April 27, 2008
Spring Workshop w/ Greg Duncan
You are invited to the first-ever "KWLA Spring Workshop" for World Language Teachers at all levels, to be held May 28-30 at St. Francis High School in Louisville. Nationally recognized world language expert, Greg Duncan will be delivering a series of three one-day workshops focusing on student motivation.
May 28: Getting them to stay beyond the requirement: tips for the wise
May 29: Talking Up a Storm! Getting Our Students to Intermediate Proficiency
May 30: Performance-Based Assessment: Showing Them What They Can Do
» Download Workshop Announcement
» Begin Online Registration.
$30 per workshop / $75 for all three workshops (Registration includes all workshop materials, professional development credit, lunch, and refreshments.)
For additional information including descriptions of each workshop, click on "Learn More" below.
May 28: Getting them to stay beyond the requirement: tips for the wise
Nationwide, more than 75% of foreign language students do not continue beyond the stated or perceived "requirement." Do we, as a profession, ever stop to examine why that is and how satisfied - or not - we are with that figure? Whether we like it or not, the vast majority of our students are voting with their feet once the required amount of study is over and are telling us "no thanks" to our offers of more.
This workshop is designed to examine the possible reasons students are bailing out of foreign language courses and to identify likely solutions to the problem. Topics like motivation, engagement, choice theory and brain research will be the focus of this workshop that promises to "engage" participants with lively discussion and hands-on activities.
May 29: Talking Up a Storm! Getting Our Students to Intermediate Proficiency
Most students enter a foreign language experience -whether by choice or requirement - wanting to learn to speak the language. But because they stay for such a short time (usually no longer than 2 years), they never really achieve a proficiency level that goes beyond Novice. Novices can't do much, and the students' lack of language ability feeds into negative feelings about the language experience.
Talking Up a Storm! is designed with the central idea that we can move our students along the proficiency continuum faster as long as we know where it is we want to go and strategies that will likely lead to the results we want. So, the focus of this workshop is how to get our students to intermediate proficiency faster (which will also help students feel a greater sense of accomplishment and might influence them to want to continue their language study!). We will get better acquainted with what it means to be an Intermediate speaker and will learn - and participate in - high-leverage pair and small-group activities that will move our students toward being Intermediate users of the language.
May 30: Performance-Based Assessment: Showing Them What They Can Do
Good foreign language instruction in 2008 is performance-oriented. Class periods are full of activities in which students practice using the language in real-world scenarios. The focus of instruction - say our national and state standards - is on students using the language, not just learning about it. Many students experience performance-oriented classes but more traditional testing, and this mismatch of learning and assessing blocks the students from fully demonstrating what they can do with the language they have acquired.
During this workshop, we will (1) explore the need to make our assessment more performance-based; (2) discover the characteristics that all good performance assessment tasks have in common; (3) examine a variety of rubric options; (4) ground ourselves in an understanding of what kinds of performances are realistic to expect of learners after certain amounts of language study; and (5) actually try our hand at developing a good performance-based assessment task and rubric that can be used in our classrooms next year.