Hachemer, Mareike. Making a Difference. Unterrichtsreihe zur Förderung von ehrenamtlichem Engagement im Englischunterricht einer gymnasialen Einführungsphase. München: Grin, 2014.

Jury of the German Teacher Prize (Deutscher Lehrerpreis):

MAKING A DIFFERENCE is an excellent teaching unit and was considered a strong candidate for the German Teacher Prize for innovative teaching. Our criteria for the award are student encouragement and involvement, interdisciplinary approaches, sustainability and transferability, compatibility with curricula, relevance for students' lives, different approaches to assessment and personal gain for students. 

MAKING A DIFFERENCE was marked "excellent" in almost all criteria. It is particularly outstanding with regards to transferability. 

The local newspaper: Connecting theory and deeds is a principle in the two classes who connected active participation and language learning. 14 to 16 year old students focused on discrimination, isolation and poverty. They helped the elderly, volunteered as football coaches for the young, offered free babysitting, or gave food to homeless people. 

Hachemer, Mareike. Our First Scientific Essay - Analyzing Slaughterhouse-Five. Das Schreiben eines literaturwissenschaftlichen Essays. Analyse von Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five im Englisch-Unterricht der gymnasialen Oberstufe. UNICUM-Wissensreihe. Band 64. München: Grin, 2014.

Jury of German Teacher Prize (Deutscher Lehrerpreis): The students' essays show that they worked individually and approached the topic on various levels. They have learned how to research, structure, present, re-write and connect aspects and are therefore prepared for university. They are enabled to unmask war propaganda."

The best essay written in class was published and is available via amazon.

I like offering opportunities for students to study individually and at their own pace. A lot of students love audiovisual material but the abundance that is available on the internet often discourages or misleads them. Therefore, I collect appropriate material and provide it for them with instructions and ideas.

This is my website for my advanced English students in year 12 and 13: Advanced English

I was fortunate enough to teach bilingual geography in year 6. While there is a lot of material online it is sometimes difficult to sort through the masses and find the best suitable videos, quizes, texts and songs. For my students I collected media on weather reports, continents and oceans, nations of the world and the solar system. Using different methods of feedback I researched in how far my students and colleagues found it useful to work with the platform and published an article in PÄDAGOGIK 6/2016.

In year 11 and 12 students who learn English as a Foreign Language should be able to read and understand a lot of authentic material like articles from actual online and print media. Still, they often don't dare to research topics they might find interesting in English.

To teach them strategies of how to approach an unknown article in an online newspaper I have collected 30 articles from online media from a variety of topics like science, culture, politics, health, sports and entertainment in a wiki. Every student was encouraged to choose an article and then work on it following several strategies like skimming, scanning, creating new headlines, looking up words, rephrasing or adding comments and questions. The aim was to understand and discover the content of the article for their personal gain but also preparing it so that it would be easier for others to comprehend.

As a final task they were supposed to invent possible exam tasks. In Germany, we work with a list of key words that indicate particular task types (like "summarize", "analyze" or "comment"). It is important for our students to understand the differences of these tasks to give them security about expected outcomes and a good way for them to understand these key words is encouraging them to create exam tasks themselves. Best case, students experience that they now have the ability to read almost any English publication they want. Through the course of the unit they should be enabled and inspired to frequently research topics of their own interest.

Hachemer, Mareike. Selbständig Informationen über Großbritannien erschließen. Unterricht in der Q-Phase mit einer interaktiven Wiki-Plattform. München: Grin, 2011.

Second language learning for young students is often connected to texts that have been primarily chosen for didactic reasons: They include a particular grammar pattern that is supposed to be introduced and overstress it. While this can be helpful and logical, it is often boring and completely uninteresting. Authentic texts or real literature are rarely chosen for students under 16 years of age. It is possible though. Even 11-year-olds who have only really started learning English one or two years ago can be confronted with Oscar Wilde's story "The Selfish Giant" when using a few little helps and techniques. I have separated the audiobook into six very small units and given them to small groups of students to listen to, find out about the verbs and their meaning and then perform their part of the story for the rest of the class.

Hachemer, Mareike. Weltliteratur in der 6. Klasse. Hörverstehen fördern mit Oscar Wildes "The Selfish Giant". München: Grin, 2011. ISBN 978-3-656-33507-8