Thank you so much for supporting our beginning and future teachers!

Nicole Hanlon, OWLA Scholarship Chair
French Teacher, Buckeye Valley High School

Our 3rd annual conference raffle was a huge success thanks to support from all of you who attended the conference! With your help, we were able to raise $750 for our Beginning and Pre-Service World Language Teacher Conference scholarships.

This year, we supported four beginning teachers and three pre-service students enrolled in World Language Education programs in Ohio and helped them defray the costs of attending our conference. This is such a valuable experience for them as it gets them involved in the teaching community early in their careers and provides them with support and new ideas. I know that many of us, like myself, have found life-long friends, valuable information, and a treasured sense of community through our own participation in OWLA. Here’s what a few of them had to say about their first OWLA conference experience:

“I thought the conference was a really great experience overall! I was able to network with other teachers and hear their experiences/perspectives, which was helpful when looking for a job (especially hearing opinions about what levels to teach and being a singleton or not). “

“As for helpful sessions, my favorites were Novels in class: a decade’s worth of tips, the great Spanish song swap, and stress free and effective feedback! I have used a few songs from the great Spanish song swap in class already! Stress free and effective feedback I used a lot while grading. I found it really helpful to have a list of key feedback/comments that you can copy and paste or stick to assignments to save time. It was also refreshing to hear that not everything has to be graded all the time.”

“Overall, it was a little overwhelming at first because I was trying to go to as many sessions as I could, but it was a lot of good information as a beginning teacher :)” – Pre-Service Teacher

“The conference has helped me a ton as a world language teacher. It was great connecting with other teachers and learning that we deal with a lot of things in common despite teaching various languages and coming from different districts. I learned about taking care of one’s self…our own cup…before filling our students’ cup. Also, I received some valuable and collaborative resources that I have taken to the classroom that I can use through my career. It was very important as I would not have gained this information if I didn’t attend the conference. The ability to collaborate with like-minded individuals is priceless. “ – Beginning Teacher