En Florida, los tres estudiantes tienen un importante proyecto

On Board Online • January 26, 2015

By Merri Rosenberg
Special Correspondent

Can elementary school faculty do a good job teaching Spanish if they don't know much about the language themselves? One Orange County school district is aiming to find out - with some help from high school seniors Cassie Rodriguez, Kyra Sullivan and Kayla Campana.

As part of an independent study, the seniors are helping elementary teachers plan and create materials for a Spanish language program that will be introduced in September to the first and fifth grades.

It's an example of how one school district is seeking to challenge students more in both high school and early grades.

Working with Spanish teacher Cassia Peeler, the students have been developing curricular materials, including tools for proper Spanish pronunciation. The students have observed classes and plan to visit other districts to examine elementary language programs. They have also created posters and developed teacher resources including a flash drive that students can use to save their lessons and audio files, so teachers can review them.

Rodriguez, Sullivan and Campana are among about a dozen students, out of a class of 66, who are pursuing Independent Student Projects.

"Part of our goal here is to help them learn soft skills, like how to solve problems, face different problems, and interview people," said Barbara Scheibling, a business teacher and adviser for the Independent Student Project. "It helps with the district goals of giving them skills."

The three students have become ambassadors for an area of instruction that elementary teachers may feel unqualified to lead. "There was a fear that the teachers don't know Spanish," said Scheibling. So, one of the students' goals was to "put them at ease."

"We're not looking to teach the classes themselves," said Rodriguez. "We're looking to teach the teachers ... The big thing is figuring out a way to be helpful for students and teachers who don't know Spanish."

None of the students are native speakers; they learned Spanish in school language classes.

Each says she is getting something different out of the project.

With a career goal of working in communications, Sullivan said she's especially interested in developing successful strategies to communicate with teachers.

Rodriguez, who plans on attending the State University at Stony Brook to major in occupational therapy, said she's enjoying pursuing what she considers a worthwhile goal. "I really like the idea of having a Spanish program at a younger age," said Rodriguez. "It's a lot easier to pick up languages."

And the project is a natural for Campana - she's president of the school's Spanish Club. She is interested in studying psychology in college.

According to superintendent Diane M.H. Munro, the ideas that led to both the elementary school language initiative and the independent study program emerged from an advisory committee that met in 2011. The committee said the district needs to provide more challenges for students that reflect the experiences they will face in a global workplace.

One way to do that is to introduce foreign languages at an earlier age. Another involves giving students in a variety of grades the opportunity to pursue projects that interest them.

"We knew we wanted to have project-based learning and problem-solving outcomes, with the skills, habits and knowledge that students would need for the modern world," Munro said.

The independent study project is designed to increase students' independence and ownership of learning, and students' projects should have some relationship to the careers they want to pursue, Munro said. In the Spanish language project, the students will "create a product important to the district, and teachers will have all the tools they need to bring this to fruition. It's an alignment of initiatives, and it's strategic."

The students say they have learned lessons that go beyond conjugations and vocabulary.

"We're learning to overcome challenges as they pop up," said Sullivan. "What we've learned through this will help us in the long run. Never before have we been telling adults what to do."