CLIL sessions

Session 1
My very first Clil session was on 17th September in Taranto to a group of secondary school teachers.
The title of my talk was "Moving from theory into Practice: looking at the CLIL tool kit". The whole preparation time was quite nerve-wracking and yet still exciting.  The more I was reading material about clil and the more I was feeling hungry. I would have never thought that there was such a massive amount of resources being produced around this new area of study. Besides, most of this material is available on line!  

Session 2
Here is instead my second talk "Lesson planning: focus on CLIL classroom interaction"  as the title suggests it was more about  how to promote  interactive classrooms, keep your TTT under control and enhance student-centre approach.
I mainly focused on planning the lesson in a different way so that we could give:

• More space to students;

• Ask questions which require them to extend their thinking and which encourage them to increase their contributions;

• More diverging and high order thinking questions (critically thinking students!!);

• More task activities: the more they are involved with the content, the more they will understand and retain;

• More effective classrom questions: to question well is t teach well (C. Degarmo, 1911);

• Be prepared to allow wait-time (5-6 secs to activate the cognitive processes on subject content and thinking. 

Session 3
Yesterday, I had a co-session with Chris Williams. Both sessions focused on resources. Chris concentrated more on on line resources available for clil teachers to investigate. He did an incredible job putting together so much material which obviously needs to be sifted through to evaluate whether it would suit your teaching context or not.
My session was about "Web 2.0 clil tools". I presented some of the tools which I have already tried-out with my own classes and some of them have revealed very successful. I wanted to consider whether the same ones could find some space within clil teaching contexts.