1 Creativity in Elf teaching

Plenaries
 
Creativity in ELT - Making not doing
Dr Diana Hicks
 
Ever since Ken Robinson's powerful call to arms in his TED talk on creativity in education in 2006, many educators have been trying to put creativity back into the curriculum. Although it is notoriously difficult to define, we all recognise creativity when we see or experience it but we, and, more importantly, our students, may not have much experience of it in our ELT classes. Creativity is one of several 'C's' which I feel has been absent from ELT state school classrooms since uniformity in L2/L3 teaching became the goal of international coursebooks. One of the other key 'C's' is cognition and it is the absence of both which has stultified originality in ELT and generated much teacher and student demotivation in the last few years..
Any originality of thinking, which underpins creativity, requires higher order cognition; in fact, the student needs to draws on a complex set of cognitive processes to produce originality within a given set of constraints. This, I believe is one of the main aims of 21st century education. I am prepared to argue that it would be impossible to have creativity without cognition.
The plenary will provide examples of creative activities for pupils in Primary and secondary classes and appraise differences firstly , between closed and open tasks and those teachers who enjoy creativity and those who encourage creativity in learners.
This is essential as many teachers are concerned about their perceived lack of creativity and possible lack of understanding of its importance in an educational setting. The presentation focuses on providing examples of learners cognitive, creative and critical production of language. Such production should reflect their originality, thereby ensuring that ELT tasks become more intrinsically worthwhile and have more action, value and purpose. This is fundamental as most time in class is spent on 'doing' activities: the teacher says 'Do exercise 4' or 'Do the puzzle' or 'Do the gap fill' or 'Do the comprehension questions'. The pupils 'do' them, as best they can: the outcome is transient and often without personal gain or satisfaction. Respond activities such as these usually lack creativity and cognition. However, a change of verb from 'do' to 'make' allows opportunities for the outcome to be an original production which helps students make sense of the language and makes them feel proud. It is the shift from responsive to productive which would allow for greater creativity in any classroom.
 
Creativity - a challenge for classroom teacher
Anne Gilleran
 
Nurturing Creativity in the Language Class
Sarah Howell
 
Workshops
 
1. eTwinning supporting creativity.
Anne Gilleran
 
2. Let's give our class a creative makeover!
Sarah Howell
For Primary school teachers

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3. eTwinning - the most exciting community for schools in Europe
Arjana Blazic
 
In this workshop we will give an overview of eTwinning, a community for schools in Europe. We will explore the advantages of becoming a member and learn how to get started, how to link up with other teachers, start a new project, connect students and participate in projects. We will look at different ways of online and onsite professional development opportunities on the eTwinning platform.
 
3 CLIL and Pluriliteracies
 
Plenaries
 
Do' Coyle
 
Why Content is a good partner for Language...
Teresa Ting
 
Since the 2014 LEND summer school where Teresa entitled her plenary "The marriage of Language with Content: a good deal for Language?" much progress has been made to delineate the type of CLIL-Mindset that is needed to make this marriage work so that both Content and Language come out better, despite the difficulties. In particular, this talk will look at how the familiar TEFL-friend, Task-Based-Language-Teaching (TBLT) strengthens the Language-Content interface.
 
Workshops

1. CLIL... a solution for both Task Complexity (the FL challenge) and Text Complexity (the Content challenge).
Teresa Ting
 
While FL teachers seek ways to increase task complexity so to encourage learners to produce more complex language, Content teachers must seek ways to decrease text complexity so to enable learners to comprehend complex information. This workshop will accompany participants in a "guided walk" through upper secondary learning materials which illustrate how CLIL can be optimized for decreasing the complexity of content-input, yet increasing the complexity of language-output. Indeed, if upper secondary Content is already complex and unknown, even in the mother tongue, CLIL at upper secondary boils down to "learning unknown content through a foreign language"... not something we would wish upon ourselves. At the same time, if students already have problems using their mother tongue eloquently to speak and write about complex content, is CLIL the right way forward? Yes it is. This workshop will illustrate how a CLIL-Mindset enables teachers to develop learning progressions which position "complexity" at the right place, at the right time.
 
2. Making CLIL work for everyone
Diana Hicks
 
This workshop will look at different strategies we can use to make CLIL work for teachers and pupils without making teachers work more than they already are. As a catalyst for educational change, CLIL requires that we rethink how classrooms work best and shift the workload from teacher to pupil. I will present different ways to show how we can reduce the teacher's workload and, at the same time, increase pupils involvement, motivation and outcomes. Efficient and effective use of classroom time is a key factor in CLIL success especially with large, mixed ability classes.
 
We will look at different tasks to see how they work in class and appraise why some tasks are more productive than others in all contexts as a means of developing teachers' skills in materials analysis and design. I encourage teachers to bring tasks and materials with them to the workshop so that they can be analysed using the tools and framework that I will provide. This is a practical session which will focus on the heart of what we and our pupils actually do in class.
 
For Primary school teachers

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3. Teacher Talk and Student Talk in the CLIL classroom. For CLIL teachers
Jessica Smith
 
A practical workshop focusing on classroom language in a CLIL context. In the workshop we will identify the purpose of classroom language for the teacher and focus on questions teachers can use to promote thinking. We will also look at different methods to encourage student talking time. The seminar is for CLIL teachers , everyone is welcome! 
 
For Clil Teachers

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