Previously, our experts Rosie Tanner and Liz Dale suggested some more ideas for using brain-friendly learning techniques in CLIL, to challenge your students, to make your learning faster, more fun and more joyful. In this article, they look at Creativity, Personalisation, and Feedback.
Creativity
Using the arts in CLIL stimulates creativity and action in the brain. So use different areas of the arts in your classroom: music, song, images, role play. People who play music apparently enjoy many brain benefits: they have stronger brain connections. This can, in turn, have a positive impact on language abilities. About 65% of our learners are visual learners: when a visual aid is connected to a verbal explanation, it actually speeds up the learning process. So what can you do in the CLIL classroom related to the arts?
• Get your students to create a simple video on their mobile phones on a topic, or to make a paperslide about a topic. Here is a sample paperslide about making paperslides.
• Use songs or music to introduce a topic, to activate students’ prior knowledge about the topic you are dealing with. One example is this well-known chemistry song by Tom Lehrer which students love. Or watch Daniel Radcliffe’s (of Harry Potter fame) version on a chat show. What better way to wake up your students to chemistry?! Or use this video of whales ‘singing’ when working on mammals or this one by the singing zoologist on metamorphosis for younger learners.
Personalisation
Another way of getting our students to make more connections in their brains is to personalize learning, to make it really relevant to their own lives. We know that when students learn something new, their brain changes and grows: this is known as ‘neuroplasticity’. Here are some ideas about personalizing for CLIL:
• Get your students writing their own questions related to input, so you are working on what they are interested in.
• Students make a drawing including all the vocabulary they need to learn on a topic.
Feedback
Feedback to our students can be the single most powerful innovation that enhances their achievement. And feedback is a key contributor to motivation: specific and positive feedback stimulates the prefrontal cortex in the brain to reflect on ways to get better. And the kind of feedback you give is vital: just saying something like “Great job” is not helpful!
We need to be tell our students what they are doing well, and we need to be specific; for example, “I really like your choice of photo on your tiger poster: it shows clearly what sort of habitat the tiger lives in. And all your spelling is correct today!” Formative feedback, where we help students continually to identify both their strengths and weaknesses, helps to improve their learning.
CLIL Activity
Today’s activity from our book, CLIL Activities, is 5.7 I am a…
In which ways is this activity brain-friendly?
1. Learners are challenged to change what they know about a topic into a journey, applying what they have learned. (CHALLENGE)
2. By asking learners to write a story, we are asking them to be imaginative (CREATIVITY).
3. The story is in the first person; learners imagine they are themselves on a journey and write about themselves. (PERSONALIZATION)
4. If you give positive, specific feedback to your learners about, for example, a draft version of their story, you will help them to learn. (FEEDBACK)
References
LW Anderson, DR Krathwohl, PW Airasian, KA Cruikshank, RE Mayer, PR Pintrich, J. Raths, MC Wittrock (Eds.), A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Allyn & Bacon, Boston (2001). …
Dale, L., van der Es, W. and Tanner, R. 2010. CLIL Skills. Haarlem: European Platform.
Rosie and Liz will be back soon with more ideas and advice on CLIL!