Congratulations!

     Congratulations to CARLA, the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition! They have successfully put together their 4th Immersion Educator's conference in St. Paul, Minnesota! The title this year was: Immersion 2012: Bridging Contyexts for a Multilingual World. For those of you who don't know about CARLA, it "is one of the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI National Language Resource Centers, whose role is to improve the nation's capacity to teach and learn foreign languages." I'm sitting in my hotel room just now (watching the Cardinals vs Giants baseball), thinking back over all the lessons I've learned in the past 2 days, and anticipating what else I'll learn tomorrow, the final day!    :)
    
     Even as I got into the Supershuttle at the airport Wednesday night, I looked around and asked if anyone else was headed to the Immersion conference; and 3 of the other 5 passengers were! We immediately started talking about where we were from, what kind of Immersion school we were part of, and what we expected to learn at this conference. These ladies were from Utah, a state that is rapidly expanding their Immersion school offerings. But that wasn't the District that came from the farthest away; I later discovered there were attendees from California, North Carolina, Louisiana, Oregon, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan, Colorado,Washington,Nebraska, Idaho, Arizona, Maryland Texas, Hawaii, Canada, Finland, Brazil, Argentina, The Netherlands, Philippines, Spain, Germany, Japan, etc, etc, etc.! I don't know what the numbers are yet, but there are several hundred educators here; each of them coming with their own story to share, questions to ask, and the desire to become better Immersion educators!

     One of my favorite workshops was: Relating Teacher Practices to Better Student Written Production. The presenters were Nicole Boudreaux and Michelle Haj-Broussard, both from Luisiana, working in and with French Immersion schools. They presented the work of 2 teachers from their District who, through very different teaching styles, have both helped their students make tremendous progress in Writing in their 2nd language. One of the teachers has a very loosely structured classroom, but with very defined goals for her students, allowing them to arrive at those goals in their own way, at their own time. She  has 9-10 students in the classroom. The other teacher was more structured in her approach, in a classroom of about 22 students. We saw videos of both teachers at work, laying the groundwork & fundamentals for their students to write, and watched as those same students proudly read aloud their published stories. Ok, back to my classroom drawing board to bust some of my own myths about what 1st grade students can do in their first trimester of Spanish Immersion! One of the key lessons I learned was that I need to give my students more specific referentials & train them how to use the referentials in their writing process. I can't wait!!!

     As I publish this post, I'm asking that other attendees add their favorite session to the blog. What did you learn? How will you apply it as you return to your schools? Let's share the wealth of information we've acquired this week!

Always learning,

~Sheryl René