My Reflections on the Past Few Years

Lucas Hoffman, Beginning Teachers Committee Chair

Serving as the Beginning Teachers committee chair has been a great privilege of mine.  I will echo what many other colleagues will say in that it has truly been an honor to get to know and work with such a dedicated and engage group of professional language educators.  Working on the board has been the greatest professional development tool of my teaching career.  I strongly advise anyone interested to join the committee!

Thanks to Lee Link who talked me into the joining her committee some years ago!  : )  My journey really started in Minneapolis as she and I were participating in CSCTFL Leadership workshop to help recruit new (beginning) members for OFLA, as part of a project we happily inherited from the membership committee.  Through our work with that committee, we developed a set of new initiates that Lee and my committee members would work on over the years to come.  In looking to warmly welcome our new teachers to the profession, we began a New Teacher/New Attendee Reception in the form of a “Meet and Greet”, usually hosted Thursday evening.  Along with that special reception, we also traditionally ran a “New Teacher” session at the annual conference allowing new teachers to network and share strategies.

This year, I would especially like to thank Paula Sondej, Jeanne Schulté and Rachel Poynter who kindly gave up of their time to contribute their thoughts and ideas to this year’s committee.  In re-evaluating our committee’s priorities through a membership survey, we refocused our direction to providing resources and tools.  This summer, we will be sharing a set of new teacher resources to new teacher OFLA members.  Watch out for that in early August.

I would like to welcome Lesley Chapman, French teacher at Sycamore High School, as the new committee chairperson.  With her experience mentoring as part of the Ohio Resident Educator Summative Assessment (RESA), she will bring special understanding of the needs of new world language teachers in Ohio.  I am excited to see the new direction in which she will direct the committee!  Lesley is looking for new committee members for next year.  IF you are interested in joining OR have ideas for committee projects, please email her at chapmanle@sycamoreschools.org.