Teacher trainers and consultants Rosie Tanner and Liz Dale are back with more ideas for using brain-friendly CLIL learning techniques, to make your learning faster, more fun and more joyful.
As we mentioned in our last post, over the last twenty years we have learnt more about learning and the brain. As this article explains, “balance bilingualism”, or knowing two languages “has the potential to be much greater than the sum of its parts”. What can these “new” insights mean for education in general, and specifically for CLIL? In this post, we deal with four more insights about brain-friendly CLIL.
Let’s start, as previously, with some questions for you.
Do you…?
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- 1. … get your students thinking hard during your lessons, for example by creating learning activities for them using HOTS (higher order thinking skills)?
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- 2. … use Bloom’s new taxonomy to design questions, CLIL tasks, lessons and projects?
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- 3. … link your teaching with your students’ own lives?
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- 4. … give your students feedback as they are learning, during their learning process?
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- 5. …teach your students to assess themselves?
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- 6. … ask your students to draw, paint or sketch?
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- 7. … work with songs to introduce or illustrate input?
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- 8. … ask your students to write drafts, give feedback on content and then ask for a rewrite?
- 9. … tell your students what they are doing well, and give them compliments?
The questions above relate to four more ways of making your CLIL teaching more brain-friendly. As in our first blog on brain-friendly CLIL, if you answer YES to all of these questions, you are welcome to click away and read another post, since you are already a brain-friendly CLIL teacher!
Four more aspects
In our previous post, we wrote about four insights related to brain-friendly learning which we consider relevant to CLIL: novelty and surprise, choice, emotion and multisensory learning. In today’s post, we discuss four more brain-friendly insights linked with CLIL: challenge, creativity, personalization and feedback.
Challenge
How can we challenge our CLIL students and keep them curious? The greater a student’s interest in a question, the better memory he or she will have for the answer. So it is really important to challenge our learners, to get them thinking and their brains working. For those familiar with the 4 Cs of CLIL (content, communication, cognition and culture), here we are talking about the C of cognition.
An important idea related to CLIL here is the difference between the cognitive (thinking) and the linguistic (language) challenge. If your input or content is likely to prove difficult for your students, look for material which explains your input in simple language. On the other hand, if the cognitive challenge is low and you think your students will grab the ideas you are working on easily, you can challenge them in terms of language and find materials at a higher language level.
To challenge your students when creating CLIL materials, use Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl: 2001). Look at your questions, tasks or projects and ask yourself at which level on the taxonomy you are working. Do you ask your students to remember and understand? Then you are working on LOTS (lower order thinking skills). Your students’ brains probably aren’t working as hard as when you work on HOTS (higher order thinking skills). Challenge them with tasks which get them to analyse, apply, evaluate and create.
For more information on this topic, visit Rosie and Liz’s next post which will explore three more aspects of brain-friendly learning: Brain-friendly CLIL #3 – creativity, personalisation, and feedback.