As the title of the project „Let’s take a CLIL L.E.A.P. – Limitless Employment Abroad Possibilities“ suggests, it intends to focus on broadening the experience and perspective of the future within classrooms with an average age from eleven to fifteen years.The project itself will be realized among the partner schools from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Greece and Portugal. Each of these member schools differs in size and experience and has a different cultural and sociological background. That will additionally give the involved members new angles, from which to look at either the educational process or life in general. There are two main objectives of the project as well as there are two target groups benefiting from its fulfillment. First off, the students will be shown that the possibility of studying or perhaps even establishing a career abroad is getting more accessible by the day. This will be done in two different ways. First of those is the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) method, which we will temporarily (but hopefully permanently) integrate into the schools’ curricula. We believe it will prove to the students that most of them already have what it takes to consider their possibilities outside their own country. The second part is the actual hands-on experience for students, who will be chosen to travel abroad. They will meet and conduct interviews with ordinary foreign citizens with a specific employment characteristics. Therefore, we believe students will see the benefits of CLIL method in real-life situation, in which they will be using English in order to accomplish a “non-language” objective. Consequently, the students will be asked to give form to the gained information and share it with the rest of the involved community. By doing that, we hope to address the widest possible audience with their results.Secondly, the partner schools and teachers will have an opportunity to get accustomed with the CLIL method (in case they have not worked with it before), try and embrace different approaches towards the method and more importantly, share any kind of experience they have had with CLIL so far. This is how schools unacquainted with CLIL will get a chance to grasp its concept and basics, whereas more experienced school will be encouraged to contemplate and share what they have already worked out. To ensure that insufficient experience with CLIL is in no way obstructive or disadvantageous for the school’s advancement in the project, there will be organized seminars throughout the joint staff meetings.The following will be the products of the joint effort on the project:Website – There will be a website created and managed to contain every important piece of information and to make it available to every interested party.Database of CLIL materials – Every member school will be responsible for the creation and management of one of these databases. There will be a total of five different databases, each consisting of education materials using CLIL method and concerning a particular set of school subjects. Joint Magazine – The students, who will be chosen to be a part of the short-term joint student exchanges, will be encouraged to share their experience and newly-gained information via production of a short magazine. Such written expression of their endeavors will not only spread the word around, but also motivate students from different to work with each other and improve their language skills at the same time.Erasmus Day – With the project coming to an end, the Erasmus Day will serve as its climax. Its purpose will be to spread the information about the project and thus make the project transparent to other students, teachers, parents and local community. It will display the products of our collective effort.
In the 2-year-long duration of the “Let’s take a CLIL L.E.A.P. – Limitless Employment Abroad Possibilities” project, all five enlisted partner schools have contributed and cooperated to achieve all the pre-set goals of the project. The differences among partner schools were noticeable and have also brought a sense of variety into the project, including not only the size and number of students, but also various teaching methods as well as social and financial background of the school. All the partners schools’ profiles can be seen on the website clil-leap.weebly.com, originally created by the Hungarian school. Furthermore, the database, magazines and all other materials created for the project are accessible there. The actual CLIL method was introduced to schools, which had had no prior experience. There were presentations, seminars discussions leading to successful implementation of the CLIL method. Schools with experience have shared their know-how among the group. The database of lesson plans using the method was created to show that all partner schools grasped the essentials of CLIL and encourage all potential interested teachers or schools to start as well. Afterwards, the CLIL method was used both within and outside of the project activities. Students in every partner school had the opportunity to communicate with foreign visitors when hosting the partner schools. They could also see the benefits of participating in a project on an international scale. They can read the project’s magazines and see for themselves how ordinary people live and work in different European countries. By using the CLIL method, they could test themselves and see how difficult it would be for them to study or work abroad using English. Students, who had been chosen to travel to a foreign country could get to know different educational systems, lifestyle and cultures. Additionally, they conducted the interviews, which enhanced their foreign-language skills and provided them with a chance to use a foreign language outside of the pre-defined, “artificial” situations that teachers create within lessons. At the end of each mobility, each of the participating students was asked to fill in a form, which was collected to evaluate the student’s experience and shown for others to see the benefits of participation. Every school organized an Erasmus Day. During that time, all available physical content and results of the project were displayed within the school halls and classrooms. It was thus made available to the public, including the parents, employees of local press and members of the city hall, who were naturally invited too. Even after the Erasmus Day, the partner schools will carry on using CLIL method within their curricula and hopefully they will continue taking part in Erasmus projects in the future, with students and teachers getting more and more experienced in organizing and taking part in them.