By Rosemary Moore

I never expected a visit to Google headquarters in California to make me a better teacher, but it did.  Google is the company known for its exceedingly fast Internet search engine.  You type in a few words and in less than a second get 300,000 plus responses, many of which will probably answer your question. How do they do that? And what does this possibly have to do with education?

Google and other hi-tech corporations – Yahoo, YouTube and eBay – are successful because they have learned how to unleash creativity.  That is what our schools should be doing, too.  The time-honoured method of teaching – lecture – requires brain surgery: opening students’ skulls and pouring information in (what psychologist and author, Carl Rogers, called the “mug and jug” theory of education.) Students study and are expected to recite what they have read, or what teachers have told them. Lecture is an efficient way to deliver concise information. However, the message is clear: “These 30 pages of text on the Civil War are all you need to know about the subject.”

 
Rather than diluting, distilling and spoon-feeding information, our job as educators should be to help students discover themselves, their talents and the exciting questions that need to be answered. We must encourage their creativity and their output. How can we do that?

 
I see a model for schools everywhere in what I observed at Google in Mountain View, CA .

 
•    Google workers are connected to the world through the Internet. They have access to all the information currently available to answer their questions.

 
•    Google workers eat nutritious meals and snacks. You won’t find a soda dispenser on their campus. You will be able to savour three, free, healthy meals daily, as well as snacks.

 
•    Google workers collaborate on their projects. They share ideas and make discoveries. They spend their mealtimes eating outside on a patio, playing with ideas and sparking one another’s imaginations.

 
•    Google workers are free to stop “work” and play volleyball on a sand court, play an etude on the grand piano, take a walk or a swim.

 
•    Google workers have both individual offices and quiet open areas where they can think and complete their projects.

 
And, my favorite:

 
•    Google workers are expected to spend 20% of their time on the job pursuing an idea that interests them, chasing a sunbeam that may have no connection with their assigned work. At every turn they are rewarded for taking initiative.

 
If that’s not enough to motivate, Google corporate will financially support an innovator’s new ideas if he or she can convince two co-workers that the idea has merit.

 
Sounds like a dream, and perhaps you doubt that high school students are capable of learning in an environment like PhDs. But I believe that students are capable of learning in a structured environment that offers comparable benefits.

 
Schools can offer every one of the Google incentives: Internet connections, brain food, time for play and collaboration, quiet space and community space, and time for individual projects.

 
I am not advocating the Summerhill School of the 60s in which students make all the decisions. I am advocating an environment in which students are given responsibility for their own learning and opportunities to explore their own interests – interests that will lead to a productive career and an inspired life.

 
The mission of educators is to break down the walls in our schools and provide opportunities for students to develop the inquisitiveness, collaborative framework, research skills, and confidence they need to meet the future.

 
One of Google’s mottos is: “Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun.”  Education should also be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.  When we create an environment that fosters initiative, creativity, collaboration, and responsibility, we create life-long learners whose ideas may change the world.

(Marsh, D. 2002. Content and Language Integrated Learning: The European Dimension – Actions, Trends and Foresight Potential).

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This would seem a good reason as any to promote an approach with a twin set of objectives. One of these objectives is clearly educational (to learn subject content and a foreign language) and the other is administrative. Since educational and administrative needs often fight for space, this seems a good way to promote peace between them. We were told in the European Council Resolution in 1995 that,
“…..all EU citizens, by the time they leave compulsory schooling, should be able to speak two languages other than the mother tongue”.
Curricula attempting to achieve this aim have been getting more and more desperate in their attempts to find timetabling space. What is the possible answer to this problem? Why CLIL, of course. Instead of studying Geography in the majority language, do it in a foreign language. As long as it works, the pupils learn the same subject concepts and skills, but increase contact time with the foreign language – crucial consideration in the improvement of attainment levels.

“…an approach to bilingual education in which both curriculum content (such as science or geography) and English are taught together. It differs from simple English-medium education in that the learner is not necessarily expected to have the English proficiency required to cope with the subject before beginning to study“.

