CLIL II, CLIL Lesson Plans Samples

I have spoken about CLIL, its foundations, where to get theoretical background about CLIL education. We need to start to see some examples of activities, resources created by teachers in their daily practice. Examples which can, I hope, help us to better understand the theory but also to inspire our own production of activities.

I find  the approach to bilingual education that Andalusia in Spain is taking particularly attractive. Every new teacher in a bilingual program takes an intense course that includes theoretical instruction, presentations by researchers and work sessions with teachers with experience in the program. The teachers also spend time during their introduction to the program creating activities that can be used in a class following a CLIL approach.  It doesn´t finish here, teachers keep on working together and producing activities that are normally placed online, using either a blog or a wiki. The best part of all this? All these resources are online available for us to look at, explore and reuse for our purposes and needs. And I honestly think that some are really inspiring.

First, we can have a look at the several templates they have created to create a CLIL lesson plan. The first one elaborated by Isabel Pérez, whose website I have already introduced, is very thorough and has all the components we need to include in a CLIL lesson plan. It also includes links to clarify some of the sections and links to pedagogical background behind CLIL.

 

 

All these resources can be found in the wiki created by the CEP (Centro de profesores) in Granada. The wiki is for teachers to have a common space to work together, share resources and learn form each other. It was created after one of the professional development sessions for teachers in bilingual programs and has been used as a meeting point for everyone interested in developing bilingual programs under a CLIL approach in the province.

Another template is available in the blog of Pilar Torres who is the Language Advisor in another CEP, in Córdoba. I will spend more time talking about this blog which offers a lot of useful and valuable information on CLIL and many other subjects. Today, let me just introduce a different proposal of template to create a CLIL activity. This one is more simplified but it can also be useful for our needs in Alberta.

I find it essential to  have a consistent approach to the way we organize our lessons plans making sure that the key linguistic, pedagogical and cultural components are included. It will help our work to a great extent and it will be the only way we can work collaboratively with other teachers in a bilingual program. In my next posts, I will talk about the CEFR (common European framework of reference, MCER in Spanish) and I will introduce some of the activities from the blogs we talked about today.