Bodrum Course 2016

Getting ready for the future!  Training Inquirers and life-long learners!
 
Let’s look at the approach used in Finland, No! let’s take examples from the system in Singapore. No, no, no, the South Korean style sounds much more effective!
 
We are always looking for and comparing different education curriculums and approaches, and trying to take the best ideas to implement in our own teaching, being the developing teachers we are.  Therefore this training focuses on the development of the whole child as an individual in order to guide or train them to be life-long learners and inquirers both in and outside the classroom.  Integrating 21st century skills into an inquiry based curriculum has started to become the trend in education. In essence teachers have been leaning towards an international curriculum where individualized learning, differentiation, focus on a constructivist approach with the emphasis on training students to take responsibility of their own learning, has become a leading trend in education around the world.  This workshop aims to look at the following areas regarding recent trends in international education:  

•   21st century skills
•   the modern learner profile,
•   aims for the primary years education,
•   laying out effective classrooms,
•   constructing an inquiry-based curriculum,
•   integrating action into the curriculum,
•   learner training for a constructivist approach,
•   differentiated teaching,
•   focusing on developing skills,
•   assessment techniques,
•   the effectively approaching primary educational trends around the world and their benefits to our teaching,

 
Basically this workshop aims to include and share lots of practical ideas and activities you could take back with you. Don’t forget to bring along your ideas and expertise to share together to form a rich pool of knowledge and ideas.


Assessing English for Academic Purposes in the 21st Century ‘Capacity Building for the Next Generation’
 
Aims of the Course
Assessment is an essential part of all English language teachers’ jobs. However, most BA programs, and even most MA programs, do not sufficiently equip English teachers with the knowledge and skills they need in order to write good tests. The aim of this course, therefore, is to provide participants with the theoretical knowledge and the practical skills they will need in order to produce effective tests for their students.  
 
Course Outline
We start off by looking at the key cornerstones of testing, namely validity, reliability, practicality, and other key principles of testing such as, backwash, transparency, security and usefulness. We will also look at the increasingly important issue of authenticity, and we will examine ways to make EAP assessment more authentic. Another key area we will look at is the difference between formative and summative assessment.
 
We then move on to look testing the receptive skills, namely reading and listening. We will examine the 12 steps we need to go through in order to produce good reading and listening tests. The following day will be devoted to assessing the productive skills, namely writing and speaking. We will look at writing good rubrics and criteria, and how to ensure reliable rating.  
 
The penultimate day will be given over to assessing language, namely grammar and vocabulary, and participants will be introduced to a range of test task types that can used to discretely test language skills. The final day we will look at alternative assessment and discuss how we can incorporate it into an over assessment scheme. The final session will look at the many benefits of computerized assessment, and we will discuss how the great potential of computerized testing can be fully realized.