Wellcome to the TREL research workshop. The two-day workshop will focus on addressing pedagogical challenges that arise in your classroom, including aspects such as teaching methodologies, interaction with students, and assessment strategies as well as creating an engaging and motivating environment for them to learn.

In preparation for our workshops, we kindly request you to reflect on the following question: ‘What bugs you?’ referring to ‘What challenges or issues do you currently encounter in your teaching environment?’

Please post your response and read others to identify similarities and/or differences. Feel free to ask questions & make comments

2)The other topic I may want to work on is how to teach more academic sentence structures while maintaining an engaging and motivating environment for the learners.

First of all, if students are not doing even the home tasks and expects teachers to pour the knowledge on them, it's impossible that they would improve their language skills.

Secondly, even if they study during the lessons, they should still develop their inner motivation, because the language they learn should teach them not only the language but the culture they need to adapt into. If they are not willing to take responsibility and practice outside the school, the language skills won't improve.

Quite often this leads to need of improving students' self-directing and self-evaluation skills.

When we start a new subject they are not interested in reading.

I will try to motivate students to see the effect of read as a study technic. And reading as an action practise to collaborate by.

Give more time to read, conversation, doing relevant action and discussing.

Many of the tasks were based on sharing in groups and collaborating in pairs or groups. This was more demanding of course. We had to make lesson plans in the subjects we teach to increase learning for students who do not have Norwegian as the native language. We presented, asked questions and commented on the other people's lesson plans. The feeling was still safe and good, and we did learn from each other.

However, what does it take to actually change your teaching? As we are creatures of habit? Through the university course, I have changed my beliefs and attitudes; however, I need to keep focusing on what I learnt to change my behaviour in the classroom, so I think, it is not enough to learn, collaborate and change. If we are to change our best practice in the classroom, we need to maintain focus over time.

Peer coaching and mentoring:

How: A colleague observed my teaching practice (one session) and I got feedback from the observation afterwards. Then we both reflected on the situation. Next session, we changed roles and I observed my colleague’s teaching practice.

My experience: I felt more involved when I was the observer and I think I was able to relate more to my own practice when I observe my colleague in action.

Why it was so? When I was the object for observation, I felt a bit stressed. Maybe because I was too concerned about how I conducted the session and whether my colleague found the session interesting. Nevertheless, the reflections after the sessions were very useful.

Individual perspective was the assessment I already conduct with my students, and the level that they are on. In the groups this was brought foreward, but we also had to adapt our feedback to what UDIR told us. It's insightful to know what they want to achieve with the new way of doing exams, and important for me to try and bring this into my own teaching. While discussing the written exams with colleagues from other schools it was also useful to hear how they taught different subjects, and how I could implement what we discussed.

How did you feel?

I was eksited to try out new ways for learning.

What happend?

The studens suprised me over the amount of theory they managed to learn during an aktive and praktical session.

How you experienced it?

It challenged me to make new tasks for my students that involved a combination of practikal an theoretical learning. I had to come up with new ideas and that was challenging and motivating at the same time.

Why it was so?

i wanted my classroom and my students to be more active and to motivate them to contribute to induvidual learning and engage themselvs so that learning in total vil be more motivated and fun.

Transactional

I was excited and very keen to sit in on CLIL classes in various subjects, taught in different languages.

I experienced a lot! Observing other teachers’ lessons is interesting for many different reasons. Job shadowing is a way to generate many reflections. There were aspects of these lessons I want to use as inspiration in my own teaching and aspects that I will try to downplay or reduce. The interaction between the learning material and the activities in these lessons and how students responded to them proved to be a wake-up call! Observing teaching and learning was a reminder of how precise instructions should be and how, ideally, there should always be room for students at different levels to work efficiently to develop at their particular level. At the same time, the feeling of community and common purpose of the class and the teacher working together should also be reflected in the structure and content of the lesson. It is not easy to strike the right balance here. At the end of the day, we had a meeting with the teachers we had observed and were able to ask questions about we had observed and share our experiences when teaching CLIL lessons. This enabled us to process our experiences right away.

I shall have to define more precisely what I mean by “precise and inspiring ».

Data collection and analysis

I shall have to ask my students about how they respond to my feedback and feed forward. Do I provide the information they nee and and want? What do they want?

Feedback and evaluation

I’m going to discuss the data with my students and explain what I’m going to do and not do and why.

Research for professional development

Hopefully, this prosess will enable me to change my practice and my students will be empowered and to a greater extentbecome agents in their own learning.