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Conversations on Open Education for Language Learning

Welcome to Open Education Week 2021

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March 1-5, 2021 is Open Education Week, an international event to build awareness of open education and show its impact on teaching and learning. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness.* Read below to learn how to get involved during Open Ed Week.

Attend OLRC’s and COERLL’s FL OER Conference

The Open Language Resource Center (OLRC) at the University of Kansas and COERLL will be hosting the first annual Foreign Language OER Conference on Saturday, March 6, 2021. Language instructors will showcase large-scale foreign language OER and exchange information on topics related to OER production and adoption. We hope this will be a space for sharing lessons learned and building a community of practice!

There is no cost to attend the conference. It will be conducted entirely through Zoom and composed of 15 minute lightning talks and 30 minute presentations.

Read NEW OER from COERLL

Be featured on COERLL’s Language OER Network

Have you taught with openly licensed resources, created your own openly licensed resources, or helped others learn about OER? If so, we want to give you a digital badge and feature you on the Language OER Network! 117 faculty, teachers, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students are already listed there.

Visit the LOERN page to join

Find other events and resources for Open Education Week

You can discover other events around the world on the Open Education Week website. Here’s just a sample:

And check out these resources:

Learn more about OER for language learning in our introductory guide

Two years ago, we launched the Introduction to OER for Language Teachers, a series of modules on topics related to creating and using open educational resources and practices. We have been updating the guide ever since based on our conversations with teachers – it’s OER, so it continues to evolve!

If you are already a user or creator of OER, or are planning on becoming one, please take a look at the guide, and let us know what you think.

Try licensing your work

If you are already sharing activities, lesson plans, or other resources with colleagues, you might want to consider adding a Creative Commons license, so people know how they are allowed to use your resource and remember to give you credit. Here’s how…

  1. Somewhere in your document, write “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License” (or whichever other license you choose). This page can help you choose a license (that is, choose how people are allowed to use your resource).
  2. Add an image of the license if you have it.
  3. Don’t forget to include your name as the author!

 

*Definition from the Open Education Consortium’s Open Education Week website, licensed under CC BY.

Activities for remote language teaching

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On April 29th, COERLL hosted a webinar where three teachers shared activities they have used for their remote language classes. You can view the video, linked below, but we’ll summarize some of their ideas here.

Recommended activities

Olivia Grugan (Arabic/German/Spanish Teacher, World of Learning Institute at Appalachia Intermediate Unit 8) first asked us to ponder: what does good teaching look like, and what one aspect of good teaching is most important to you to preserve in your remote class?

For Olivia, routines are an important way of grounding an online course. Routines provide repetition for students, build confidence, and make it easier to stay in the target language. For example, by using the annotation tool in Zoom, students can collaboratively add to a Google Slide that lists the date or the class objectives for the day.

Catherine Ousselin (French Teacher, Mount Vernon High School) decided that doing activities in the interpretive mode is more accessible for students learning from home. They had just completed the food unit when remote teaching began, and eating is an activity everyone is doing in common at this time. Hence, interpretive tasks based on food!

Catherine showed some Google slides listing steps students could take to build on their knowledge, with each step linking to a different interpretive task. For example, beginner students would answer some short questions, look at a vocabulary list, use Quizlet to practice vocabulary, categorize foods in Seesaw, and finish by watching videos.

Daniel Verdugo (Spanish Teacher, Ann Arbor Public Schools) regularly writes and publishes Ñ magazine in Google slides with his students, and continued this when his classes went remote, with some tweaks.

Usually his students would write articles based on their interests. In the remote classroom, he asked them to write film reviews, since they were already watching media at home in quarantine. Students write their reviews in a shared Google Doc so they can read each other’s work, providing for a collaborative learning experience and enhancing their digital skills. All of this will be added to their digital magazine, which is published and distributed at school and in the community in Ann Arbor.

Key questions

To summarize, here are some questions to ask yourself when planning your remote classes:

  • What is good teaching? what one element of that do you want to focus on?
  • What mode of communication will your students be able to work on with the tools they have?
  • How can you build on what students are already doing at home?
  • What linguistic tasks and technology activities do your students already feel comfortable with that you can expand on?

