How can teachers, teacher educators and other stakeholders in language education be informed about the wealth of existing instruments that describe language-related teacher competences? How are these instruments used in practice by teachers, teacher educators and curriculum planners? These questions lay at the heart of two intensive meetings of experts on the project team.
In June 2017, the team met in Switzerland to discuss a beta version of the project website. Different ways of accessing the catalogue of instruments were discussed and drafted, including search functions to match the different profiles of instruments, and vignettes to describe, for instance, how a teacher educator could combine different general and more specific instruments in a curriculum. The discussions were continued in September 2017 in Graz, where the team agreed on further improvements to the website, and discussed the results of a Europe-wide survey on the use of instruments conducted in early summer.
In 2018, the piloting of the website will coincide with a consultation on a further key output of the project. This is a new inventory which will draw on existing models of teacher competences, and will seek to link individual competences with professional learning experiences that further develop the capacity of teachers to place languages at the heart of learning and to support key Council of Europe actions in the field of education.
The project team:
Lukas Bleichenbacher (coordinator), Francis Goullier, Richard Rossner, Anna Schröder-Sura