Alumni Connection - February 2004

National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center (http://www.educ.iastate.edu/nflrc/)

Alumni Connection Newsletter - March, 2004 - Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Document Source: /http://www.educ.iastate.edu/nflrc/newnflrc/news/200403/

New Visions: Teacher Development

Welcome to the March electronic newsletter of the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center!

This month we focus on the Teacher Development Task Force of the New Visions in Action (NVA) project [1]. This task force is tackling questions such as:

How can we prepare teachers to implement content and performance standards?
What constitutes an ideal student teaching internship experience?
How can we effectively mentor new teachers?
What professional development models have proven to be effective and are exemplary?

Cindy Kendall, Newsletter Editor
Marcia Rosenbusch, Director, National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center

National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center Website's New Design

Have you been to the NFLRC's website [2] lately? The website redesign and reorganization has resulted in an updated appearance and improved usability.

While you are visiting the website, consider furthering your own professional development by returning to the NFLRC at Iowa State University this summer. The application and request for scholarship for the 2004 institutes (Language, Culture, and Content Connections: Mexico and the Zapotec Culture and Rethinking the PK-12 FL Curriculum: Intrinsically Interesting, Cognitively Engaging, Culturally Connected, and Articulated) [3] are now available.

Teacher Development: Task Force Goal

The goal of the Teacher Development Task Force [4] is to identify and define the key components that might be included in a national foreign language teacher education program for pre-service teachers and a national agenda for professional development for in-service teachers.

Both the model and the agenda are based on data gathered from a variety of sources, including:

Current teacher preparation and professional development programs;
Results of the NVA national online survey on ideal professional practice;
Studies of existing and proposed professional-development materials and frameworks; and
National teacher standards and accreditation initiatives.

Working through New Visions in Action, the Professional Development Task Force will be disseminateing the results of its efforts nationally.

Focus on National and Regional Initiatives

The Central States Conference has entered into a collaboration with the Teacher Development Task Force and groups are currently defining goals and activities. There are four Working Groups with Group Leaders who met at ACTFL 2003 in Philadelphia and the tasks have now moved to the following Working Groups:

* Preparing Teachers to Implement Content and Performance Standards - Carmen Tesser , Group Leader, carmen@arches.uga.edu
This group took as its charge a focus on teacher preparation programs vis-a-vis the NCATE standards. One of the goals of the groups is to determine how to help teacher education programs that are preparing for NCATE accreditation.

* Internship - Judith Shrum, Group Leader, jshrum@vt.edu
The group is exploring how to identify high-quality but realistic models for internships that work well in a variety of teacher preparation programs. One of the documents the group has examined is "The Student Teaching Experience: Definition of Best Practice" endorsed by the Michigan Foreign Language Association.

* Induction - Nadine Olson , Group Leader, olsnaf1@okstate.edu
The goal of this working group is to describe the principal characteristics of effective induction/mentoring programs that will encourage and support new teachers. Induction is defined as "that period of transition from student to professional when beginning teachers are offered supervision and support as they adjust to their new roles." (Horn, Sterling, and Subhan, 2002).

* In-Service Professional Development - Sally Hood Cisar , Group Leader, sahood@uoregon.edu
This group established as its overall goals to (1) identify criteria for evaluating models, (2) identify exemplary models and determine why they are exemplary, and (3) establish ways to showcase these exemplary models.

More information about each group and its actions [5] is available on the New Visions website. Or, for additional information, contact the Working Group Chairs by email.

Task Force Co-Chair Bob Terry writes, "We are always looking for input from the field. Since our Task Force and its Working Groups are already set up, we are not actively looking for additional members. We are, however, always eager to have information about model/exemplary programs that are relevant to our Task Force in general or to any of the four Working Groups." [6]

Focus on State Initiatives

The various working group members of the Teacher Development Task Force represent a number of states and levels of instruction. At present, working group members are gathering information from their own states and localities in order to develop goals and activities.

Please share what your school, district, state or region is doing with the appropriate Teacher Development Task Force Working Groups. There are many exemplary programs here in the United States and by sharing our successes we can strengthen the field. You can nominate online [7] a program being exemplary in some aspect of Teacher Development.

Featured Websites

Helping educators develop and maintain their technology skills and integrate technology into teaching and learning is a challenge. Teacher Tap: Professional Development Resources [8] at the University of Toledo and its parent page Eduscapes [9] are rich resources for integrating technology into today's classroom. For foreign language specific resources, the Foreign Language Teaching Forum (FLTEACH) [10] continues to be a premier website and discussion forum for foreign language educators.

Focus on Research

The Teacher Development Task Force working groups are using results of the 2002-03 online NVA survey on ideal professional practice to focus their work on areas that were identified as important to the profession by survey participants. Further in-depth analysis of the results of the NVA 2002-03 survey is currently underway at the NFLRC. The following, for example, was found to be a controversial item on the Teacher Development section of the survey (more demographic groups were in (a) significantly stronger agreement and (b) significantly less strong agreement with other respondents for this item, although none were in disagreement):

"The preservice teacher education program prepares preservice teacher to integrate culture with language instruction."

