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Message from the President
Eileen Glisan
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New Year’s Resolutions and “Big Ideas” About Language Teaching
Embarking on a new journey of serving the profession as ACTFL president for 2010 is a unique and invigorating opportunity, for it has given me the impetus to step back from the daily details of my work as a language educator and program coordinator to reflect on the bigger picture of language learning on a global scale.
The ACTFL 2009 Convention and World Languages Expo that took place in San Diego in November set the stage so perfectly for what promises to be an energizing year for our profession—as we begin new endeavors and continue to build on the successes of the past year’s accomplishments. What better way to anticipate a new year than to have attended the ACTFL Convention and to have become inspired to enlist a grassroots demand for stronger language programs across our nation and mount advocacy efforts for language education?
As we advocate for language education and appeal to the general public to support language study, we must be able to promise that our programs will enable learners to do more than just recite a few words after years of study. One way that this can be accomplished is through “backward design” planning and a focus on “big ideas.”* In backward design, teachers attend first to the desired results of instruction—that is, what it is that we want learners to know and be able to do—and secondly on how they will demonstrate this knowledge and these skills. The principles of backward design promote planning our learning experiences and instruction only after we know what our goals for learning are and how we will assess these goals. This concept of planning contrasts sharply with planning that simply specifies textbook material in a lockstep way with no thought to the final outcome of the lesson or unit. In the framework of backward design planning, the focus of instruction is on the big ideas for understanding and learning.
What are examples of big ideas in language study? Big ideas are grounded in meaningful contexts in which learners might, for example, use the foreign language to explore an engaging cultural perspective and examine it through the lens of their own culture; connect to another discipline such as art, theater, music, or politics; contemplate an intriguing topic of concern to their community of learners; or interact with members of target language communities. Planning on the basis of big ideas shifts the focus away from inert grammatical details (i.e., talking about the language) to using the language for a bigger communicative goal and for exploring the cultural communities in which the language is spoken.
We are beginning a new year, and we know that lack of public excitement for languages often results from learning experiences in which learners were led to “miss the forest for the trees.” Let’s make a new year’s resolution to design classroom practices that put language study in a positive light among the general public and build excitement in our students for learning languages. We can begin by exploring these big ideas with our colleagues and educators at other levels of instruction to promote and foster language study for building a global citizenry. ACTFL has resources to offer as we engage in this professional dialogue: venues for professional development and interaction, such as the Annual Convention (featured on p. 32) and our new ACTFL Online Community (which you can find out more about on p. 40); standards for teachers and students; publications about learning and teaching languages; advocacy materials; and much more.
I cannot help but wonder if the general public’s opinion about the benefits of language study would be different if the average North American had been given opportunities to explore big ideas during his or her own language study. Only we have the power to be sure that the public doesn’t miss the forest of big ideas that are possible through study of another language. Please join me in undertaking this exciting endeavor this year!
* For more information about backward design planning and big ideas, see Understanding by Design [2005, 2nd edition] by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA. Wiggins and McTighe describe a “big idea” as a “concept, theme, or issue that gives meaning and connection to discrete facts and skills” (p. 5).
