Individual Support and Differentiation
School has a comprehensive educational mandate - a mandate that relates to the promotion of the cognitive, psychological, and psychosocial abilities of the pupils. This support also has the aim of recognizing and promoting the disadvantages and/or talents of individual pupils. The more heterogeneous a class is, the more the lessons have to change in order to adequately support all learners.
Internal differentiation is used in our lessons to counteract the heterogeneity of the class group because performance deficits and special talents require oriented support - addressed to each individual. Through methodical-didactical support in the classroom, with which we react to the different learning requirements of the individual students, we take into account different learning requirements and learning dispositions, e.g. interest and motivation; Capabilities and the degree of independence and, if necessary and possible, adapt learning arrangements and tasks to the students.
The goal is the independence of the learner
We are convinced that learning success is best achieved in a pleasant, stimulating, and encouraging learning atmosphere. That is why we mainly implement the support at our school in regular classes, i.e. in class groups. Factors that have a particularly strong impact on learning success at school, which we also implement at Mentora Gymnasium, are the structure and clarity of the rules in class management, the classroom climate and the teacher-student relationship, the extent and variety of activating learning strategies, sufficient practice and regular specialist discussions in the classroom as well as a wide variety of feedback measures. Based on these powerful influencing factors, we would like to support students in largely controlling their learning processes themselves and thereby promoting their individual learning development and their desire to learn.
Language support for pupils whose native language is not German
Mentora Gymnasium does not have welcome classes. All students who come to us with little or no knowledge of German start in a regular class and take part in the subject and German lessons of the respective class. Language support takes place inclusively in the class association. In addition to this immersive language support in regular classes, students can receive additional, extracurricular language support (German as a second language – DaZ) as needed.
The immersion method in foreign language acquisition
By far the most effective method of language acquisition is the immersion method. In this method, the new language is the working and colloquial language. Everything the teacher says is reinforced solely through facial expressions, gestures, or pointing, not through translation. The child thus develops the language independently bit by bit from the context of the situation. This recreates the most natural way children learn languages, whether as a first or second language (Stangl, 2022).
Immersive subject and German lessons
Learning German through immersion means that the children immerse themselves in a “language bath”. They hear, speak and learn German in authentic everyday contexts and experience the new language in their familiar environment. They learn the new language as naturally as their mother tongue - without any pressure or vocabulary stress.
