Yve

The CEFIRE English Course for Teachers

The CEFIRE English teacher training course has far exceeded my prior expectations. It´s been a privilege to help Spanish teachers develop their English language skills. Yet more than that, I have learned so much about the difficulties and challenges for them in their own teaching as well as the many brilliant, creative ideas and resources which they have shared with us on the course. I like to use technology in my own teaching and am especially grateful to people like David for broadening my ICT horizons! I loved his mobile phone activity and just need help to learn how to use it! I have used Carmen´s house activity with a B1 class to help them record the vocabulary associated with houses, rooms and neighbourhoods, which worked very well. I will use this again. I also loved Arantxa´s blog idea as a fantastic way to record and reinforce all student´s learning experiences. These and so many other interactive and creative teaching resources are now being used in the planning of topic specific sessions which the teachers are preparing themselves for presentation to the whole group during the penultimate session of the course. For example, the focus for my group is teaching about the five senses to 2^nd Primary students and I have been impressed by the team effort of everyone in achieving what I think is an excellent outcome in the time available.

I have also been impressed by the openness of all our discussions, especially concerning general education policy, classroom practise and the differences between the English and Spanish education systems. Projects like these can only benefit all participants. The challenge facing all of us now is to raise the bar higher by continuing to pool together all our collective knowledge, skills and resources to improve our teaching in even more student-centred ways than in the past to help them realise their dreams and full potential. This for me is the true essence and ethos of CEFIRE. Thank you everyone for all your contributions.