Churchill Fellowship

In 2023 I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to undertake a research project into modern languages teaching and learning. The Churchill Fellowship is a charity and is the UK’s national memorial to Sir Winston Churchill. It promotes the exchange of ideas and provides grants to UK citizens to gain knowledge and skills abroad that they can bring back to the UK.

The Fellowship programme is enabling me to take a sabbatical from my teaching in Edinburgh to visit four secondary schools in Canada, Switzerland and Germany. Throughout May and June 2024 I’ll be observing teachers and students in Semiahmoo Secondary School, Vancouver, The International School of Lausanne, Georg Büchner Gymnasium in Bad Vilbel and the Johanna-Tesch-Schule in Frankfurt am Main.

The common thread that connects these schools is that teachers there are using a “comprehensible input” (CI) approach to languages teaching. Typical strategies in the CI classroom are extensive reading programmes, use of class graded novels, story listening and co-created stories (sometimes referred to as Teaching Proficiency for Reading and Storytelling or TPRS).

I’ll be learning from Adriana Ramirez (Vancouver), Dr Liam Printer (Lausanne), Tina Abour (Bad Vilbel) and Muriel Hautefeuille (Frankfurt), not only about how they teach, but how they construct a curriculum that is motivating and accessable to all learners. I’ll also be chatting to some of the students and hearing their thoughts on how they find language lessons in their respective schools.

My hope is that my Fellowship will be of interest to other languages teachers in Scotland, the rest of the UK and beyond. I’m always interested in collaborating with other teachers, so if this project is of interest to you, please be in touch!

I will be keeping a Substack journal: subscribe here to receive updates to your inbox.