Friday, February 2, 2018

Medfield World Language Department hosts WLClassroom/Joshua Cabral for an ACTFL CORE practices workshop

Yesterday afternoon, February 2, during our professional development time, the World Language department had the pleasure (and the luxury) of meeting together as a full department grades 2-12. We welcomed Joshua Cabral aka WLClassroom to our district; he provided us with a full afternoon of philosophy, pedagogy, and examples for our classrooms.  Through previous communication via phone calls, e-mails, tweets, and Facebook, we determined that Mr. Cabral would present the ACTFL proficiency levels and then focus on target language use/comprehensible input and feedback from the six ACTFL CORE  practices. Mr. Cabral was favorably impressed with the work that our department is already doing (check out the image of his tweet and also on our twitter feed on the right of this page):
We learned a great deal from working with him throughout the afternoon.  It was a great way to spend our professional development time.  We had the rare chance to gather all the teachers from all four buildings in town and hear the same up to date professional practice tenets that guide our everyday passions: teaching our Medfield students to communicate in another language. He underscored the importance of speaking the target language during class and we dove into different types of feedback that did not necessarily include a grade. Coaching was the word of the afternoon as we learned different ways to coach our students to level up their proficiency levels in the languages that they study. The experience was energizing and professional.  Many of us left with a renewed sense of purpose as we head into the second half of the academic year.   As I mentioned, WLClassroom was also favorably impressed with some of what we already do in Medfield. Srta. Seri's model grammar/ target/word/ walls were a great hit!
WLClassroom helped to affirm our proficiency practices and encourage us to continue to work toward proficiency for all of our Medfield students.