Dear all,

we have come to the end of another hectic yet successful semester. Below you can find the TLDU update for the Spring Semester.

1. ScOLa ELT Conference

We have successfully completed our first ELT conference journey. We hope it was a day well-spent with lots of idea sharing and learning opportunities for all of us.  Thank you to those who put effort to make the conference happen for their incredible work and and to those who attended the conference and contributed to this success! We are looking forward to having another successful conference in the near future 🙂

2. Continuous Professional Development

Believing in the importance of continuous professional development, we support all ScOLa instructors who would like to invest in their professional development in different ways.  Below you can find the details of the professional development activities that we had at ScOLa this semester.

2.a. Common time development sessions
There were six sessions in the spring semester and all of them were repeated so that instructors with different timetables could join (Please see the table below). In total, 74 participants attended these sessions. We would like to thank our colleagues who gave the sessions voluntarily and the ones who attended and contributed to these sessions. We hope we will continue sharing our ideas and expertise with each other in the future 🙂

You can find some photos from the sessions below:

2.b. Research Sessions

Nagihan Aydın, Sinem Erdağ Altuğ, Aysel Kalcıoğlu, and Fatemeh Layegh completed the first round of the research journey and received their certificates!


They attended the sessions below and completed the necessary requirements:
•The research question
•The introduction and the purpose statement
•Literature Review
•Methodological Design
•Data collection
•Data analysis
•Research ethics
For each session there were suggested articles to read prior to the session. During the sessions, there were group discussions and hands-on-practice in order to internalize the input. The group came up with guidelines to follow in order to utilize while conducting their research. And after the sessions, participants were expected to work on their research.

We wish them good luck in continuing their research!

2.c. Conferences/Trainings attended in & outside ScOLa:

This year our colleagues from different programs in ScOLa participated in more than 20 different events with the aim of professional development in and outside Turkey. Below you can see the list of the attendees and the events supported this year.

2.d. Induction:
The spring module started with a meeting which was held with the participation of Nergis U. and all the new instructors to go over the feedback received for the first half of the induction program and learn about the reflections of the instructors as well as discuss the actions for the new semester. The instructors also attended the peer observation session in which the aims and conventions of the peer-observation were discussed and the peer-observation tool was shared. Throughout the semester there were also in-class observations, video observations, reading and reflection tasks were completed by the participants based on their individual needs. We would like to thank all the participants for their efforts.

3. Extra/Co-curricular Language Development Activities

3.a. B1 project

 

Although the B1 project class started with 140 students, 39 students completed it successfully. Students were expected to attend the 90% of the sessions and complete all the oral or written tasks during and after each session as well as the final project which was shooting a short movie. The first phase of the project started with the input sessions/tasks which provided students with the opportunity to read and listen to different views of different parties on the generational differences and challenges of teaching the new generation. All the tasks were in line with B1 level objectives and some of the tasks completed were conducting interviews with their teachers, reporting their interviews in the sessions, participating in group discussions, conducting research on the issue and presenting their findings orally in the classroom. For each task they were assessed based on the criteria that had been shared with them. The second phase of the project started with narrowing their topics down and learning about the features of shooting an effective short movie. They were supposed to choose a problem related to teaching the new generation, to raise awareness of others on the issue and propose a solution directly/indirectly. Each week they also completed a different step (submitting project proposal, describing the characters and main scenes, writing the first draft of their scenario, etc.) and received feedback to make necessary revisions. Since they worked hard, took responsibility and managed their time effectively, they could produce great projects and we would like to share the ones for which we got the permission from students. We hope you will enjoy them 

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=Ob89rrZ3lLE

https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=Y3OwCme29zk
https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=WRorCyNVuqw


https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=G7AIz7EfrEg

3.b. ScOLa Clubs

This semester we provided 6 different club activities for our Prep students.Although the attendance was not as high as it was in the Fall semester due to several reasons, the regular attendees gave positive feedback about these clubs.  We would like to thank all our voluntary teachers who designed and ran a club this semester, and we hope to continue providing this support next academic year, as well.

3.c. Study Center

Study center continued providing individual outside-class support for ScOLa students. The center was visited around 300 times this semester and more than 500 times this year. We also continued providing “How-to” Sessions specifically on Motivation this semester for our Prep students at different levels who feel the need to be motivated more. We are happy to be of help for our students who seek this kind of help. Thank you all for your effort to guide your students who need extra support.

 

We hope we will continue having activities as fruitful  as these ones in the future!