Proud to be tvmbo - Kortlopend Onderwijsonderzoek

able for the upper school and that these need to be developed. Schools working with
projects realize that creating good projects for tvmbo is time-consuming and a challenge.
50-50 doesn’t work
At the school where 50% English and 50% Dutch was permitted in the classroom during
the same lesson, teachers admitted that this does not work, since both teachers and
students speak too much Dutch. “I explain in English, and then switch to Dutch because
they don’t understand,” said one teacher. The students do not listen to the English
if they know that a Dutch translation is following. When it is not compulsory to
use 100% English (at one school in our project), the result is that neither students nor
teachers use English consistently. It seems important, thus, to be clear about how much
English that the schools require teachers and students to use, and to be consistent in
this.
5.6 Results: Results : interviews students
The interviews with the students were carried out in Dutch. Below you can find a
summary of our findings.
5.6.1 Learning and teaching
The initial key question which we asked the tvmbo students was What works in
tvmbo? Here we wanted to discover what the students themselves believe helps them
to learn a subject in English. The first part of this section is organized in a similar way
to the section about the teachers’ answers, in order to be able to compare answers. The
second part of this section discuss the aspects of learning and teaching which only appeared
in the students’ answers during the interviews.
Hands-on, variety and activity
Like their teachers, it is clear that the students believe that they learn the best if they do
something, if they are practically involved. For example, they learn if they play games
on the smart board, play card games or memory, work with practical objects such as a
skeleton or a cow’s bone, or a microscope.
Creativity, projects, surprises and new things
The tvmbo students are not so keen on working from a book, and prefer projects and
making things rather than working with a course book. They say that this type of
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