The EMI Center collaborated with studioclassroom.com to hold 4 EMI teacher seminars on November 16 and 29, under the four major headings of “Developing EMI Mindset”, “Teacher Higher-Order Thinking Skills”, “Integrating Tech Tools with EMI”, and “Conducting Assessment Strategies”, and the content of these sessions were highly diverse and rich. A total of 24 teachers attended these seminars.
The first seminar was focused on “developing EMI mindset”, where the lecturer Wendy Hsueh used interactive teaching as the main training method, with student-centered and teacher-centered perspectives as the point of entry, and led the teachers in attendance to carry out discussion on EMI teaching. The teachers all express the view that they came away with a lot through the interactive exchanges.
The second seminar, “teaching higher-order thinking skills”, was focused on the part of the teaching activity, introducing techniques that teachers can use to question students in EMI classes, while also contrasting the differences between teacher-student interactions in traditional teaching versus EMI teaching. Those in attendance indicated that the lecturer had adequately and concretely demonstrated the actual delivery of EMI teaching, which allowed them to review their teaching, and then to consider the value of EMI at the seminar.
The third seminar, “integrating tech tools with EMI”, the lecturer shared many practical internet resources with the teachers which can assist with their teaching, and how to apply these resources in the classroom in order to allow the course to proceed more smoothly, while also increase the interaction between teachers and students in class.
The last seminar, under the topic of “conducting assessment strategies”, the lecturer spoke on several effective approaches for teachers to evaluate students’ learning outcomes, such as using constructive alignment to design teaching and to check on teaching effectiveness.
The four seminars all had proceeded step by step based on the topics, and the teachers participating in the various sessions all indicated that the series of seminars was very well thought out. They benefited greatly in various aspects on EMI teaching, and hope that the EMI Center can hold more similar events in the future!