Each of these teachers has met their students where they are by giving them activities they know their students are capable of completing, both linguistically and technologically. While the exercises they shared look polished, they are using basic tools like Google Slides and video-conferencing that most teachers can access. For teachers and students who can’t access these tools, the panelists provided suggestions for other ways to engage the students, which we’ve listed in the webinar notes on the event page.

  • See the event page for a recording of the webinar, more details about the presenters’ work and ideas for adjusting their activities to different levels, and information shared in the Q&A.

Thank you to Olivia, Catherine, and Daniel for sharing their ideas, and thank you to every teacher who is pushing to reach their students in these out-of-the-ordinary circumstances! Stay safe, everyone.

Welcome to Open Education Week 2020

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March 2-6, 2020 is Open Education Week, an international event to build awareness of open education and show its impact on teaching and learning. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness.* Read below to learn how to get involved during Open Ed Week.

Attend COERLL’s Open Ed Week OER Hangout Webinar

Celebrate Open Education Week by attending this discussion-based webinar on Wednesday March 4 at 6:00pm CST, where you will have a chance to chat with three instructors who have adopted OER and creatively adapted the content for their language classes.

  • Alexandra Gouirand is a French faculty member at South Puget Sound Community College. She uses Français interactif as the main textbook in her French 1 class, as well as ancillary books and online resources including YouTube videos.
  • Dawn Michael has been teaching French since 1991, and is currently a high school French teacher in Ohio. She uses the open curriculum Français interactif to teach blended French 1 and 2 courses and creates her own supplements to accompany the resources.
  • Valérie Morgan is a French lecturer. She uses the open curriculum Français interactif to teach Levels 1, 2, and 3 French. To supplement the textbook she uses Google Classroom, Google Tools, Flipgrid, and Padlet.

Since Français interactif is the most widely-used OER published by COERLL, it was easier for us to find French teachers to present here, but we hope teachers of all languages will join.

There will be 20 minutes of presentation time, and the rest of the hour will be dedicated to your questions and to conversation between participants and panelists. We want to hear from you!

Be featured on COERLL’s Language OER Network

Have you taught with openly licensed resources, created your own openly licensed resources, or helped others learn about OER? If so, we want to give you a digital badge and feature you on the Language OER Network! 102 faculty, teachers, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students are already listed there.

Visit the LOERN page to join

Find other events and resources for Open Education Week

You can discover other events around the world on the Open Education Week website. Here’s just a sample:

And check out these resources:

Learn more about OER for language learning in our introductory guide

Last year, we launched the Introduction to OER for Language Teachers, a series of modules on topics related to creating and using open educational resources and practices. We have been updating the guide ever since based on our conversations with teachers – it’s OER, so it continues to evolve!

If you are already a user or creator of OER, or are planning on becoming one, please take a look at the guide, and let us know what you think!

Try licensing your work

If you are already sharing activities, lesson plans, or other resources with colleagues, you might want to consider adding a Creative Commons license, so people know how they are allowed to use it and remember to give you credit. Here’s how…

  1. Somewhere in your document, write “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License” (or whichever other license you choose). This page can help you choose a license (that is, choose how people are allowed to use your resource).
  2. Add an image of the license if you have it.
  3. Don’t forget to include your name as the author!

 

*Definition from the Open Education Consortium’s Open Education Week website, licensed under CC BY.

Collaborative classroom research through the Exploratory Practice framework

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Photo credit: Middle school Spanish class by flickr user woodleywonderworks Creative Commons License

Editor’s note: the following is an excerpt from “Exploratory practice: a way of opening up access to research by classroom teachers and learners” by Assia Slimani-Rolls in the book “New case studies of openness in and beyond the language classroom”, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. This chapter shows how teachers can integrate research into their teaching in a straightforward and feasible way with the Exploratory Practice (EP) framework. The author organized a research project with a group of teachers who met together regularly to support each other in their individual exploratory practices. The team’s resulting work demonstrates many facets of open education: experimentation by teachers, support from other teachers, and giving students more agency in the classroom.

