Aligning Practices as a Tool in Increasing Program Enrollment

Dawn N. Michael, OFLA Recruitment & Retention Chair
Reynoldsburg City Schools

This is a follow-up piece to my October article entitled “Where Did All the Our (Language) Students Go? Examining Systemic and Classroom Factors in Program Decline.” I am sharing some of our experiences and choices in the hopes that it is useful to other departments as they approach the problems of maintaining student enrollment and administrative support for their language programs.

At the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, the world language teachers in my district were able to meet to discuss alignment of curriculum and assessment practices. The goals set out were to examine what and how students were being taught at each level in each language, to compare assessment practices, and to reach an agreement on common curriculum and assessments so that students would have an equitable and comparable experience across the district. We divided into small groups by language (French and Spanish) and dove into our work.

CURRICULUM

We had existing curriculum maps that were based on the state model curriculum content elaborations, but we chose to examine those to see if they were still serving us and our students. Across the board, we all agreed that our curriculum maps were overly ambitious and we were not able to teach all of the units included at each level. Both the French and Spanish teachers decided to move some units from one level to another in first and second years in order to allow more in-depth study of fewer topics. One of the factors behind our choices was the level of difficulty of the structures involved in communication for that topic. Our hopes were that diving deeper would build stronger foundations and empower more students to be prepared and feel confident about moving to the next level. Further, we all agreed to teach the content of the curriculum maps, but allowed that we may do so in a different order. I hope to do a follow-up at the end of the school year to see if those teachers who chose to mix up the units were able to teach the same amount of content as those who went in order.

For upper levels, we were able to agree on flexibility regarding content, as we are split across different campuses and staff has different training and experience. We have a broad range of topics to choose from and are free to explore those according to what our students need and are interested in. I personally have found that giving my intermediate level students a voice in what they learn has greatly improved their engagement and achievement. 

ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

We have been having ongoing conversations over the past several years about standards-based assessment and grading. This is always a challenge when teachers have experience in traditional grammar-accuracy methods and may not have done professional development regarding integrated performance assessments or communication focused assessments in general. At our two fall planning sessions, there was a consensus to use the ODEW rubrics for grading, which will hopefully create more parity in testing and grading across classes in the same language. My primary goals in these discussions were that colleagues familiarize themselves with our state standards and rubrics, and reflect upon how the assessment and grading practices shape the student experience (and in turn, enrollment choices). 

INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES

As is common in our field of language education, our group of teachers have very different approaches that we are comfortable with. We were all able to collegially agree that as long as we teach the content agreed upon in the lower levels, methodology does not particularly matter. That said, I have introduced Extensive Processing Instruction (the method created by Dr. Gianfranco Conti) and others have adopted many of the materials from the Language Gym as well. This is one area that does affect the student experience and perception a lot, as students sometimes struggle to adjust from one method to another when they articulate up levels. Therefore having a common factor, whether it’s a set of games, activities, technology tools or teaching model, can help students feel comfortable and safe as they move from one teacher to another. This is one thing I would suggest to any other department that is looking to increase uptake to consider.

REFLECTION

Our hopes were that by having extensive conversations about alignment of content and practices, we would be able to provide language learning experiences that encourage our current students and appeal to potential learners. I hope that at the end of the year, we can examine our enrollment numbers for the following  year to see if our aligned practices created any positive changes.