Workshop leaders

This may sound very basic, but it is always good to start with an introduction. Who are you? Who are they? If you have time, we recommend using one of the icebreaker activities below.

During the introduction session, you can also give the attendees an overview of TOP. What is it exactly? Why are you holding a TOP workshop for them?

• The next step we recommend is getting into the details of the study tour itself.
• If you’ve never traveled with TOP
  • This is where you can go over the logistics of the tour and what participants can expect to experience. All of this information can be found on our Study Tour website. Basic items to cover are eligibility, cost, intensity, itinerary, responsibilities of those accepted, number on tour, length of tour.
• If you’ve traveled with TOP before
  • Not only the logistics of the tour and what participants will experience, but this is the time to let them know what YOU experienced if you have traveled with TOP before.
  • What were your expectations and preconceptions of Germany? Be honest with the attendees. When most people think of Germany, they think of beer, pretzel, and lederhosen (and that's ok!). Is this what you thought of?
  • What were your highlights from the trip? Pick some of the visits from your trip that were particularly impactful to you and discuss them with the attendees.
  • What did you learn? Let them know all the new things you learned about in Germany. You can even discuss your preconceptions again and discuss topics you may have thought you knew about but learned a lot more about once you were in Germany.
  • What surprised you? Talk to the attendees about the things that surprised you about your visit. This could be from how the school system was set up, to how the train system runs, to cultural norms at formal meetings.

This is a moment where you can really tell your attendees how impactful the TOP study tour was for you as an educator or as a global citizen.

There are two different ways you can discuss the instructional materials provided by TOP

1. Make it personal. Tell the attendees about the instructional unit you created as part of your application or post tour requirements. Why did you choose a particular topic for your unit? If you've had a chance to teach it, you can also discuss how students responded to it. This gives you a chance to discuss the direct impact your study tour had on you and most importantly, your students. What is it from your experience that you are able to share with your students and how is it enhancing their learning?

2. Discussing TOP teaching materials more generally. Demonstrate a lesson from our searchable database, the TOP Lessons Portal. You can choose any lesson from these materials to demonstrate for your attendees. This approach allows you to showcase the materials that TOP offers teachers and how they can already begin incorporating contemporary Germany into their classrooms. 

• Maybe the most important part: Let your attendees know how to apply for a TOP Study Tour.
• If you have not applied / are applying currently
  • Please reference our Study Tour page for information. Let them know the application will require personal and professional contact information, travel availability, topic of interest selection, resume, employment verification (your direct supervisor must upload a letter), a professional statement of purpose (3,000 characters), essay on your contribution to the group (1,500 characters), and a lesson plan (4,500 characters). The application takes from 5-10 hours to complete excluding the time to obtain the employment verification letter
• If you have applied before
  • You can talk to them about the process when you applied and the things you did. You can also discuss if you submitted multiple applications and anything you may have done to better your application from one year to the next.
• If the application is live when you give your workshop, please share the application link with your attendees. You can also direct them to the Study Tour page of our website where most of the essential information will be located. If not, please still share the link to the Study Tour information page.

When attendees provide their name, email address, and consent to contact after the workshop, TOP will email them when the applications go live for the following year.

Another important part! Allow for plenty of time for Q&A from your attendees.

If there is a question you are unsure of, you can always direct attendees to our email top@goethe.de for follow up questions. We are here to help and support you and your colleagues.

At the end of each workshop, we ask that you share the link to our Workshop Attendance form. This allows for a number of things. 1) We get to share with our Board how wonderful all of you are for sharing about TOP. 2) We are able to contact those who would like more information about TOP including the link to the next application. Please note that there is a consent question at the end of the form that we take very seriously. If an attendee marks "no" to receiving emails, we will simply record that person in the number of attendees but will not add them to our mailing list for study tour information.

Workshop Attendee Form

A document with the Attendance Form QR code and link can be found in the Materials section of this page.

Finally, once the workshop is completed, we ask that you as the Workshop Leader fill out the Workshop Leader Form linked below. This allows us to not only confirm the incoming submissions to the Attendee Form, but we also hope to gather information about how these workshops are being delivered and where. The more feedback we get, the better we can be! If you are completing the workshop as part of your post-tour requirements, you will need to submit both the Workshop Leader form and have attendees fill out the Workshop Attendee Form to have it recorded.

Workshop Leader Form 

These essential questions, modified from Let’s Explore Modern Germany and Germany In Focus, are universal.

Purposes:

• Serve as seat cards and discussion starters.
• Demonstrate examples of questions posed in a variety of lessons.

Directions:
Options:
1. Post a question/quote. Ask participants to discuss with a partner.
2. Use as a starter for a broader discussion of the question/quote.
3. Use as a short strategy to preface a specific modified strategy.

