Roy Cross's Blog

1. On Thursday next week, 13^th November, at 15:00 UK time there’s an ECML webinar for teachers and teacher trainers at primary and secondary level on “Mediation in teaching, learning and assessment” which will present the achievements of the ECML project of the same name, a.k.a. METLA. More info and registration here https://www.ecml.at/en/Resources/Webinars

This webinar introduces participants to the concept of mediation and its role in language teaching, learning, and assessment in primary and secondary schools using practical examples of mediation tasks in various languages for both primary and secondary classrooms. Participants will explore the METLA databank and discover how it can support teachers in designing materials that foster and assess learners’ mediation skills. The session will provide concrete strategies for teachers to:

•            adapt tasks across languages, proficiency levels, and learner groups;

•            draw on learners’ heritage and home languages;

•            integrate pluricultural components into multilingual activities;

•            nurture intercultural understanding, openness, and respect for diversity;

•            assess mediation performance, with a focus on formative assessment approaches.

More information on the METLA project here https://www.ecml.at/en/ECML-Programme/Programme-2020-2023/Mediation-in-teaching-and-assessment

2. A day later next week, on Friday 14^th November, between 12:00 and 15:30 UK time, TeachingEnglish is offering three webinars on Creative lesson planning:

How storytelling transforms learning with Claudia Tumba

Inspiring climate action through the arts with Zeny Zerfu

and a final session in which three teachers from around the world will share their own creative lessons. More info and registration here

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teachers/creative-lesson-planning-webinars

3. Timothy Cook was taken aback when his third-grade students at the American Community School in Amman – eight- or nine-year-olds – asked him if they could design an AI engine to help with their learning. Here’s his account on the Connected Classroom website of what they did, Teaching Students to Control AI https://connectedclassroom.org/perspectives/students-control-ai-not-use-it

4. Recognition of Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara by the UN last week, another notch on President Trump’s ‘conflict resolution’ belt, did not attract a whole lot of attention. The latest post by Carne Ross on his blog, Western Sahara: betrayal of a people, a principle and of international law, makes it clear what he thinks https://carneross.substack.com/p/western-sahara-betrayal-of-a-people

The resolution is an abandonment of the Sahrawi people. It is also an abandonment of decades of international law. Of course, the poodles in chief, the Brits, voted for the resolution, complicit in the act of selling the Sahrawis down the river. Doubtless they’ve reasoned to themselves that this is a ‘sensible’ step forward, while keeping quiet about their abject sucking up to the Moroccans to stop refugees crossing the Mediterranean, sell military equipment etc.. Trump apparently sees it as an opportunity for him to ‘solve’ another conflict. This is also of course a symptom of the erosion of the world of rules that the UK and others pretend to stand for. At least Trump doesn’t pretend.

5. And, finally,  Big trouble in ‘Little Berlin’: the tiny hamlet split in two by the cold war, a piece for The Guardian by John Kampfner, tells the divided story of Mödlareuth, a tiny hamlet in south Germany https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/nov/03/big-trouble-in-little-berlin-the-tiny-hamlet-split-in-two-by-the-cold-war

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.