Aura Trujillo
Co-designer of Let's eat healthy
What did I learn in the course?
In the school where I am doing my practicum I have seen some projects in which CLIL is somewhat involved. Even so, before this course I honestly had no idea of what CLIL or CRLL were about. I have thus learned how fruitful it is to design a lesson based on and by means of real meaningful content. In addition, I think that the process of activation, presentation and production contributes a new point of view that gives the language classes a complete sense of continuity (so grammar is not random and isolated anymore).
How has the course impacted my future teaching and ideas? How has it contributed to my development as a teacher?
After thinking it through, I have got the feeling that content has always been such a wasted element in language classes, just a topic to give a cursory glance at. Basically, in this course I have learned something really useful and interesting to further develop in the future. I do not know yet exactly how or to what extent (my whole future is uncertain in this sense!) but I do appreciate a lot what I have seen and read about because I am very interested in using rich knowledge for language learning. In short, I have found out a new approach to teach a language (especially CRLL), which offers a bunch of opportunities.
What have I learned with the project and how has it made me rethink / reshape my role as a language teacher?
The first thing that comes to my mind is that I have realized with this project how thoroughly a CRLL lesson has to be prepared. Creating a language class from some rich content requires a lot of work; needless to say though how worth it is because the resulting lessons are truly meaningful and well-rounded. For me it is also a matter of perspective, as I used to first think of what grammar focus I wanted to teach in order to plan my lesson. Quite the opposite, now I see it makes much more sense to choose a topic and then predict what language items students may need in order to communicate. And, in addition, they learn much more than English, which is an added value. In this sense teaching is more appealing than ever.
How have I participated in the course project?
The three of us have coordinated pretty well in terms of work load. We all had some initial brainstorming and made decisions together and then, we divided the tasks we had to so that each of us could focus on something. I devoted myself to technical and formal aspects of the project. Besides, I got the chance to experience real teaching in this class we were given the opportunity to go, which was very rewarding: first of all, because we were testing out our own project (and it is so fulfilling to have such a coherent lesson built upon a complex topic) and then, because we could see wether the project would work out with the kids or not. The outcome was more than satisfying.
