CAN CO-TEACHING AND BLENDED LEARNING COEXIST IN THE CORE CURRICULUM OF SECONDARY SCHOOLS? - A PROJECT IN SPANISH AND HISPANO-AMERICAN CULTURE M. Pitsaki, I. Kassotaki, C. Dimitrakopoulos Pilot Experimental General Lyceum of Heraklion (GREECE) Abstract The article discusses the use of blended learning and co-teaching in interdisciplinary fields in group activities at Greek secondary school level in an elective course. Three secondary school teachers from different fields (Biology & Spanish Language, English Language, Greek Language) cooperated to attain the goal of involving 46 students in learning through group activities the Spanish and Hispano- American culture employing ICT skills such as interactive whiteboards, blog and website. The project was based on the principles of collaborative teaching and learning cross-culturally involving interdisciplinary topics such as art, culture, history, sports, language, literature, geography, cuisine, music and cinema. Discovery learning was applied through students’ presentations and was further reinforced by our experiences in the educational trip to Madrid, Toledo and Segovia. The article recommends the possible adoption of co-teaching and blended learning in the core curriculum of secondary education as a means of acquiring and retaining knowledge in a creative way and argues for a shift towards the integration of student-student interaction and collaboration. Keywords: Blended-learning, co-teaching, discovery learning, ICT skills, interdisciplinary, cross- cultural, cooperative learning. 1 INTRODUCTION The last two decades there is an increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT) teaching techniques incorporated in the general classroom [1] rendering a more flexible, collaborative, less teacher-centred character to teaching and more participatory, project-based learning both on a synchronous and an asynchronous level [2]. Blended learning has been viewed as a unique opportunity to combine the effectiveness of face-to-face communication in a classroom environment along with the endless opportunities and innovation of the online environment, fostering learner autonomy [3]. Cooperation, participation and exchanging of ideas by creating blogs, wikis or websites has become a prerequisite in the new classroom where blended learning seems inevitable. Educators throughout the world are seeking ways to implement tools that will enable them to foster learning and appropriate use of ICT skills. Blogging, in particular, is an essential component of blended learning making teaching and learning more social and transparent, through teacher-learner, learner-learner, learner-resource interaction and feedback. The combination of blended learning and co-teaching can further boost delivering instruction on the part of teachers and rendering students’ participation more active. This paper aims to present the results of co-teaching and blended learning of an elective course and examines the possibility of such an adoption in the core curriculum of secondary education in Greece. The team consisted of three teachers (English language, Greek language and Biology/Spanish language) and forty six students, all native speakers of Greek, from the first and the second grade of Model Experimental General Lyceum of Heraklion (ages 16-17), who opted for the cultural program entitled “¡Hola, España!”, an elective course whose group met once a week for an hour after the end of compulsory school timetable. A pre-study survey was conducted in advance to provide insight into participants’ experience and expectations regarding blogging, presentation skills and language level. It was indicated that despite being familiar with other social media like Facebook, the vast majority of students had not posted on a blog before. Regarding English language level, the majority of students (about 80%) ranked themselves as of intermediate/upper intermediate level, while only ten percent considered themselves to be of advanced level, and another ten percent of low-intermediate level. None of them had experience with co-teaching or had prior knowledge of Spanish. Regarding the set-up of the project-based program the three teachers chose to separate Spanish and Latin-American culture into 12 subjects: Geographical distribution of Spanish speakers in the world, Proceedings of ICERI2015 Conference 16th-18th November 2015, Seville, Spain ISBN: 978-84-608-2657-6 7798