Maine DOE offering free workshops for world languages educators

The Maine DOE’s World Languages in Maine: A Standards-Based Teaching and Assessment Initiative, now in its third year, will be again offering free regional workshops for world language teachers statewide during the 2014-15 school year.

Each day-long workshop is delivered by a teacher leader who received intensive summer training on current best practices for teaching to student proficiency. The workshops are intended to directly assist teachers and schools in accessing high-quality, free professional development that will directly support teaching and assessment in a proficiency-based system.

This year’s content includes, but is not limited to:

• practical strategies that build interpersonal, presentational and interpretive communication skills to create a communicatively purposeful classroom environment in the target language;
• performance toward proficiency: understanding the proficiency levels for all grade spans and understanding how to advance students relative to grade span; and
• time for teachers to work on content with support from the teacher leader presenter.

Every year the content of the workshops changes, so teachers who have attended in previous years should be aware that this round of workshops provides new information and builds on the two previous years. To register participants should contact the workshop teacher leader. Space is limited.

A complete listing of the workshops with dates, locations and times is below.

For more information about the workshops or world languages related technical assistance, please contact the Department’s World Language Specialist Dr. Jay Ketner at jay.ketner@maine.gov or 624-6825