Rosie Tanner and Liz Dale share their thoughts on inspiring creativity in the classroom through the effective use of CLIL.
A personal resolution of ours recently is (yet again) to slow down. This video, “Creativity requires time” caught our attention, because it shows that slowing down actually can help creativity. The clip shows that if you give students 10 seconds to perform a task, they all come up with the same – or pretty similar – answers. Give them a task for 10 minutes and their creativity explodes!
But what does this mean for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)? Here are some suggestions for slowing down CLIL to help both language and content learning.
Slowing down CLIL in the classroom
Give students more time to work on CLIL activities. Replace lessons with project time, where students can be creative and work “slower”. In order to stimulate their creativity with language, give them choices in how they perform – to make a video on their telephones, or PowerPoint or a poster or a Prezi.
Instead of requiring students to write short paragraphs or answers to questions, work on one, longer piece of writing over a number of lessons (plus homework), in order to develop their writing skills. Ask students to spend time on drafting and perhaps illustrating a piece of writing and then first give feedback on content. Giving feedback on content first helps students improve their language. Students then rewrite and hand in a piece of writing that they can be proud of. On Friday, we’ll be sharing an activity “Brainstorming for writing (1) posters” from our book CLIL Activities for ideas on how you could do this in a variety of subjects.
Think > Pair > Share
Alternatively, you can use the well-worn idea of Think > Pair > Share (TPS). You give students a question, prompt or observation. The students then take a few moments to think about the question and note down their answers, for example on a mini-whiteboard. Next, students make pairs to talk about their answers. Finally, you ask pairs to share their answers with the class. You can record these on the board. For more about TPS, see, for example, this site. In this way, your students are all engaged and producing spoken output, which then helps with their language learning.
Use HOTS (higher order thinking skills) more than LOTS (lower order thinking skills). Instead of asking questions which require short answers of less than five words – usually lower order thinking questions – ask questions so students have to think hard. Change “What is 16 times 4?” to “How many sums can you think of to which the answer is 64?” Check back tomorrow for an activity that will help with this – “Skinny and fat questions and thinking skills”. Again, by answering HOTS, CLIL learners produce more spoken output.
School Development
Implementing CLIL also means taking time in terms of school development. It means taking time to invest in subject teachers’ English and continuing to invest in it. English teachers at school can play a role in this, giving regular practical English workshops to their colleagues.
And it takes time to integrate CLIL methodology into subject lessons. Moving into CLIL means adding extra, language-rich tasks into your subject lessons – and that takes time, too. It often means working closer with colleagues to develop a shared approach. One useful aid to help you to think about school cooperation is the Collaboration in CLIL rubric (p.25-29) from CLIL Activities. If we take more time, maybe our CLIL students’ creativity will increase, you will be prouder of what they make or perform, and your lessons will be richer.
We’ll be sharing some activities from Rosie and Liz’s book CLIL Activities: A resource book for subject and language teachers tomorrow and Friday. Rosie also has her own website and regularly posts blogs at Reflections on CLIL.