"With the help of a three-year grant from the US Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, an eleven-member task force, representing a variety of languages, levels of instruction, program models, and geographic regions, undertook the task of defining content standards - what students should know and be able to do - in foreign language education. The final document, Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century, first published in 1996, represents an unprecedented consensus among educators, business leaders, government, and the community on the definition and role of foreign language instruction in American education. This visionary document has been used by teachers, administrators, and curriculum developers at both state and local levels to begin to improve foreign language education in our nation's schools. The 3rd Edition Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century, revised including Arabic standards, is now available."
A new resource from the National Capital Language Resource Center - a must read for WL teachers who are seeking to implement a true standards-based, proficiency-oriented language program.
A new resource from the National Capital Language Resource Center - a must read for WL teachers who are seeking to implement a true standards-based, proficiency-oriented language program.
It's a practical guide to building 21st century-student competency in the "4 C's" - critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity/innovation. The book is designed for middle school and high school teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. It also shows how the 4 C's in a PBL context align with the Common Core State Standards.
Sample projects, CCSS-aligned 4 C's rubrics, tips for technology in projects, notes for school leaders on building support for 21st century learning with PBL.
Authors: Suzie Boss, author and BIE National Faculty, and John Larmer, Editor-in-Chief, BIE
"The NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements are self-assessment checklists used by language learners to assess what they "can do" with language in the Interpersonal, Interpretive, and Presentational modes of communication. These modes of communication are defined in the National Standards for 21st Century Language Learning and organized in the checklist into the following categories:
Interpersonal (Person-to-Person) Communication
Presentational Speaking (Spoken Production)
Presentational Writing (Written Production)
Interpretive Listening
Interpretive Reading
Click within each cell to display the benchmark and the associated Can Do Statement PDF. Or, click on a Level/Mode row or column to expand the entire level or mode."
"Welcome to the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 2012 online. Here you will find the most current version of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for Speaking, Writing, Listening, and Reading made interactive through the inclusion of glossed terms and multimedia exemplars. You can explore the Guidelines by skill or by level, listen to and read samples in English that represent abilities at each of the major proficiency levels."
Activating Communication:Focusing Lenses
How can we use focusing lenses to guide thinking when creating instruction? How can an old unit "going to a café" be changed to a thematic unit on food and hunger that focuses on performance tasks integrated to create a meaningful cultural context? How can images, videos and other technology encourage learners to critically think of solutions to real-world global issues on
environment in innovative ways? We will explore these questions through the lenses of an UbD designed thematic units and the concepts of the ACTFL 21st Century Skills Map.