Mentoring, Leadership, and Change: Designing Compelling Experiences for 21st Century Learners

Institute Purpose

To explore key concepts and principles related to mentoring, leadership, change, design, and new technologies. To empower, initiate, implement, and sustain change on multiple levels (individual, departmental, program, district, university, local community, state, regional, or national) regarding a facet of foreign language education that was personally meaningful (such as curriculum development, classroom instruction and assessment, program advocacy and articulation, professional development, or policy issues).

Institute Objectives

To develop, refine, and synthesize professional knowledge, skills, and expertise in focus areas that are likely to affect the foreign language profession in profound ways over the next decade;

• Equip and empower foreign language professionals (already tapped as mentors and leaders in their schools and organizations) to assume some of the roles and responsibilities of a retiring cadre of national leaders;
• Strengthen professional networks of associations through collaboration;
• Promote "cross fertilization" in experience and expertise through mentoring;
• Explore the nature of compelling experiences, extract key concepts and principles of design from them, and apply them to educational contexts;
• Experiment with the use of new technologies and their applications (such as aggregators, blogs, cyberportfolios, digital storytelling, machinima, podcasting, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, vlogging, vodcasting, and wikis) as powerful pedagogical tools;
• Acquire research-based techniques for initiating, implementing, and sustaining positive change in a wide variety of contexts.

Institute Focus Areas

Five focus topics for the institute were selected based on current national trends and initiatives in economics, politics, policy, and research that are likely to affect the foreign language profession in profound ways over the next decade.

* Community Outreach - Focus was on expanding foreign language education beyond the classroom through innovative partnerships between schools and the community to meet the growing demand for proficiency in a second language and strengthen students' commitment to learning languages. (Such efforts might involve community awareness, service learning, or other initiatives that generate community support for and involvement in language programs.)

* Differentiated Instruction - Focus was on better meeting the needs of diverse populations of learners, including students in mixed level and mixed ability classes and those with a wide range of special needs (including giftedness, learning disabilities, and physical impairments).

* Professional Development - Focus was on re-envisioning and reconceptualizing professional development (including its goals, purposes, content, structure, format, and materials) to better meet the needs of the people and school systems intended to be served.

* Program Development - Focus was on exploring issues related to the development of articulated programs across levels, with a special emphasis on Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs). Ways to overcome cultural barriers to program development, to recruit quality teachers and locate materials, to integrate LCTL programs and personnel into existing language departments, to provide professional development for teachers from other countries, and to obtain the community support needed to initiate, implement, and sustain such programs were explored.

* Teacher Preparation - Focus was on the role of teacher preparation in language education, with a special emphasis on preparing cooperating teachers to mentor new teachers in becoming active professionals who serve diverse learners through articulated programs.

At the close of the institute, participants developed a plan to initiate, implement, and/or sustain change in their local context(s) using the principles they had learned. They will report to the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center through The Research Institute for Studies in Education at Iowa State University on their progress at regular intervals.

Fifteen participants, five group facilitators, two institute leaders, and the director of the NFLRC attended, for a total of 23 participants.

Participants were selected from a pool of applicants who were nominated by national, state, and/or local professional organizations and institutions. Group facilitators were invited to serve in this capacity by the institute leaders.

NFLRC Director – Dr. Marcia Rosenbusch

Institute Leaders – Cherice Montgomery (Doctoral Student and Instructor, Michigan State University) and Cindy Kendall ( Ingham Intermediate School District and Doctoral Candidate, Michigan State University)

Group Facilitators – Community Outreach - Lynn Fulton-Archer, South Carolina; Differentiated Instruction - Toni Theisen, Colorado; Professional Development - Chuck Thorpe, Kansas; Program Development - Elena Farkas, Alaska; Teacher Preparation - Julia Hanley, Georgia

Group Members – Institute leaders pre-assigned participants to one of the focus groups based on their expertise. Each group consisted of four members, one of whom was designated by the institute leaders as the group's facilitator.

The institute was held at the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University in a technology-rich classroom in Lagomarcino Hall, with access to Mac laptops for each participant.