See you this year? Conferences & workshops

Where will I meet you?  I’d love to learn with you at any of these professional development opportunities this year.

ACTFL Convention & Expo 2016

I’m headed to the annual Convention and Expo of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (gulp) THIS WEEK.  I am participating in three sessions at the convention, but before you make any plans, please do yourself a professional favor and read Thomas Sauer’s post Creating Your Conference Path – you’ll really be glad you did.  My own conference path this year involves addressing what I see as my current major weakness, connecting with my early language learners.  If I don’t meet you at one of the sessions I’m speaking in, I hope our conference paths will cross elsewhere.  At the very least, keep an eye out on Twitter to see where the #langchat group will be meeting up, and if you’ve never participated in #langchat, get ready to learn about the professional development that will change your education (and maybe the rest of your) world.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Friday, 11:00 A.M.
Convention Center, 210B

Juan Carlos Morales and Susann Davis have put together a crazy fabulous team to help ACTFL newcomers (or oldcomers who are confused about anything!) get a crash-course in some of the concepts and terms we throw around like everyone knows what we’re talking about.  If you’ve been on the proficiency path for a long time, you’d probably benefit more from following a different conference path – don’t come just for the names.  But if you’re still confused about some of the tenets of what we talk about, this is the best hour-long PD you’ll find all weekend, I’d wager.  I’m going to talk for 5 minutes on Can Do statements, and you’ll hear the likes of Yo Azama, Alyssa Villarreal, Thomas Sauer, Nicole Naditz, and Ken Stewart talk about everything from the modes of communication to the input-output continuum to Integrated Performance Assessments.  I can’t wait!

ImpACTFL Voices: Pathways to Proficiency

Saturday, 8:00 A.M.
Convention Center 206A

I’m incredibly honored to have been asked to help Paul Jennemann and Lori Langer de Ramírez share our stories of proficiency in TED-style talks at this session.  If you join me here, you’ll hear me share about my dad and talk about why I think just maybe good pedagogy is not the principle factor in long-term language success (ssh, don’t tell anyone).

Textbook as AID: Adapt, Incorporate, Ditch

Saturday, 5:15 P.M.
Convention Center 103

The question has never been whether you use a textbook or any given tool in the classroom, it’s always been how.  Come help me build a list of the characteristics of a world language class activity (textbook or from someone’s blog or otherwise)  and then run a few activities through that filter to decide whether we should adapt them, incorporate them as-is, or ditch them.

Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

Can you believe I have never been to Chicago?  My clothes have been to Chicago, but I have not (that is a long story of luggage misrouted by the airlines).  Will I see you in Chicago to talk about authentic film or learn together on a different path?

Mining for Gold: Leveraging Culture and Language in Authentic  Film; Friday, 11:15 A.M.
Mining for (Elementary) Gold; Saturday, 12:15 P.M.

These two sessions will be similar, but the source and process are obviously different for younger learners.  Let’s talk together about how to use authentic film and break it down into tiny chunks in a way that engages learners and fosters proficiency development.  (Maybe by then I’ll have finished my ebook guide to Canela?!)

Locations are TBD.

Musicuentos Summer Workshops

Camp Musicuentos: (Base)Camp and Northeast

Camp Musicuentos is a workshop designed to help teachers develop and plan their curriculum for the following year, from establishing proficiency goals and primary Can Do statements to the process of turning those Can Do statements into daily performance goals.  I’ve removed the third day on comprehensible input strategies supporting your lesson plans and made it a separate workshop at the end of the summer (see below).

I have a very celebratory summer as my in-laws will celebrate their 40th anniversary and my husband and I will celebrate our 10th, both in the month of July, so I’ve decided not to pursue a Southeast location next year, but that certainly doesn’t mean I won’t in 2018.  My husband’s family live in Rhode Island and I travel there every summer anyway, so I will be attempting a Northeast location again if there’s interest, and I’ve extended it to match the 2-day format of (Base)Camp.

(Base)Camp Musicuentos will be June 15-16 in Louisville, Kentucky and Camp Musicuentos Northeast will be July 10-11 in Warwick, Rhode Island.  To be notified when I open registration in February before that information is posted on the blog, send me a note through my contact form.

I’m excited to be offering my workshop The Brave Little Tailor for the first time in Louisville.  We all know that we need to infuse comprehensible input into our classrooms, but there is no one-size-fits-all method of doing this.  Teachers’ personalities are different, kids are different, classrooms are different, schools are different.  We’ll look at a ton of strategies from storytelling to infographics to music and how to effectively use them in your classroom with your students.

The Brave Little Tailor will be at the end of the summer (where we live anyway), July 31-August 1 in Louisville, Kentucky.

Where will I meet you this year?