We wanted our teachers to have an opportunity to work on developing their own language competences, to broaden their skills and strengthen their motivation. The main aim was to equip them in theoretical and practical knowledge of using the CLIL method in their didactic work with the students and to allow them to exchange experiences with foreign teachers who were already actively working with CLIL in their schools. We wanted the teachers to be able to plan CLIL lessons and extracurricular activities on their own and to carry out these lesson plans with their classes. In the future we would like to open an experimental European linguistic class and the experience of CLIL-trained teachers will be an invaluable asset. An additional, but equally important goal, was providing the teachers with positive stimuli and means to battle professional burnout.
We have been active in European projects since 2003, constantly developing our school's educational offer. It requires constant effort of our teaching staff, not only on the subject matter of each project, but also on their own language skills. A lot of teachers go abroad as accompanying persons for groups of students, so developing their language competences is crucial.Another reason was the fact that on implementing the reform of our educational system our aim was to create bilingual classes, as it seemed a natural solution due to our long traditions of international cooperation and by the decision of our city's authorities this opportunity was taken away from us. Bilingual classes were only created in those schools, which had already had such classes as middle secondary schools. Believing that we do have a lot linguisitically competent and experienced in European cooperation teachers, we decided to use our assets and start using CLIL as an experiment in all our classes in as many subjects as possible, as our goal is to offer our students an opportunity to develop their language competences in the best possible way.