Facilitating EMI with Teachers in Bahrain

[#facilitation👩🏻‍🏫] While I love big events and all the #community building it nurtures, it is so inspiring to spend time with #teachercolleagues in smaller groups where we can really have fun sharing ideas on how to tackle big sticky #challenges.

Today was just like that. It was my last day in #Bahrain, where I spent time with a small group of teachers tackling the increasingly common challenge of shifting to English as a medium of instruction (as opposed to teaching Math and Science in Arabic).

There were two aha moments:

1️⃣: One for the teachers: from what I could see, it was at the point where I shared this: now you’ve shifted to EMI, you’re no longer “just” a science or math teacher. You’re a language teacher too.

“Oooh… yikes!” said the energy!

2️⃣: One for me: teachers, and people in general know a lot already. A large part of facilitation is not in sharing “new” information as such… a big part of training is in the inspiring and motivating.

If you’re a math or science teacher who is shifting to teaching your subject in English and looking for support, there is a wonderful article by Margaret Cooze on the Cambridge University Press Education #BrighterThinking Blog, which helped inform today’s session. Well worth a read for teachers facing this challenge. 💪

Here’s the link:

🔗 https://lnkd.in/dScXXvCF

P.S. The room we were in had a couple of whiteboards, and I couldn’t help but squeal a little to use them after such a long time. I just love a whiteboard, chalkboard… any kind of board that you can write on. 🖍🤓🥲😆

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sumbella_facilitation-community-teachercolleagues-activity-7035677488642940928-idM-