Antonia Clare: Teaching the curriculum creatively
Our desire as teachers to be creative and to encourage our learners’ creativity are prime motivating factors in our own professional self-development and self-renewal. Yet there is often a tension perceived between ‘being creative’ in our lessons and the demands of standardised curricula and testing. In this interactive workshop, Antonia will explore reasons why it is so important to resolve that tension – to teach the syllabus in creative ways – and offer practical ideas for how this can be achieved.
language as a learning tool, but also to feel valued as a learner and to engage in a range of ways that seek to deepen an awareness of self, identities and wellbeing
Claudia Farradas: That’s not what I meant”: activities to develop and assess mediation skills
In this workshop, we will discuss the potential of short texts and coursebook activities to develop linguistic and cultural mediation skills. We will work together to design and adapt materials to achieve these aims and will suggest ways in which we can identify and assess the competences involved in communicating successfully as social agents.
Sarah Ellis: Encouraging creative thinking skills in the classroom
In this workshop, we will consider the importance of developing our learners' creative thinking skills and explore a variety of practical activities that can help you do this while they have fun learning English. We will include some of the activities from the activity cards packs connected to the Cambridge Life Competencies Framework, which is one way to easily integrate these crucial life competencies into lessons, at any stage, with minimum planning and maximum impact! "Education is not the learning of facts, but training the mind to think" - Albert Einstein
Anthony Green: Encouraging creative listening in the classroom
Listening in the classroom is often a source of frustration for both learners and teachers. Traditional, test-based approaches—largely unchanged since the early days of ELT—fail to meet the fundamental needs of language learners. This is especially true for Italian learners, who often struggle to decode spoken English due to its phonetic complexity, stress-timed rhythm, and frequent dropped sounds and elisions. As a result, many feel overwhelmed by the challenge of understanding real-world English. In this workshop, we will put the fun—and the success—back into L2 listening, looking at a number of ways of making listening far more learner-centred, empowering the teacher to become a facilitator. We will also be looking at ways of enabling the teacher to read the minds of their learners as they listen and make hypotheses in their Zone of Proximal Development. Learners will begin to use listening as a source of new vocabulary, while improving their pronunciation, syntax and spelling, as well as negotiating meaning and using metalinguistic discussion to resolve issues surrounding the listening process, with a good dose of healthy gamification.
Alessandro Iannella: Generative Artificial Intelligence Pedagogy: Concretize, Modify, Inspire
The workshop examines the various ways teachers can establish partnerships with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) systems. Participants are invited to experiment with these technologies in the design, development, and evaluation of educational content and learning experiences. To achieve this goal, the session also introduces the Promptuarium method — a practical tool for integrating GAI into pedagogical practices, originally developed as part of the "Teaching with AI" guide for teachers published by Treccani Giunti TVP.