About the two-year C1 course, teachers & methodology

Can you lend me a hand with some brooding over the C1 course? I would like to ask you to answer these questions if you manage the time. You can do 1 (the polls), or 1 + 2 (reading why’s), or 1 + 2 + 3 (developing your own analysis).

1. The Polls – this will take you very little time and it’ll be of great help. It’s anonymous and you can tick as many answers AS APPLY TO YOUR CASE.

NB: In the polls, I’m not including Education for Equality because all teachers need to include in their teaching this crosscurricular subject — not only me, OK?

2. Background Information. Explaining the whys of this post

As you know, because when we started this 2018-19 academic year our syllabus was for a year, not two, we’ve had to adapt to the new situation throughout the course, so I asked my colleagues in our last meeting if it would be OK for me to stay with you C1.1’s next year too in C1.2, so we can succeed in our mission of covering all the points the C1 syllabus included! You see, in our Department we try to choose groups expressing preferences and then reaching a consensus, because we think teaching is a very complex matter and it’s important each teacher feels positive about her or his levels.

I’ve been thinking that considering the methodology we use in class, which was published by my school as the C1 Resource Pack, is so novel to so many students (in spite of the fact that it is not that new, really — textbooks share a lot of the aims and procedures I explain. Actually, I learned those in textbooks too!), and the fact that we use original materials which you share via your projects and which I share in non-stop diagnoses throughout the year, to adapt to individual and group needs, I think it would be a good idea…

• to allow students taking the c1.1 course with me one year to continue with me (the same teacher) the following year too, whether in the c1.2 course or because they need to take the c1.1 course again.

For the English Department this would mean I would have a two groups of C1 every year, a c1.1 non-certifying group and a c1.2 certifying group, which would need to be the same students I worked with the first year. In our last Department meeting we talked about this, due to the peculiar situation we faced this year, and my colleagues agreed I should teach the new c1.2 course next year, and stay in my old c1.1 (with new students and whoever decides to take the c1.1 course again). But now I’m thinking this should be so hereafter!

About next year, because B2 students will be able to move on to the c1.1 course, I imagine we will have new groups and more teachers giving the C1 level, which is wonderful because then students will have more teachers, days and hours to choose from. But so far in our School (since 2013 that I know) levels are understood as individual one-year courses and we have not had one teacher staying two years in a row with a same group — mostly for organizational reasons, not because we did not want to.

3. The Question or Writing Topic. I would like to know what you think about this proposal:

• spending two learning years with the same teacher at the advanced level.
  Do you think this would be a good decision? Why (not)?

Writing Tips. Approach: You can speak in general and then focus on or illustrate with your own case, or else, you can focus on your own case OR speak in general! 😀

Deadline and Language: You can answer whenever suits you best — preferably before the end of June 2019, in English or Spanish or both! The good thing about answering in Spanish is that I could share it more broadly; say, with the School’s Claustro (teachers’ governing body) and Consejo Escolar (the school’s most important governing body), and the authorities when they request info about the C1 courses at EEOOII.