(Graddol D. English Next, British Council Publications, 2006)

Graddol suggests that a powerful element of CLIL is its role in the improvement of language skills, and that pupils do not necessarily need a particularly high level of foreign language attainment to do their ‘CLIL-ing’. Now this sounds quite radical. Why?
Because the teachers would have to adjust their methodology to ensure that the students were understanding the content.
Teachers would not be able to simply ‘transmit’ the content, assuming that their audience understood. They would have to think of other means (group work, tasks, etc) which would result in an increase of the skill-based focus of the learning.
The educational materials (textbooks) would also have to reflect this approach.
The pupils would be learning language that was more clearly focused on, and related to, the subject matter that they needed to learn.
CLIL is not confined to higher-achieving students. It is not an approach for the elite. It fits in perfectly with a mixed-ability philosophy.
Ensuring that students understand the content, reducing teacher-talk, increasing the focus on skills, influencing publishers to do likewise and getting students to learn language items that are always contextualised, always functionally necessary in the classroom – sound good at any level of curricular discourse. What is CLIL? Well already it looks as if it is something like ‘good practice’, and if we take Graddol at his word, it can be applied across the ability range.



Finally, another quote that extends the scope of CLIL still further;
“CLIL is about using languages to learn… It is about installing a ‘hunger to learn’ in the student. It gives opportunity for him/her to think about and develop how s/he communicates in general, even in the first language”.

(Marsh, Marsland & Stenberg, 2001)

We can see from the first part of the underlined sections that CLIL views language as a ‘vehicle’, not simply as an entity in itself. This is a central component of the CLIL package. David Graddol said something similar too in his book English Next, when he talked about the world now viewing English not so much as a language but as a core skill. This is a crucial observation, and it lies at the heart of the educational and social change that has taken place since the development of the Internet and the parallel growth of globalisation. As English becomes an essential add-on to any curricular programme around the world, it is moving into a position where it becomes a subject that pupils learn in order to do something else.
CLIL, with its ‘dual-focused’ aims, encapsulates perfectly this post-modern, utilitarian view of the English language. Liberal educationalists may not agree with it, but for the time being it is here to stay. In its defence, CLIL also seems to contribute to the buzz-concept of our times – namely ‘motivation’. Teachers’ forums talk about it endlessly, as do the blurbs on the back of scholastic textbooks and the opening lines of ministerial declarations. Does CLIL install a ‘hunger to learn’ as Marsh et al claim? If this is true, then we need to know exactly why. We can examine this in subsequent articles, but for now, why should CLIL motivate more than other conventional approaches? Could it be because:
It provides reasons for learning and improving the foreign language level, because the understanding of the subject content is compulsory.
It focuses on and assesses the subject content, so the learner is not being assessed on his/her mastery of the Past Simple (for example) but rather his/her ability to use it in the appropriate places.
It gives students a feeling of real achievement. They are coping with, and talking and writing about, complex material in the foreign language.
They are not being asked to discuss ‘vox-pop’ content as in standard language learning textbooks (Pop Stars, Global Warming, My Favourite Auntie) – where the content is used as a slave to illustrate a certain language structure – but because the content is important in itself. In CLIL there is a chance that they are being asked their opinions because the expression of opinions (for example) is a key competence in the syllabus content.

Credits:
The cartoon strips “CLIL Times” used in this article are by Manel Piñeiro

1. Behaviourism.
Key names: Thorndike & Skinner.
The idea is that we learn by building associations between thinking and behaviour. From a stimulus, you get a response which has a consequence. You get the answer right and you’re rewarded (maybe praise or a gold star). You need a lot of drilling and practice in such things as letter shaping and grammar patterns, but can be encouraged through games and songs. The teacher is in control of the activity, timing, pace and materials. Stimuli are often provided through flashcards.
Drawbacks: Little attention to individual needs and interests; rigid, fixed routines and contexts may be rather artificial and practice mechanical.

2. Constructivism.
Key name: Piaget.
Here learning is seen as the result of interaction between thought and experience through a sequence of developmental stages. By being exposed to new experience we restructure our thoughts to create another, new state of affairs. The new is thus accommodated and assimilated. Learners are active participants in examining and discovering the world so play is important as is variety and stimulation; we use realia, colourful materials and encourage discovery.
A drawback might be the focus on the individual, disregarding the social dimension of learning.

3. Social Constructivism.
Key names: Vygotsky & Bruner.
There is here an emphasis on the social / cultural context of learning and interacting with others. A child develops when given scaffolding / support by someone more knowledgeable to help construct meaning. Pair and group work, projects, board games, drama and discussion activities are emphasized as well as giving help in the form of guided writing and pre-writing tasks. Reading skills such as skimming and scanning, prediction and guessing from context are promoted along with general learning strategies.
Drawbacks: classes may be noisy and unpredictable outcomes with the variety of teacher roles needed make the teaching more demanding.
 
We can probably recognize elements of all three ways of thinking about the nature of learning and thinking in our own work.
A couple of good books to get hold of on the subject:
Margaret Donaldson: Children’s Minds.
David Woods: How Children Think And Learn.