Dear all,

Please find ScOLa Teaching and Learning Development Unit update for 2022-23 Academic Year Fall Semester below:

1. Professional Development Activities

1.a. Common Time Sessions

There were five individual and one series of common time professional development sessions in the fall semester of the 2022-2023 academic year, as listed below:

  1. The Importance of Professional Development and Teacher Well-Being by Wioleta Wenclawek
  2. Syntactic Complexity Development in L2 Writing by Nesrin Atak
  3. Student-Centred Class through Reflective Teaching by Deniz Bağcı
  4. Technology Integrated Activities to Practice Vocabulary by Emrullah Levent Çoban
  5. Grammar and Technology-Mediated Task-Based Language Teaching by Aida Görgülü
  6. Assessment in the EFL Classroom by Canan Şaban
    •         Foreign Language Assessment Overview
    •         Classroom Assessment & Teacher as an Assessor 
    •         Common Task Types in Foreign Language Assessment
    •         Assessing different Language Skills

All the sessions and meetings were held face-to-face and in total 20 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.

1.b. ScOLa Induction Program – Fall Semester

Our new instructors, 15 prep instructors & 4 ML instructors, have completed Fall Semester of ScOLa Induction Program.  During this program, our new colleagues attended individual and common needs sessions, completed diagnostic observation cycle and follow-up cycles. Below you can find the common-needs sessions delivered in the Fall Semester as part of the Induction Program:

  • How to plan a week incorporating all the resources
  • Lesson planning
  • How to teach vocabulary in ScOLa context

We will continue with our needs-based program in the Spring Semester to ease our new colleagues’ transition period in their first year in our institution.

1.c. ScOLa Lesson Observation Sessions

As TLDU, we held two consecutive development sessions with the management team – Director, Coordinators, Team Leaders- to reflect upon our current lesson observation procedures and their effectiveness, go over literature to see alternative methods of lesson observation and the ways to implement them in our context. With these sessions, we aim to create an environment where we further support our colleagues through up-to-date observation methods and to maintain the dynamic development culture at our school.  Following these sessions, we’ve started working on ScOLa Effective Teaching Criteria to see whether there is a need for an update based on the changing needs of our school.

2. Extra-curricular Language Development Activities for Students

2.a. OzU English Language Support Center

In the Fall Semester, our Study Center, which now works under OzU English Language Support Center, was visited 116 times & Speaking Center was visited 148 times by our prep students. Out of these 116 visits to Study Center, 60 visits focused on writing and 33 visits were to get grammar support. Prep students also sought guidance on reading, listening, vocabulary and study skills in general. In addition to the Speaking Center slots, prep students also visited Study Center 11 times to practice speaking.

Apart from these visits by the prep students, we also had students who study in their departments visiting OzU English Language Support Center since we started providing support for all the students at the university starting from 2022-23 Academic Year. More specifically, we had 8 visits by the faculty students to Study Center and 11 visits to Speaking Center this semester.

As in the previous academic year, we continued to offer face-to-face meeting opportunities for our students in OzU English Language Support Center in addition to the online ones. Out of 124 total visits to Study Center by all students, 64 of them were face-to-face ones, whereas in the Speaking Center this number goes up to 120 face-to-face visits out of 159 total visits by all students.

We hope to continue giving this individualized guidance in OzU English Language Support Center in the areas where students need extra support in the following semesters.

2.b. ScOLa Student Development Sessions

We offered the following live sessions to our students in the Fall Semester:

  1. How to Study Vocabulary by Esra Çelik Soydan
  2. How to Study Receptive Skills By Özlem Kaplan Snyder
  3. Writing & Speaking Different or Similar? by Mojgan Ziaeenejad and Betül Selcan Şentürk
  4. A Mindful Break by Şule Bakırcan Yalçın

In total, 33 students attended these sessions in the Fall Semester.

There were also some session recordings from the previous semesters available for our students:

  1. Guest Student Session
  2. How to Study Writing by Esra Çelik Soydan
  3. How to Revise Vocabulary Effectively by Babak Jahanaray
  4. Effective Problem Solving Skills by Sultan Zeydan

2.c. ScOLa Clubs

In the Fall Semester, our students had a chance to attend 10 different ScOLa Clubs:

A2 level,

  1. A2 Speaking Club by Babak Jahanaray

B1 level;

2. B1 Speaking Club by Mojgan Ziaeenejad

3. B1 Discover Far East Club by Betül Selcan Şentürk

B2 Level

4. Engineers’ Club for B2 Students by Özlem Kaplan Snyder

5. A Club for Creative and Innovative Mindsets by Işıl Öztürk

6. Social Sciences Club by Özge Özgen

7. Applied Sciences Club for B2 by Levent Çoban

8. Ready to Take off by Sedef Nur Yaman

9. Scola Club for B2 Students of the Business Faculty by Hussein Abdulrazzak

B1 and B2 level foreign students, 

10. Turkish Language Club by Yunus Emre Taşkıran & Aslı Gürses

In total, 41 students attended these clubs regularly and completed them successfully by attending at least 60% of the relevant club sessions.

We would like to thank our colleagues who gave these sessions and ran the club activities voluntarily.

3. Blended Model Instruction Evaluation Questionnaire

In addition to all the other tools that we use to evaluate the effectiveness of our instruction, we wanted to collect feedback on the blended model instruction we implemented this semester. With this aim, we circulated a specific questionnaire focusing on the aspects and components of this type of instruction and asked for their valuable feedback both from our students and our instructors.  The data collated will hopefully be of importance when taking the necessary actions in the Spring semester.

 

With all the parties involved, it has been yet another fruitful semester for all of us. Thank you all for your invaluable contributions to the development of ScOLa.