More important than funding we have always believed that teachers are more creative and develop more engaging and exciting resources when they plan and work collaboratively inside and outside the classroom. Apart from EU support to run training in the nineties enabled by enlightened UK civil servants, we have survived, independently, leanly and meanly, with no external funding. Our project, initially inspired by Andrew Wilkinson's work with us in Birmingham on oracy developing responses to the Bullock Report, grew out of the "teachers as researchers" initiative in the 1960s and 70s and was funded and nurtured by the Inner London Education Authority. They also allow learners to move confidently from social language to curriculum/academic talk and from there to informed readubg abd writing. Our activities scaffold talk for all learners and help teachers plan for the language to support thinking. Talk is good for all learners and vital for children learning a new language while they are learning. Unfortunately there is also evidence that talk has been and still is neglected in our classrooms and this has widened the gap in attainment. There is also now neurological evidence that talk fuels brain development. There is increasing evidence that talk and thinking work together to develop new meanings. Third to encourage exploratory talk in the classroom. We don't want to oversimplify concepts nor patronise learners, but we try to break ideas down by presenting them in case studies with lots of detail and visual examples. Learners learning English while they are learning everything else thrive on challenging activities that are quickly comprehensible. Second to make complex ideas accessible by providing ways in which they can be presented in concrete, visual, tactile and playful ways. We want to nurture emotional and social development and make learners confident in sharing what they know. Our activities can be used as they are, or tweaked a little to suit different classrooms or they can be an inspiration/a template for you to develop your own resources that we hope you will in turn share with us.įirst to develop resources that empower learners by encouraging them to work with every other learner, including new arrivals to English, in their class in a playful, but purposeful and creative, way. We support a creative teacher network that shares resources that scaffold talk. Improving our links with colleagues who share our approach to learning and encouraging them to share their resources.Ĭollaborative Learning is practitioner led, has evolved over the last sixty years and is still evolving. ![]() They work well in CLIL classrooms too!ĭeveloping new activities to support exploratory talk in many languages around stories in early years between children and parents/teachers.ĭeveloping challenging information gap activities for well motivated late arrivals, literate in first language, in secondary schools. Collaborative Learning activities help to create inclusive EAL friendly classrooms. Excellent for all learners,endorsed by the EEF and vital for learners new to English.
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