It remains relevant for teachers to engage in research in order to contest their tacit understanding and ensure that their classroom practice is not based only on intuition and experience. It is essential to realise that teachers cannot undertake research in the same way academic researchers do because their training and working conditions differ drastically. Exploratory Practice (EP) has put forward a principled framework (Allwright, 2003) to empower teachers and their learners to understand better their practice by investigating teaching puzzles, such as “why do my students make disruptive use of mobile phones during my lessons?”, as Lecumberri’s (2018) study illustrates.

EP believes that asking ‘why’ instead of ‘what’ questions leads to a deeper understanding of complex issues rather than finding solutions which may work in some circumstances but not in others (for more teacher and learner puzzles see Allwright, 2003; Allwright & Hanks, 2009; Dikilitas & Hanks, 2018; Slimani-Rolls & Kiely, 2018).

In the framework of EP, quality of life is prioritised in the classroom because it is believed that it is the search for quality of life that paves the way to quality of work. When teachers and learners feel respected, listened to, and enjoy rather than endure their classroom experiences, then they invest their efforts in developing the quality of their work. Seeking to understand quality of life should come before attempting to bring any change because understanding is “a prerequisite to intelligent decision-making” (Allwright & Hanks, 2009, p. 151).

The principles of collegiality and inclusivity for mutual development are crucial to the research enterprise. Indeed, it is imperative that all those involved in the research are given the opportunity to contribute with their ideas and, by the same token, derive a positive learning experience. In particular, inclusivity of learners as co-partners is essential as EP suggests that learners are an integral part of the classroom environment and that their involvement in the search for its understanding is paramount.

In order to make sense of their practice without getting burnt out, EP recommends that teachers integrate the search for understanding into their teaching routine so that both, teaching and research, get done at the same time. For this purpose, EP proposes that teachers use normal classroom activities as research tools to investigate the teaching puzzles. These activities can include brainstorming sessions, class discussion, pair/group work, reading comprehension texts, surveys, video recording, and any other pedagogic activity that teachers find suitable. Developing expertise in using the tools of their trade as investigative instruments would make the teachers’ search for understanding feasible and sustainable.

  • Read the rest of the chapter, including the description of Lecumberri’s research on the puzzle “why do my students make disruptive use of mobile phones during my lessons?”, and information about where teachers can engage with exploratory practice.

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Dr Assia Slimani-Rolls is Associate Professor at Regent’s University London. She has co-authored a book with Richard Kiely on Exploratory Practice as continuing form of professional development for language teachers and is currently working with Dr Ines Miller and her colleagues on a British Council funded research project (2018-2019) whose main objective is to examine the delayed impact of the principles of Exploratory Practice (EP).

Inclusive Pedagogy and the Language-Learning Classroom

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Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Sarah Le Pichon, an Assistant French Instructor at the University of Texas at Austin, on the topic of inclusive pedagogies. Students, administrators, and faculty here at UT are developing inclusive policies and practices. If your institution is considering the same changes, we hope the following information will help.

We also saw a clear link to open educational resources in Sarah’s advice: inclusive teaching requires adapting or adding on to your curriculum to address your students’ varying identities, and these changes are easier with a curriculum composed of openly licensed materials that can be adapted based on individual needs.

Language pedagogy most often focuses on linguistic theory and the most successful modes of language learning. Discussions of inclusivity, however, are crucial to successful language pedagogy; in fact, language learning and teaching are largely about coming in contact with different populations and broadening our world view. More importantly, instructors must remember that students cannot leave their identities at the door when they enter our classrooms, and we must therefore adopt pedagogical practices that acknowledge and welcome all populations and identities. Inclusive pedagogies aim to outline implementable practices that encourage open and welcoming learning environments for all populations and identities.

Remember​: These techniques work differently depending on where you are in your career, as well as on the teaching context and your own teaching ethos or style. Use techniques you feel comfortable with; hold off on ones you don’t.

