The teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure growth and to advance the professional.

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ARTIFACT 1

Name of Artifact: Culture Shock Essay                  

Course: WL 665: Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Language

Date: Spring, 2020

World-Readiness Standards Addressed: Relating Cultural Practices to Perspectives, Relating Cultural Products to Perspectives, 

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RATIONALE

The artifact I have chosen to demonstrate how I integrate leadership and collaboration into my teaching practice is a project I conducted in the course WL 665: Sociocultural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives in Language. The project required me to put myself in a situation where I would experience culture shock. Initially, I struggled with identifying a way to do this as I had quite an extensive international experience from living in the UK and France and working in Africa, and therefore felt that it would be difficult to find and authentic experience close to home. However, around the same time that I started this course, I also had started working as a high school French teacher in a Russian Orthodox school in San Francisco. I decided that for my project I would attend a three-hour service in the Russian Orthodox church next to the school. I felt that I would be sure to experience aspects of the Orthodox culture that would be very knew to me, and at the same time it would provide me with the opportunity to better understand my school’s community.

 

I arrived early to the service and stood in the back ready to take notes and trying hard to blend in. Being raised in the Catholic Church, I was no stranger to religious services, yet the Orthodox service was completely different. As soon as I entered the church there was a lot for my brain to process: bright colored murals on the walls and ceiling, the continual chants and singing from the choir, the lack of benches requiring everyone to stand, the incense filling the air, and the continuous movement of people as they walked around the church during the service to venerate the icons. The use of the Slavonic and Russian languages furthered my feeling of being disoriented. It was a beautiful event but I also felt like a stranger, not understanding what was happening and found myself monitoring my behavior to make sure I was not standing out.

 

I chose this artifact because it demonstrates the value I place on making leadership and collaboration an essential part of my teaching practice. First, it demonstrates the value I place on being part of the school community and understanding its cultural and social traditions. Furthermore, I felt that being more familiar with another learning environment in which my students spend a significant amount of time would provide me with more insight into how to better motivate and encourage them in the classroom. Second, my participation at the religious service provided me with the opportunity to be a positive role model for my students and also my colleagues. Teachers exhibit leadership in multiple ways. Some ways are more formal roles with official responsibilities and some roles are more informal (Harrison & Killian, 2007). Discussing the service with my students in class later that week and explaining how my presence there was also linked to an assignment for my MATL, demonstrated to my students the importance I place in being a life-long learner. I believe that this is one of the most important leadership roles a teacher can have for his/her students. My presence at the service also demonstrated to my students and colleagues the importance I place on intercultural competence which is “the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes,” (Deardorff, 2004; as cited in Jackson, 2020, p. 309). Breaking down stereotypes, developing self-awareness and knowledge of others are all aspects of intercultural competence that I teach in my French classes. For my students to see me at the service, seeking to know and understand another culture, not just as their French teacher, but as global citizen, was also an important part of my leadership role in the school.

 

There are many ways for teachers to show leadership. This artifact highlights how being a positive role model to my students as well seeking ways to understand their cultural values and traditions contributed to the school’s overall capacity to improve.

 

References

Jackson, J., (2020). Introducing language and intercultural communication (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Harrison, C., & Killion, J. (2007, September 1). Ten roles for teacher leaders. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

     https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/ten-roles-for-teacher-leaders

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ARTIFACT 2

Name of Artifact: Letter of Recommendation   

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RATIONALE

The artifact I selected to demonstrate my understanding of this standard is a letter of recommendation from the principal of the school where I was teaching French. I chose this artifact because it highlights how I integrate collaboration with colleagues and school professionals into my teaching practice. The letter specifically mentions how I integrated into the school community and willingly and productively collaborated with the school's Administration and a Foreign Language Curriculum Consultant. It also mentions how I participated in several peer observations and engaged in feedback sessions with colleagues. 

 

I started teaching French to the high school students of St. John’s Academy in San Francisco about the same time I started the MATL at the University of Southern Mississippi. Although I had no formal teaching experience, the school appreciated that I was fluent in French, had lived in France for several years, had an extensive experience coaching high school students and was just beginning my MATL. My school had an external Foreign Language Consultant that had been collaborating with the Administration for many years. As the new French teacher, part of my responsibilities was to meet with the Language Consultant in order to evaluate the curriculum and the progress of the students. As I had no formal teaching experience before starting this position, I did not have the skills or background to provide input or suggest any changes to the French language curriculum at that point. I did, however, understand the importance of overall curriculum goals and understood that just as best practices in lesson planning call for a backward design approach, so do they call for a similar approach in the development of a curriculum. Therefore, it was important to ask the question: what do we want students to know and be able to do at the end of their high school foreign language program (Shrum & Glisan, 2016).

 

With an idea of the overall language goals, I began teaching three classes to the high school students. At that stage, I felt that it was important to try and stay on track with the curriculum and to learn as much as I could about my students. I soon became aware of how closely the curriculum was aligned with the textbook and how heavily the lessons were organized around the teaching of grammar. I met with the Foreign Language Consultant in several face-to-face meetings during that first year in which we discussed the progress of the students, results on assessments, areas of the curriculum which challenged them, potential modifications to consider for the end of the year, the course materials, and if I was keeping on track with lesson plans schedule. These meetings were conducted orally and were rather informal, but highly collaborative and productive.  When I met with the Foreign Language Consultant at the end of the first year, I was finally able to collaborate in a meaningful way as not only had I been teaching for a whole school year, but I had also completed several courses in the MATL, including sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, French culture and second language acquisition. These courses had significantly increased my knowledge in the areas of second language teaching and learning theories, and how to effectively apply them in my teaching practice. Discussion items during our meeting at the end of the first year centered on the curriculum, on how to use the target language more effectively in the classroom, how to begin to move the curriculum closer in alignment with the World-Readiness Standards, how to integrate more lessons on Francophone culture, and how to update our materials, in particular, the library of French language readers. The final area of the meeting was a discussion about the textbooks, which were very outdated for all classes.  As there was no budget for new textbooks, and the introduction of new textbooks required a rather lengthy process, we decided to use a strategy of stepping away from the textbook once per semester in order to teach a specific theme, which is an effective strategy for working around outdated classroom materials (Munson, 2023). The themes I added focused on Francophone culture and French food and cuisine.

 

This experience taught me the value of collaboration. It showed me how collaborating with other teachers and work professionals contributes to a well-run and healthy school environment. When students see their teachers collaborating and getting along, that inspires them and also provides them examples of positive behavior. This experience also showed me how collaboration with colleagues can have very practical and positive effects in the classroom. In the future, it will be very important to be fully engaged in my school community including parents and other members of the community that have an impact on learner growth or the school’s capacity to improve.

 

References

Daniels, H, (2003, December 1). Out with textbooks, in with learning. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/out-with-textbooks-in-with-                   learning

Shrum, J. L., & Glisan, E.W. (2016). Teacher’s handbook: Contextualized language instruction (5th ed.).   Cengage Learning.

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