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Teacher Training Course/English
Teacher Training Course/English
Start date: Aug 1, 2014,
End date: Jul 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The HLW Fohnsdorf, established in 1985, is a College of Management and Service Industries located in Upper Styria/Austria catering for girls and boys aged between 14/15 to 19/20. The school has had a long tradition in inter-cultural activities. It has, for example, carried out projects with schools in Italy, Hungary or France or projects under the umbrella of the European Union including work placement for our students abroad. Employing innovative teaching approaches, co-operative and open forms of learning and integrating people with special needs have - amongst others - been important elements of our school.
The process of selecting candidates for this project has been transparent and fair. An invitation to take part in this training giving deatails and lining out the criteria candidates have to fulfil was sent out to all teachers of our school.
The two candidates for this training have played a major role at our school both as teachers and mentors for university students aiming to become teachers themselves. Moreover, they have both been involved in inter-cultural activities such as students exchange visits and EU-projects including work placements. They both teach languages and subjects (geography) that are partially taught in English (CLIL/English as the working language) and have been involved in the implementation of new teaching approaches such as for example COOL (Dalton Plan).
These teachers have shown great efforts and commitment in further developing their teaching methods. They have also been deeply interested in broadening their students' horizon by understanding other cultures and building relationships with young people with a different cultural background or from other countries. For this reason, they would very much appreciate being given the chance of this training course in Ireland as this will help to improve their command of English and their teaching skills. Moreover, meeting other colleagues from abroad and exchanging ideas and experience will help them or their students to build bridges to others.
Our school is deeply interested in heightening the quality of teaching competence in our classrooms. Moreover, we find it very important to set up links with other schools and share ideas and best practices on international level. This makes it clear why our school firmly supports initiatives like this one.
In order to achieve these aims our project partner will offer a course for our staff that contains English language linguistic training and pronunciation work, lesson planning, in class project planning/set up and development, syllabus design, use of technologies in the classroom (ICT), and offer elements of job shadowing and work experience so our teachers can see how teachers work in other classrooms.
As far as the impact achieved and potential long term benefits are concerned, it is expected that participants will improve their knowledge, skills and ability to contribute to developing our school policy. This will add an international aspect to school subjects, projects and curriculum gained from their experience on the course and intercommunication with other teachers.
Furthermore, participants will improve their ability to manage and organize international activities with partners abroad through contacts made on the course and through e-twinning partnerships.
They will enhance their command of the English language and its use in the classroom and achieve a higher competence in the use of new technologies/new media in the classroom.
In addition, participants will also improve their knowledge of best practice in the classroom and learn about new approaches used in classroom work in other countries.
Last but not least, teachers will enlarge their knowledge of Irish culture, music and the people and country of Ireland and learn how that can be used to form a common bond between students in the European classroom.
As to dissemination of the results achieved, in-house training via meetings or workshops will be organized to inform colleagues .
Outside of our organization we plan to share our ideas with organizations similar to ourselves through e-twinning partnerships with schools in our country but also with international schools. We will also share ideas through social media promoting inter-cultural relationships .
We also plan to set up school projects that will involve our students working with international partners in the fields of Music, culture and any other area that might be of interest to our students and fits in with our curriculum and school developmental plans.