Expressing significantly stronger agreement than other respondents with this item were college or university foreign language teachers, methods instructors, university supervisors, officers in foreign language organizations, teacher educators, and full-time college or university personnel. Expressing significantly less strong agreement were PreK-12 teachers, district administrative office personnel, and high school teachers. To better understand these differences in viewpoint, the written comments by respondents on this item are currently being analyzed.

In addition to the New Visions In Action national survey [11], the Working Groups are currently reviewing a wide range of documents, focusing on over 50 current articles and publications that are related to teacher development. Notable among these are the teacher and/or accreditation standards developed by (a) the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) [12] and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) [13], (b) Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) [14], (c) the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards(NBPTS) [15] and (d) International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) [16] . The Teacher Development Task Force's challenge is to build on work that has already been done and incorporate it into effective program guidelines for pre-service and in-service teacher development, rather than to "re-invent the wheel."

Task Force Co-Chair Bob Terry has developed a PowerPoint presentation that includes the Teacher Development resources of the 2002-03 NVA national survey and a description of the work of this Task Force. This PowerPoint is available directly from Bob Terry (rterry@richmond.edu).

Staying on Top with Technology

Education World offers 30 technology tips for teachers in the January 2004 online article Managing Technology: Tips From the Experts [17]. This list is full of neat ideas that will save you time and make your technology-rich activities more productive.

Become Involved

Are you interested in collaborating with others to address the challenges of teacher development? If so, contact the Task Force Co-Chairs [18] for additional information on how you can help.

Robert M. Terry
Teacher Development Task Force Co-Chair
PO Box 25
28 Westhampton Way
University of Richmond, VA 23173-0025
TEL: 804-289-8117
rterry@richmond.edu

Frank W. Medley Jr.
Teacher Development Task Force Co-Chair
fmedley@wvu.edu

Quotes to Ponder

We have inadvertently designed a system in which being good at what you do as a teacher is not formally rewarded, while being poor at what you do is seldom corrected nor penalized.
-Elliot Eisner, professor, Stanford School of Education, New York Times, September 3, 1985.

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessóthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.
-John Dewey, ìDemocracy in Education,î John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899ñ1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 3, p. 229 (1977). First published in The Elementary School Teacher, December 1903.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
-Chinese proverb. The International Thesaurus of Quotations, ed. Rhoda Thomas Tripp, p. 76, no. 3 (1970).

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get.
-Attributed to William Feather - August Kerber, Quotable Quotes on Education, p. 17 (1968).

I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil - or a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammer - whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.
-Senator John F. Kennedy, commencement address, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, June 8, 1958. Transcript, p. 2. (Note: The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 9th ed., p. 84, no. 8 (1964) gives the quotation from Goethe as follows: ìThou must (in commanding and winning, or serving and losing, suffering or triumphing) be either anvil or hammer,î citing his play, Der Gross-Cophta, act II, though it has not been found there.)

Memories of Iowa

Since this newsletter is focusing on development, today we offer you a site that focuses on Iowa's development. The Iowa Department of Economic Development promotes Iowa: The Smart Place to Live, Work, and Play [18]. This comprehensive website provides a very interesting big picture view of Iowa and its potential.

Links in this document

[1] New Visions in Action - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/newvisions/

[2] National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/nflrc

[3] 2004 Summer Institutes - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/nflrc/inst/2004/homepage.html

[4] New Visions Teacher Development Task Force - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/newvisions/newsite/td/homepage.html

[5] Teacher Development Reports - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/newvisions/newsite/td/td_preport.html

[6] Email correspondence from Bob Terry, 2/2/2004.

[7] Exemplary Program Nomination - http://casls.uoregon.edu/nomination/tdform.htm

[8] Teacher Tap: Professional Development Resources - http://www.eduscapes.com/tap/

[9] Eduscapes - http://eduscapes.com

[10] Foreign Language Teaching Forum (FLTEACH) - http://www.cortland.edu/flteach

[11] New Visions In Action national survey - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/newvisions/

[12] American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) - http://www.actfl.org

[13National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) - http://www.ncate.org

[14] Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) - http://www.ccsso.org/projects/Interstate_New_Teacher_Assessment_and_Support_Consortium

[15] National Board for Professional Teaching Standards(NBPTS) - http://www.nbpts.org

[16] International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) - http://www.iste.org/standards

[17] Managing Technology: Tips From the Experts - http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech116.shtml

[18] New Visions in Action Teacher Development Chairmen - http://www.educ.iastate.edu/newvisions/newsite/td/td_chairs.html

[19] Iowa: The Smart Place to Live, Work, and Play - http://www.iowasmartidea.com

This Newsletter was prepared with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education under Title VI grant #P229A020023. The publication of products and website URLs in this newsletter is provided for informational purposes only and does not imply an endorsement by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center, Iowa State University, or the positions or policies of the U. S. Department of Education.

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