American Association of Teachers of German

Making Decisions of Language Offerings in a School District

A process from the Forest Lake Area School District, Forest Lake, MN

The past few years the community in and around Forest Lake, MN has been discussing the possibility of offering students the opportunity to learn Chinese and Arabic.  Several parents asked the school district administrators if either of these languages could be offered, and the district decided to consider this issue. The following is the process that our district used to answer the community’s questions.

The Task Force comprised the following members:

• 3 Teachers –one from each of the languages the district offers.
• 2 Secondary principals/assistant principals
• 4 Citizens
• 2 Post-secondary educators involved with education/world language education
• District Director of Teaching and Learning
• School Board Liaison

Desired outcomes: 

• Review the current offerings 7-12 in German, French, and Spanish
• Review other possible 7-12 world language offerings
• Develop a recommendation to:

• Continue with current offerings,
• Continue with current offerings and add an additional language(s),
• Eliminate one of more current offerings, or
• Eliminate one or more current offerings and add an additional language(s).
• Develop a timeline for implementation (if necessary)

Timeline:

•   September – first Task Force meeting
•   December – recommendation presented to the school board
•   Next semester – implement approved changes

An important factor to the success of the pre-Task Force planning was designating our Director of Teaching and Learning to solicit its members.

Our first meeting was dedicated to the following:

- confirming meeting dates
- setting ground rules
- reviewing current offerings in the district
- deciding what information would be needed to complete the work

Ground Rules

• Free flowing/open discussion
• Everyone invited to share
• Everyone involved in discussion
• Stay within the scope of the committee
• Timely beginning and ending of meetings
• Set agendas and well facilitated
• Minutes circulated
• Prepared for the meetings

• Open to alternate viewpoints
• All points presented and discussed

• Listen respectfully
• Be constructive
• Be cooperative
• Be respectful

Questions to be Answered:

1. Why do we offer world languages? (national perspective, personal, district perspectives)
2. What are we preparing our students for?
3. Why do students take, not take, drop world languages in our district? How can we encourage students to take a world language?
4. What languages are students interested in? (a survey was created and completed by students in grades 6-12)
5. What languages are offered in neighboring and or comparable districts, including private schools?
6. What does the community know about and think about world language offerings in the Forest Lake Area Schools
7. Are there alternative ways to providing world language instruction– sharing teachers, online classes, etc.?
8. What are the local immersion school’s plans for adding Chinese? Will they be implemented? What does the immersion school want from our schools?
9. What are current curricular issues in world language courses/programs?
10. What are unique characteristics of the world language courses/programs? (opportunities outside of school, trips, etc.)
11. What support will a novice teacher have if an additional language option is offered?
12. Are there world language teachers available in various languages?
13. What are the trends in world language offerings (historical and current)?
14. Are classical languages an option?
15. What do we require or consider as proficiency? Heritage language offerings?

Over the course of six meetings from October to early December 2007, we researched and discussed the questions above. Our discussions were based on that research and information we received about teacher availability from the post-secondary educators and the local immersion school. We also used data collected from surveys conducted in our schools and in the community about world language offerings. Finally, we took into account school monetary issues and logistics.

Conclusions

There is community support for all of the current language offerings in the school district, as well as the interest in the offering of Chinese (by parents), Japanese (by students) and ASL (by students).

The availability of Chinese teachers at the moment was none, due to visa restrictions with China, and all available teachers getting certification currently already had placements, so Chinese was currently not a viable option. Japanese teachers are available in our area.

We also recognized that the school district was unwilling to allow classes below a certain numbers of students. With the addition of a language, the smaller programs would be at risk. We did not envision the enough of the present pool of students wanting to take a world language to increase by “a whole program” worth of students. To have healthy programs, teachers need to have stability, and this would not be feasible unless the district were willing to change its class size policy. As the post-secondary educators stated, it would be a waste to put healthy, community supported programs at risk, just because a language was added, whose success was not guaranteed. Once a student has learned one language, learning a second is helpful.

Our decision was to keep the current offerings (German, French and Spanish). Since there is support for Chinese and Japanese (and ASL), the addition of those languages would be discussed by a future task force, if circumstances would seem fortuitous for such a discussion.

For German and French, this process offered an opportunity to advocate for  and support these languages. The Task Force with its representative membership from a variety of school and community constituents reviewed the benefits of the presently offered languages for our students, not just the benefits of a potential new offering.

Reported by Kristina Kvarnlov-Leverty
Century Junior High School
Forest Lake, MN
kkvarnlovleverty@forestlake.k12.mn.us