world language laboratory

Top 5 Priorities for the Master Plan

Filed Under Chinese, French, German, Latin, Spanish, World Languages

Yesterday, the World Language Department met (after a rather unproductive but historic Inaugural school day!) for a very productive Faculty Development meeting. See details here. The longest portion of our meeting was devoted to narrowing down everyone’s comments from the master plan survey to a list of our top five priorities. Here’s what we came up with and plan to share with FGM and VDTA:

1. Classroom Spaces

- Rooms need to be big enough to truly accommodate 23 students. This is especially true than when we are working in groups or rehearsing plays.
- The Lower School needs dedicated rooms for language instruction that are relatively close to lower school students’ homerooms.
- Each language (Spanish, German, French, Latin, Chinese) needs one or more dedicated language classroom with storage space for that language’s visual aids and project materials. Currently, teachers are doing a lot of traveling between departmental storage in UH207, their offices, and their several classrooms across the schools. This arrangement will also allow each language group to decorate the room with appropriate visual materials, which will greatly enhance the learning experience.
- It might be nice if performance and rehearsal spaces were built into the language-themed classrooms and/or the lower school language classrooms.
- Quality classroom spaces need 1. adequate sound proofing (real walls), 2. climate control, 3. technology & A/V in every classroom (unlike UH301, UH219, UH217, Judd 207d), 4. natural light as well as the ability to turn all of the lights off for movies and projecting the computer on the screen, 5. allow for multiple configurations in the same room so teachers don’t lose time setting up the room for different activities (part of the classroom with desks, another part with a rug for stories, and an open space for dancing).

2. Performance Spaces

- The department is regularly rehearsing and performing plays. Second only to adequate classroom space, they would like to have a theater at their disposal with adequate A/V equipment and lighting, clip-on microphones, and excellent acoustics for young voices. This space could be reserved and reservations could be worked out between the teachers well in advance to avoid conflict, since most of these plays occur annually. An ideal space would have a seating capacity of at least 60, ideally 100.

3. Office Spaces

- It is really impossible to work with 12 other people in a single room. We can’t eat, talk, or collaboratively work without disturbing the entire group. 2/3 people max in a single office space.
- We’d like to see our offices closer to the language classrooms where we regularly work. This is not always possible, but it would be great if offices for a particular language were somewhere in the vicinity of the dedicated language classroom(s) (i.e. Spanish teachers’ offices are somewhere in the vicinity of the Spanish language-themed classroom(s).
- It would be nice if all of the language faculty offices were in the same vicinity, instead of divided between U-High and Belfield.
- It would be great if the language offices were closer to a photocopier.
- In our dreams, we’d like to see office space with windows and plenty of natural light.

4. Meeting Spaces

- The department recognizes a real need for spaces where they can meet or retreat to when they need to concentrate (since the office is so busy).
- Spaces for teachers to hold their small (2-5 person) classes or independent studies
- Spaces for teachers to hold parent/teacher conferences
- Spaces for teachers to hold teacher/student conferences
- Spaces for students to collaborate on projects during or outside of class
- Spaces for teachers to go and grade or plan in silence
- At least one dedicated non-classroom space where we can build a foreign language library (think shelves and bamboo plants)

5. Kitchen Spaces

- The department does a lot of in-class cooking. Cooking is a great way to teach culture and interact with language. Currently, the teachers bring their heating elements, pots, and pans from the storage in UH207 to the individual classrooms and cook there from start to finish. There are a variety of solutions to this: create a culinary classroom just for language (and other subject area) use, build small kitchenettes into the dedicated language classrooms (this would be ideal), or at the very least, build a kitchen space next to world language offices, so that there is a safe place for faculty to prepare food. A separate kitchen space and eating area could serve both teachers and classes of 23 if it were big enough, may even double as a departmental meeting room, and could alleviate the lunch-time noise problem, since teachers would have a place to go to eat and discuss work together.