Welcoming Trans- & Gender Non-Conforming Students into our Language Classrooms

Trans- and gender non-conforming students may feel particular anxiety in entering a language classroom, where partner work abounds and where, most often, gender pronouns and gender agreements are addressed on a consistent basis. Language classrooms must finds ways to welcome trans- and gender non-conforming students, and aim to minimize anxiety that might hold students back from learning a language. We should not, however, assume that any individual is ready to or wants to share their gender identity with the classroom or their partner. This means that instructors should be prepared and trained to have conversations with trans- and gender non-conforming students, and work together to establish the best course of action for them in the classroom.

  • Make Room for Your Students​:
    • Distribute notecards the first day of class that ask for the student’s name as it appears on the registrar, their preferred name, and their pronouns. Present yourself to your students using this model as you distribute the notecards, for example: “My name is Sarah Le Pichon, and I go by Sarah. My pronouns are she/her/hers. You are welcome to leave your pronouns section blank, or if you would like to discuss further, you can indicate that on your notecard as well.”
    • Follow your students’ lead: Have a conversation with your trans- and gender non-conforming students about how they would like for you to proceed in the classroom and with their peers.
    • Offer options: For example, give them the option to stick with a single partner they feel comfortable with for the semester, rather than switching partners, thereby avoiding unnecessary misgenderings, or repeated requests.
  • Know Your Information:​
    • Know your gender-neutral pronoun information. If you feel like it is complicated, go over it and practice using those pronouns and making those agreements until it comes to you more easily.
    • Do research on how trans- and gender non-conforming issues are addressed in the language and various cultures you teach. These conversations might be very different from one country to another, even if those countries share a language. Acknowledge the different ways in which this conversation is being held across different cultures. Many languages also have several different options for non-binary individuals; research these different linguistic possibilities, and offer your students options.
    • Provide students with accessible and clear information, and diverse resources: show them blogs, videos, articles, etc. from trans- and gender non-conforming individuals who speak the language you teach.

Representation: Race and Diversity

Cultural discussions that address matters such as race are crucial to an inclusive language classroom. Think about and practice methods to properly and confidently mediate discussions on these complex cultural topics so that you feel more comfortable and knowledgeable when addressing these in the classroom, while providing authentic resources that allow a diverse set of voices to be heard.

  • Rethink Your Texts:​
    • Diversify your texts! Think and rethink your material every semester. Find authentic online material that makes your students feel represented, including blogs, videos, articles, etc. from various identity groups.
    • Eliminate any exclusionary language: make sure none of your material stereotypes, mocks, or in any other way targets an identity group.
  • Create an Open Environment​:
    • Have open conversations with your students about how these conversations are being had in the various countries in which your language is spoken.
    • Acknowledge gaps in knowledge, and your own experience/privilege; this is especially important if you yourself are not a part of the identity group you are discussing.

Providing Resources and Working Beyond the Classroom

While not all of us have the opportunity to rethink our materials and texts, we all have the opportunity to provide our students with adequate resources. There are always ways you can create an inclusive syllabus, and small ways you can diversify the material you present to your students.

  • Be Prepared with Referrals:​
    • Know the resources your students need, and provide specifics (counseling and mental health services, services for students with disabilities, behavioral concerns advice line, student emergency services, Ombuds Office, etc.), including phone numbers and/or e-mail addresses. Add these to your syllabus and/or course site.
  • Seek Other Input​:
    • Let other voices be heard by providing outside/online resources (blogs, YouTube videos, etc…). Create a weekly newsletter that links to all of the resources you’ve studied or discussed that week.
    • If you feel comfortable doing so, talk to your supervisor about inclusive materials and additions.

For more information:

—
Sarah Le Pichon is a PhD student in French Studies working on non-conforming individuals and identity negotiations in the nineteenth century. She has taught French at various levels, from pre-k to higher-education classrooms, since 2013. She now leads Trauma-Informed Teaching workshops for staff and faculty in addition to working as a French instructor at UT Austin. Sarah also creates inclusivity workshops for various groups on campus. Most recently, she was invited to speak at the Faculty Innovation Center’s Inclusive Teaching and Learning Symposium. She does not claim to be an expert on any topic, except for the Harry Potter series.

