


Description: Description Cloning has been one of students' favourite issue of study. The debate was introduced by a prompting question about an ethic issue: « Are we entitled to clone a human being ? », which led to the search for further information about this topic. The reading of an article called Recipe for Human Cloning (“Science et Vie Junior”, 163, April 2003) enabled them to complete the other two columns.


Are we entitled to clone a human being ?: Are we entitled to clone a human being ?


Description: Description To facilitate communication, the French teacher integrated activities to practice specific vocabulary and checked reading comprehension when reflecting on another article, from the same magazine, entitled “Is cloning moral/necessary, or not?” Then the students had to present this new information to the class: they were given a short questionnaire for them to cover the main aspects, such as formulating an interesting idea, asking for answers to solve a problem, concluding with a personal comment. The final task consisted on the development of an interactive role-play. The board was divided in two columns, one for the key roles involved in cloning (scientists, doctors, business people, patients, politicians…) and another one for the people to whom they would like to address a message: chemists, physicists, doctors, parents, journalists. In groups, students had to choose their characters from the first column and write a text to the ones chosen from the second column. For instance, journalists wrote a newspaper article addressing ill people who may benefit from this technique; business people offered doctors in a formal letter financial support for research. Thus, both linguistic and scientific knowledge were presented to the class: Content and language integrated learning.


Assessment: Assessment The Science/Physics teacher and the French teacher gather and evaluate together the students’ written and oral production (questionnaires and role-play). They also take notes based on classroom observation about the following aspects: Pupil’s diary Peer’s feedback Individual contributions Group dynamics Team-work


Slide20: The teaching strategies have in view four directions of education: Learn to know – contemporaneous scientific research, elements of general scientific knowledge, cultural values. Learn to do – pragmatic skills: negotiate, communicate, etc. Learn to live with the others – create, develop, work on group projects, plan. Learning to be – emphasize the capacity to learn and evolve, apply values.


Slide21: Content dimension  The use of a cross-curricular topic, of authentic materials in both languages (Romanian and French) and the different experiential tasks undertaken by students give an added value to this practice. Language dimension  The type of activities and experiences proposed are language-sensitive: the new vocabulary and the different types of texts are exercised within a significant context. Integration dimension  The task-based activities designed are interdisciplinary and help to have a global understanding of the world; these tasks are enriched by the fact that the cooperation between the specialist teacher and the language teacher is guaranteed. Learning dimension  The supportive and motivating learning atmosphere and the variety of methods used in the classroom enhance the autonomy and responsibility of students. Environment dimension  This practice enriches students’ learning objectives and widens their perspective of interests. The framework of the general project improves the school’s profile.