The main focus of the training will be on active learning through the application of creative Cooperative learning techniques. Additionally creative and diverse evaluation methods will be explored and participants will develop specific materials to use with their own learners.
Target group:
The target group is schools and organisations which have strategies or core aims of improving learners key intercultural competencies including:
Cooperation, communication, initiative, entrepreneurial skills, critical and creative thinking, citizenship, teamwork, problem solving and underpinning core skills and embedding these within the subject curricula. Participants could be teachers at all levels of education from primary, secondary, further and higher education in both academic and vocational areas. Additionally senior managers, head teachers, inspectors and other educational staff responsible for teaching and learning.
Preparation: Participants will be expected to read the course program and pre released reading material before arrival at the course and to carry out the methods and evaluate them after the course.
Aims:
That participants learn how to create an inclusive and creative learning environment
That participants learn concrete, structured and creative cooperative learning methods
That participants reflect on diverse assessment methods and criteria
That participants learn through theory and practice how to incorporate cooperative learning in general into their teaching.
That participants know how to develop their own cooperative materials or to adapt existing materials in a cooperative way in their daily class practice.
During the course the following questions will be addressed;
What is intercultural education? How has it developed in Europe and why is it necessary in every classroom?
How can we create a safe and trusting class climate?
How can we increase our learners key and intercultural competences?
How can we organise our teaching in order to ensure equal access to the learning process for all learners?
How can we develop teaching materials that meets the aims of intercultural education?
Methodology: Learning by doing is our leading principle. This means that the training is organised in such a way that the participants participate and cooperate actively in group work as well as in plenary sessions. The methods introduced will be used actively during the course.
All participants should be able to discuss and present in English language, simultaneous translation is not possible.
Outcomes: Participants will have the necessary skills and materials to implement cooperative learning in their own classrooms and to guide others in implementing it. They will have developed simple and more complex concrete material in their subjects where they train the learners social and intercultural competences as well as teaching them their subject in an active, inclusive and creative way.
Follow up: On return to their home locations participants will try out the different approaches with their students/pupils and share their experience and material with other participants through e-mail and on an internet platform. The trainers will also give feedback and counselling after training if needed.
Course fee includes administration, refreshments, course materials and a certificate of attendance.
The main trainer of the course is sociologist, teacher and teacher’s trainer Guðrún Pétursdóttir
Guðrún Pétursdóttir is a Sociologist, teacher and teacher trainer. She finished her master’s degree in sociology from the Freie Universität Berlin in year 1990. Besides sociology she also studied intercultural education at the Institut für interkulturelle Erziehung at the same university and later finished the teacher’s qualification at the University of Iceland. For the last 20 years Guðrún has worked in different fields connected with migration issues and teachers training and has since 2003 ran the intercultural centre InterCultural Iceland (www.ici.is).
She taught courses at the Teachers University during the years 2003-2005 and at the pedagogical department of the University of Iceland from 2006-2009. She has run Grundtvig/Comenius/Erasmus+ In-service training courses for teachers and educators since 2004, developed cooperative learning methods and materials and she is the author of three books: Intercultural education (1999), Everyone can do something nobody can do everything; a practical handbook for teachers (2003) and Diverse Society Diverse Classrooms; Critical, Creative, Cooperative and Interculturally Competent Learners and Teachers Ready for the 21st Century (2018)
You can watch a short video from the course on our fb page: https://www.facebook.com/263369640353211/videos/1800028006687359/
For any further information about a more detailed program, please contact Guðrún: gudrun@ici.is
