- December 21st, 2009
Scottish CILT Professional Reading Group: Thursday 28th January 2010
- Katie Barrowman
- Comments: Comments OffTags: CPD, Events, Glow Meet, language teaching, Modern Foreign Languages, Scottish CILT
Guest Post from Catriona Oates of Scottish CILT
If you have ever taken part in a book discussion group and thought the format might well be useful for professional purposes, then put this date in your diary – Thursday 28th January 4pm -5pm.
At Scottish CILT ( the Scottish Centre for Information on Languages Teaching and Research ) we are committed to supporting the professional development of languages teachers across Scotland. We do this in several ways: through our programme of CPD events both national and local, on an outreach basis; through our news updates and enquiry service, and through the on-line educational journal, the Scottish Languages Review. We dipped our toes into Glow last session and had our first on-line CPD event in June, which was very successful, attracting 17 participants from across Scotland. We then live streamed the keynote talks from our national conference on MLPS in September.
This session, we took inspiration from David Niven of Wallace High School in Stirling and decided to follow his lead and organise a virtual professional reading group. This is a great idea that David started in his department and it hits a lot of targets for us. We like to think that we help teachers develop professionally through reflection on their own practice and engaging in professional dialogue.
We know that money is tight and CPD budgets are coming under increasing strain; we edit and publish a cost –free educational journal of relevance to languages teachers. It is the most frequently visited part of our website attracting hits worldwide, but we’d like more teachers in Scotland to be aware of it and make use of it, so our first reading text will be Content and Language Integrated Learning : Motivating Students, Motivating Teachers by Prof Do Coyle of Aberdeen University. Do gave the keynote talk at our September national conference and inspired many teachers to think about content and how we approach this in languages classrooms. We’d like to take a closer look at her thoughts on this and make a space to discuss what might be attractive in this idea; what might the barriers be, and where these ideas fits in with Curriculum for Excellence.
If you’d like to join us please get in touch – either with Mandy Reeman Clark (mandy.reemanclark@strath.ac.uk) or myself, Catriona.Oates@strath.ac.uk to register interest for the event and download your free copy of the reading paper. Looking forward to seeing you in the new year!
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