As the SILLiSS project neared completion teachers were asked to give feedback on:

• their planning process and the support they received
• their experience of the transdisciplinary approach
• teaching and learning with an intercultural language learning approach, and
• their future aspirations in IcLL.
  

The planning process

The planning process was much more demanding than anticipated for most teams, in terms of time taken, format, level of detail required and links with the Essential Learnings.

The planning process was a bit of hard slog. It required that in depth thinking that we want from our students so that by the end of the day we were exhausted.

Collaborative planning is always a difficult thing in a busy school year. The allocation of time away from school was really important and without it we would not have been able to plan or implement this project. I am glad that we chose not to include any other teachers at this stage of the project, as this would have made it near impossible to complete.

The collaborative process was a positive learning experience and a big step forward in our thinking.

Need a good lead in time – lots of thinking time before you start – you can’t rush that … team meets once a week.

Keep it simple! We found it was best to use something we had already done in the past as a basis.

Having access to 13 days relief afforded us the time to meet and really engage with the difficulties of planning and drafting the learning sequence.

Many of the teachers commented on the value of meeting as a whole state group because of the chance to ‘network’ with other language teachers, and also because of the excitement generated by seeing all the different approaches taken.

Teachers were happy with the content and with the timing of the professional learning days – March, May and August. Although several teams had not finished their learning sequences by the ‘sharing day’, all were able to share their plans and experiences.

I found the PL [professional learning] days to be of great benefit. The peer support, looking at one another’s plans, hearing what other teams were doing and the sharing of ideas was really valuable.

Julie Browett’s presentation was insightful and thought provoking and provided many “light bulb” moments for me.

The three days that we had were terrific just to be able to get right away from everything else and really clarify your ideas about what it was you were going to do, and hearing everyone else’s ideas it was just so terrific and everything sounded so interesting.

Perhaps it would have been good to have a more explicit focus on the format we should use for the planning etc during the first PL day.

Central and local support, both formal and informal, was appreciated by the participating teachers.

Being able to email drafts to Janine and receive educative feedback that was both immediate and constructive made our participation in the project successful and worthwhile.

Grade supervisor involvement was excellent.

The encouragement and collegial support from within our own team was good as we were all working towards the same goal with a shared focus. It was great to see non-LOTE teachers involved in something that did involve language learning, both for myself and the students involved. It helped the students to see that the other teachers also value language learning.

Several teachers added that the difficulty of planning together was compounded when teachers were part-time or had school-wide responsibilities, such as grade supervisor, that often demanded instant response to unforeseen occurrences.

Sometimes, the planned coverage was a little too ambitious.

Keep it simple. It is better to do something really well within a smaller group. Our project got a bit out of hand and grew too quickly. That made it difficult to tie everything in across the subject areas.