A network to showcase OER for language learning

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Editors note: This post was originally published on the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources blog

The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) just launched the Language OER Network (LOERN), a page on our website to list language educators who are creating, using, or promoting open educational resources (OER). Every person featured on the page receives an open digital badge from COERLL. In this effort to acknowledge, validate, inspire, and connect open practitioners, we have already distributed badges to 41 teachers, librarians, and administrators.

We built the Language OER Network because we realized that more people than ever have started to understand what we do and are interested in getting involved in their own open projects. We are always thankful to hear from K-12 teachers and community college and university faculty who spend the extra time and energy to find the right open materials to support their students’ language proficiency. The Language OER Network exists to acknowledge this work.

Even though the open movement is gaining momentum, a large number of teachers and administrators either don’t know or misunderstand what OER is. Teachers who do advocate for openness often report that they are doing it alone. Badges provide teachers with proof of their accomplishments, to validate to their colleagues and employers that using and making OER is scholarly, creative work.

Language teachers (plus other staff, administrators, or students involved in OER for languages) can earn as many as six badges on the Language OER Network, for being either an OER Teacher, OER Master Teacher, OER Creator, OER Master Creator, OER Reviewer, or OER Ambassador. From what we’ve seen, this follows the natural progression that many people take, from the basic use of supplementary OER, to the full involvement of sharing the benefits of OER with others. We hope that this set of badges will inspire people to keep opening up, eventually earning all six badges.

We would also love if people embarking on new open projects could look at this page and find others who have similar ideas, to connect with them and potentially collaborate. With the number of people pursuing OER right now, it’s likely that many of them are doing similar projects and could benefit from sharing ideas and resources.

Even though we are publishing the Language OER Network to benefit teachers, it benefits COERLL as well. LOERN will be a tapestry of open language education that will help us demonstrate what this multifaceted movement is all about. Since launching the page in the past month, we are excited to have already learned about new people and projects from across the country. We look forward to hearing from more open educators, and also hope that in the future we can find a way to acknowledge more types of open educational practices, which are just as important as open resources, but harder to quantify.

Read about your colleagues and their open projects, and join the community! https://community.coerll.utexas.edu/

OER for a Common Goal – Meeting the Needs of Spanish Heritage Learners

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Editors note: This post was written by COERLL partner Jocelly Meiners, and originally published in Tex Libris, the blog from the libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, for a special Open Education Week series.

In recent years, the development of Spanish language courses designed specifically for heritage language learners has gained much attention throughout K-12 and post-secondary education in the US. Heritage language learners are students who were exposed to Spanish at home while growing up. These students usually have a broad knowledge about their cultural heritage, and varying degrees of language dominance. Over the years, it has been found that these learners have different pedagogical needs than second language learners, and that they benefit greatly from language instruction that is catered to their specific needs. Throughout the country, as more institutions realize these needs, Spanish instructors at all levels are forming programs and creating materials to serve this student population. It seems that we all have some common goals: to help heritage Spanish speakers develop their bilingual skills, to empower them to apply those skills in academic and professional settings, and to feel proud of their cultural and linguistic heritage. So if we all have similar goals in mind and are all working on creating programs and materials to serve these students, why not share all the work we are doing?

I have been teaching courses for heritage Spanish learners here at UT for over 4 years, and about a year and a half ago I started working as the community moderator for the Heritage Spanish Community. This web-based community, which is hosted by COERLL (The Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning), serves as a space for Spanish instructors to collaborate, share and communicate with others about the teaching and learning of Spanish as a heritage language. We encourage instructors at all levels to ask questions on our online forum, to help other instructors, and to share the materials they are working on. Open Educational Resources are an excellent way to share these types of materials, since they can easily be adapted to the specific needs of each instructor’s particular student population.

As community moderator, I add useful content to our website, create interesting questions for discussion, and encourage others to explore our website and share their work. I have also been able to share my own materials as OER, and it has been very rewarding to hear from people in other parts of the country who have found my resources useful and are adapting them for their own heritage Spanish programs. I believe that if we all collaborate and share our resources openly, we will be much more successful in attaining both our personal and common goals.

