Teachers are the heart of language programs. However, school, divisional, and provincial educational leaders have a pivotal role to play in the success of these programs.
Leading Successful Language Programs: A Tool for Educational Administrators of Additional Language (L+) Programs is a practical resource that helps leaders reflect on their effectiveness. According to the tool, focusing on three areas can create meaningful impact: 1) boosting language teacher resilience, 2) supporting classroom challenges, and 3) leading the learning community.
Boosting Language Teacher Resilience
Language teaching is a vital profession and can be incredibly rewarding. However, language teacher retention is a continuing challenge in school districts across Canada.
School leaders have a major influence on helping their teachers stay in the profession and achieve higher job satisfaction. By asking “How can I more effectively support language teachers?”, leaders can reflect on ways to help improve additional language (L+) teachers’ pedagogy, target language proficiency, and cultural understanding. Facilitating teachers’ access to targeted professional learning opportunities and communities of practice is also a great way to help boost their classroom confidence.
When school leaders support teachers to develop their skills, knowledge, confidence, and professional relationships throughout their careers, they also help them improve their resilience in the face of professional difficulties.
Supporting Classroom Challenges
Language leaders are often called upon to provide guidance, feedback, and resources to ensure that their teachers can succeed in meeting the wide range of requirements and challenges of language programs.
For instance, leaders play a key role in ensuring that teachers have the skills, knowledge, and resources to effectively meet diverse learning needs. L+ teachers are most impactful when colleagues, students, and families also have a strong understanding of language program goals, requirements, structure, and curriculum.
Leaders should also ensure that quality assessment and reporting practices are in place in the language classroom. Even if they don’t speak the target language, leaders can understand assessment practices by discussing, observing, and asking questions of the teacher. They can also observe for quality gathering, management, and triangulation of data, as well as conversations and learner outputs in the language classroom.
Leading the Learning Community
Successfully leading language programs extends beyond the classroom walls. Leading the broader learning community — which includes building a culture that promotes the target languages and cultures — is also part of the job. This involves fostering support from the broader school community, local neighbourhoods, business communities, language/cultural communities, and the public in general.
School leaders must also promote success for all students, including those with diverse needs, abilities, backgrounds, and identities, and then recognize their success. A recognition system to celebrate student language achievements would be one positive step. Planning activities that recognize and celebrate the learning of the target languages and cultures is another. Making teachers and families aware of available competitions, awards, scholarships, and further study opportunities provided by external organizations is also a terrific way to expand student success beyond their own classroom and school.
In addition to inviting reflection, Leading Successful Language Programs offers helpful suggestions for next steps, current research, resources, tools, and follow-up activities. When leaders know how to effectively support language programs, teachers, learners, and the wider community all benefit from the program’s success.