Questions/ Quotes

• What makes someone famous?
• What things in your life would you refuse to give up even if your life was threatened?
• Are there circumstances when it is all right to back out on a promise that one has made?
• In what ways have geographic features made a difference in history and people’s lives?
• Can Europe be compared in any way to the United States?
• How might a country such as Germany benefit from being in the European Union? What might the drawbacks be?
• How does knowing something about a language help us learn a culture?
• What does possessing citizenship mean to an individual?
• What does it mean to be German? An American?
• How might buildings and other public sites in a community reflect the values and history of the community?
• What do the memorials and monuments in our capital say about our values and history?
• What criteria are/should be used to designate a national day?
• In what ways do individuals influence the times in which they live?
• How has avid disobedience been used throughout history to effect change?
• How do our past experiences shape our personalities?
• How does a flag come to represent a nation?
• How does this statement “ring a bell” for you?
• A person is only forgotten if his name is forgotten. (Gunter Demnig)
• Tolerance should be a temporary attitude: it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to offend. (Goethe)
• He who doesn’t know foreign languages doesn’t know his own. (Goethe)
• Every choice has a second-best option which must be given up, and that’s the opportunity lost. (not provided)

Purposes:

• Tap interest and prior knowledge.
• Provide an open-ended question to ‘Get the Ball Rolling’!
• Engage participants in brief conversations before the session begins using ‘Seat Cards’.

Directions:

• The Essential Question: What are two Common Issues that will continue to Challenge both Germany and the US?’
• Cut and place ‘Seat Cards’ with the Essential Question on each chair for participants.
• Participants respond to the Question, find a colleague in the room to share and discuss responses.

     

Purposes:

• Meet other participants
• Tap prior knowledge about Germany

Directions:

• Find a different person to answer each question and initial the box.
• Table linked here. 

 

Purposes:

• Tap interest and background knowledge
• Use as an icebreaker when participants are waiting for a session to start

Directions:

• Print and cut apart the Word Cards (enough for all seats in the venue).
• Place one Word Card on each seat.
• Invite participants to find someone else with the same Word Card and to then introduce themselves.
• Partners should define the word using the provided sentence as the clue.
• If time allows, select random pairs to share their word, sentence, and definition

Words and Word Cards linked here.
 

• 45 to 60 Minutes
• No less than 30 Minutes
• Times may vary given audience participation

• Introductions (yourself, TOP, possibly also participants)
• Highlight TOP materials (what does TOP offer?)
• Sampling a TOP lesson
• Sharing about the study tours and application process

More detailed information can be found here

Yes! Utilize TOP's presentation template to shorten your prep-time. You are welcome to add or remove content/slides as needed.
 

• Building your presentation around a lesson plan or specific resource will give your workshop clear thematic content to attract participants and allow participants to visualize how Germany could be taught within their curriculum (which often is not explicitly Germany-related).
• When sampling a TOP lesson, it is a best practice right now to guide participants to the digital versions of TOP resources for Social Studies and STEM teachers all found in the TOP Lessons Portal and offer ideas on how teachers can modify the original lesson to adapt it to online-learning during the pandemic.

You can create interactive online quizzes, activities, polls, etc. beforehand using tools you are familiar with from the classroom (Kahoot, Socrative, Google Forms, Mentimeter, Surveygizmo, Quizlet, etc.)
You can either paste the link to the interactive activity in the chat, or (especially for app based services) you can include the QR code in your presentation and participants can participate on their phone.
Options where you can share the results live on your screen while they come in keeps participants engaged.

• Zoom has an in-platform polling function that can be used to gather answers and data from participants. 
• Zoom offers a "break out room" function, which use can use to put the attendees into small groups to discuss or work on certain activities and then bring them back into the larger room for whole group discussion.
• You can ask quick short answer questions and ask the group to type their answers in the chat.

• Collect participant registration information by sharing the link to our Workshop Attendee Form 
• You can paste the link into the chat or create a slide with the link and a QR code as part of your PPT presentation. The Workshop Attendee and Leader forms as well as a document with a QR Code can be found here.
• Participants click on the link or scan the QR code with their phone to access the registration system. The will need to provide at least the last name of the workshop leader, the date of the workshop, their name, and their email address.
• Please let them know that their information will not be shared with any third parties and their data will be protected.

Having participants fill out the form allows us to update our Board about all the hard work our Alumni and TOP supporters are doing to spread the word about TOP! We will also add their names to our application update mailing list if they want to be informed when the application opens.
 

Following your virtual workshop, please fill out the Workshop Leader form with:

• your name
• the date your workshop took place
• the number of attendees

Letting TOP know the workshop took place allows us to update our Board about all the hard work our Alumni and TOP supporters are doing to spread the word about TOP!

Make a plan to follow up with your participants by collecting email address yourself and let them know that it is your plan to send a follow-up e-mail:

• You can send them links to resources, etc.
• You can also follow-up with them once the study tour applications come out to remind them to apply and offer advice