Jocelly Meiners was born and raised in San José, Costa Rica and moved to Austin, TX to attend UT, where she obtained her undergraduate education, as well as an MA in French linguistics and a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. She is currently a Lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UT, where she teaches courses for Spanish heritage learners.

Happy Open Education Week 2018!

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Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its goal is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Join us March 5-9, 2018!

Language OER Network Launch

Here at COERLL, we’re excited to launch a new network for promoting open projects in language education. The goal of the Language OER Network (LOERN) is to showcase the work of open educators in the field of language learning and teaching. If you are a language educator or student who uses, creates, or promotes open educational resources (OER), COERLL would like to recognize your innovations by listing your name on the LOERN page and by sending you a COERLL badge.

Teachers and students are featured as an OER Teacher, OER Master Teacher, OER Creator, OER Master Creator, OER Ambassador, OER Reviewer, or some combination of those roles.

Please also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to hear from OER Master Creators and Master Teachers about how they have integrated openness into their curricula.

Stories From Open Educators

We’ll also be publishing blog posts here on this blog from language faculty at the University of Texas who have created open educational resources.

OER for a Common Goal – Meeting the Needs of Spanish Heritage Learners by Jocelly Meiners
Creating an OER for Turkish-language learning has made sharing my ideas possible! by Jeannette Okur
Open Access at the Core of Materials Development for LCTLs by Orlando Kelm

Open Education Worldwide

Other organizations around the world are celebrating Open Ed Week too. Learn more about the movement and the events and materials available at openeducationweek.org/.

A Program for Professional Growth Based on Collaboration

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Over the past three years, COERLL has been working on several projects that require participation from language instructors; a new realm for a language center accustomed to making language learning materials with small teams of faculty and graduate students.

In order to jumpstart these participatory projects, we started a “COERLL Collaborators” program to mentor teachers and give visibility (and some funding) to their work, while spreading the use of open licenses and starting a network for our projects. Participants in the COERLL Collaborators program have helped COERLL tremendously over the past year or so, by testing and providing insights into our projects.

We piloted COERLL Collaborators for FLLITE (Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday), a project with CERCLL (Center for Educational Resources in Culture Language and Literacy) in which teachers write multiliteracies lessons around an authentic resource, receive peer review feedback, and have their lesson published on fllite.org. The FLLITE team chose three graduate students to go through this process, based on lesson proposals they submitted.

These lessons are now published on the project website for anyone to use, and exemplify how a teacher can transform their interests into a completely original lesson.

  • Natasha César-Suárez photographed an image from Spain’s 15-M movement and turned it into a lesson on language in social movements.
  • Marcelo Fuentes developed an image of a letter to God found in a Chilean church into a cultural lesson and letter writing activity.
  • Carol Ready used a poem by Pablo Neruda to teach students about the impact of commercial food production on Latin America through the study of descriptive language.

For our digital badging partnership with Austin Independent School District, which awards teachers digital badges for professional development based on the TELL (Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning) Framework, we chose three more Collaborators. The three teachers agreed to attend professional development and personal mentorship sessions organized by Thymai Dong, AISD’s World Languages Coordinator, and to earn digital badges related to the topics of the sessions.

Unfortunately administrative changes stopped us from seeing this process through to the end, but the COERLL Collaborators still received some mentorship and challenged themselves to take risks and reflect on their teaching.

  • Rachel Preston developed her own professional growth plan based on a self-assessment of her teaching, which led to an increase in her students’ self-assessment, reflection and goal-setting.
  • Tania Shebaro got motivated at a workshop to scrap her lesson plans for the next day and rewrite everything, leading to engaging and participatory class sessions.
  • Janeth Medrano attended every professional development event possible to get new resources and tools she could adapt for her students.

Thank you to all six of our Collaborators – they have taught us, in addition to teaching their students!

Six more COERLL Collaborators are now busy perfecting some new FLLITE lessons in Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and German, and we are narrowing down COERLL Collaborators applications for our Heritage Spanish project. We are looking forward to expanding the COERLL Collaborators program and building up a network of creative and collaborative language instructors.

See what the COERLL Collaborators have created: