Pilgrim’s is a teacher training institute in Canterbury. Every Summer, as soon as all students go home for their holiday, the staff move their office, laptops and library to the Cornwallis building at the University of Kent. And teachers from all over Europe, ready to attend the Pilgrim courses, take over the campus from the current students. Some of their trainees are staying in the Parkwood self-catering accommodation; houses with up to six people. As the name implies, they lie in the middle of a wood and you can see rabbits, squirrels as well as an occasional fox. The rest of the attending trainees stay in the concrete jungle of Keynes, where people don’t share facilities but mingling starts over breakfast at the Dolce vita restaurant every morning.
The Pilgrim’s course takers can be either in primary, secondary or adult education and are mostly teachers of English or classroom teachers or subject teachers who teach their subject in (or should I say ‘through’?) English. They can pick a selection of courses like (Creative) methodology, Building positive group dynamics, Leadership skills for teachers, British Life and culture, Teaching difficult learners, or the two that I took this Summer: One week of CLIL (Content and language Integrated learning) and one of Multiple Intelligences. Although classes take place from 9 am until 3.30 pm, many teachers stay around for the afternoon sessions (inspiring workshops on drama, music, reading theatre, coaching or speaking activities) and come back for more at 8pm!
It definitely feels like you’re refuelling yourself for the academic year ahead, getting so many new ideas and insights, you can hardly wait to get back to school and implement them.
There are moments of deep insight, moments you feel something is shifting in your perception of the classroom reality or in your teaching practice. I had that when I took Mark Almond’s class on high status/low status in the classroom. He divided the group in two. Around ten teachers were standing and the rest of us had to observe them while they all got a card varying from 2 (low status) up to an ace (the highest status). They were told to pretend to be at a welcome back to school party for teachers and to mingle according to their status. They kept the cards to themselves and we had to figure out what the status of the different teachers would be and accordingly rank them from low to high status. Then the other group of teachers needed to stand up and had a card attached to their forehead (they stuck since ít was a sweaty day, or because they were sticky because they had been attached at teachers’ foreheads since a long time, as I understood from my colleague Louise Alix Taylor, who had done the very same activity with Mark 10 (!) years ago). I appeared to have very low status and where in real life I tend to be quite sociable and am quite good at mingling, I now felt what it was to be left out and isolated. That was a very unpleasant feeling of course. But an eye opener to experience what it really feels like to be left out nor be considered important enough to hang around with.
Other sessions I particularly liked where the singing workshop with Emily White, who got us to sing ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ in wonderful harmony in a blink of the eye and encouraged us to write our own lyirics to its melody. The one in which Adrian Underhill explained us how to teach pronunciation and of course the three coaching models we applied in the coaching skills workshop of Mike Shreeves.
Discussing the content of all those sessions, contrasting and comparing the educational reality in the different countries, together with the (two) week courses you take with a group of these teachers make this experience so worthwhile. Finding out that all of the primary teachers you speak to teach their pupils 3-5 hours of English per week for example, while we teach English half an hour per week at the Such Fun! schools and come back for small group activities for another 30 minutes is a reality check I can’t wait to share.
I was lucky enough to spend my first week in Canterbury learning about CLIL from Kerry Powell. If you want to teach a subject in English, children need to understand the content of the subject and therefor you need to teach them the English vocabulary through scaffolding. We learned how to classify language in three parts: the academic language (CALP), that is divided in two: the content or topic specific language and the cross curricular language, that is applicable to other topics and subjects as well as the social or everyday language (BICS), which is the general classroom language. CALP takes longer to learn and is quite artificial, it is a challenge to think of ways how to teach it, whereas BICS is the communicational and interactional language that will be picked up easily, in the playground or on the street.
In the Such Fun! scheme we use a lot of picture books for our youngest learners and Julie Wallis showed us how to apply CLIL techniques when we are teaching our very young learners as well.
CLIL in combination with multiple intelligences was pointed out to us in an inspiring assignment: when we left the course the previous day, our teacher had asked us to really pay attention to how we went from our apartment to our classroom (intrapersonal, visual spatial). The next day, we had to recreate the walk from our apartment to our classroom in a story filled with onomatopeia to describe the sounds (musical), describing sensations (linguistic) for all five senses (bodily kinestetic) and using every material to actually represent the walk as well (visual spatial, logical mathematical). We worked together in small groups (interpersonal). While we were working, a piece of classical music was playing (musical). We presented our walks to one and other and this was a great example of how to combine CLIL and multiple intellgences in our teaching.
In the Such Fun! scheme we use a lot of picture books for our youngest learners and Julie Wallis showed us how to apply CLIL techniques when we are teaching our very young learners as well.
In my second week I could join Stefania Ballotto and a new group of teachers who had been working on multiple intelligences the week before. I stumbled upon the theory of multiple intelligences during the first Pilgrim’s course I ever took, Language and methodology by Wendy Arnold, some eight years ago. The theory by psychologist Howard Gardner was published over thirty years ago and states “human beings have evolved to have several different Intelligences and not one general intelligence”. He proves that these intelligences can be indicated in different parts of the brain and states that students should be “allowed to demonstrate their deep understanding of what is being taught not by written testst but by creating and carrying out ‘performances’ instead”. Given that this theory appealed to me from the start, I have always tried to teach taking in account the multiple intelligences in our learners, and the curriculum we’ve developped over the years reflects this theory quite a bit. No wonder I felt in my comfort zone during this course, enjoying so many creative assignments and activities to point out its theory. Also, the restructured assesment Mrs Ballotto asked us to accomplish: setting up a multiple intelligences museum on any topic we liked ( we chose animals) was just my cup of tea! In two days we went from an empty classroom to an interactive museum in which everyone could learn about the animal kingdom through one of the 8 intelligences. All teachers taking different pilgrim’s courses at the time were invited and their reactions were priceless.
I can recommend it to anyone to spend some of their Summer on a Pilgrim’s teacher training course, get inspired and find new colleagues and friends that will be delighted to work with you and your classes through eTwinning or in an Erasmus+ Key Action 2 partnership!
