If you were not limited by the demands of the national/regional curriculum, what would you say is the most important thing you would teach your students about your subject (in a CLIL context)? How would you assess their learning?

I am a computer science teacher at a secondary school and I can teach at ESO, Baccalaureate and vocational training, however nowadays I am only teaching ESO and Baccalaureate. So I'm going to focus this essay on my current teaching practice that is different from the reality of being a vocational training teacher.

In my case, the demands of the national / regional curriculum are not too strict,so they allow me to suit the students' needs and work those aspects that I consider the most relevant for students . Computer Science subject is an optional subject, so I always try to increase students' motivation, using new teaching methodologies that will be gradually implemented.

After performing this training course, I have reflected and have concluded that it is important to change some ways of working my subject and especially of evaluating it. Before performing this course, I've started using some new methodologies but my students' assessment process has not changed for many years at all.

First of all, I would like to talk about the way of working my subject. On the one hand, I would like to work with collaborative learning and working projects, because it is essential that students learn how to work in groups. Today, it seems that most students follow a competitive learning and they don't know that the result of working in groups and sharing experiences can be much more rewarding. I also would like to perform a socio-cultural project in order to establish relationships between the different areas taught at a secondary school and to facilitate students to organize their knowledge more generally. On the other hand, I want to continue increasing students' motivation using games and strategies that enable them to acquire knowledge in a funny way. For example, organizing a gymkhana of QR codes, running contests, using Kahoot to review concepts ...

Secondly, regarding the assessment process I have to change many things, because except in some particular cases, the evaluation process that I use depends on me. I would like to introduce self-assessment and peer-assessment methods in order to make students aware of their own learning process. This is easily accomplished through rubrics for both the student and for the teacher. An important point is to minimize the number of the exams and use other techniques such as developing group work and presenting it. In this way, they can work other learning skills and they can reach Hot Thinking through reasoning.

Besides all this, I think it's important to use different tools based on scaffolding, giving positive feedback, and thus try to foster a positive attitude in class to increase students' motivation. The goal is that students go back home with more curiousity about what they have learned than fatigue or boredom.

My next goal is to teach computer science in English, so I think that using this approach will be easier to apply CLIL principles, with the aim to use language Appropriately Whilst using language to learn effectively.