Penn Language Center offers professional development opportunities for language educators throughout the year in the form of pedagogy and technology workshops, featured speaker events, and the Language Educator Symposium.
Pedagogy and Technology Workshops are designed to facilitate the ongoing development of skills related to advances in language education pedagogy as well as the technical skills relevant to the 21st Century classroom. Workshops have an average run time of about 90 minutes, in which attendees will participate in hands-on activities, have the opportunity to network and collaborate with colleagues, as well as walk away with classroom materials that can be readily applied in their teaching context.
Past Topics
- Screencasting in Panopto
- Introduction to Universal Design for Learning and Language Learning
- Designing for Mobile
- “Post” Pandemic Teaching
- The Focus on Canvas Series - An 8-part series focusing on developing instructors’ strengths in Canvas and course development. You can access the following content through an asynchronous Canvas course:
- Homepage Design in Canvas
- Discussions in Canvas, Part I
- Grading in Canvas, Part I
- Assignments in Canvas, Part I
- Modules in Canvas
- Discussions in Canvas, Part II
- Grading in Canvas, Part II
- Assignments in Canvas, Part II
2023-2024 Theme: Research-Informed Teaching Practices
For the 2023-2024 academic year, PLC is hosting four technology workshops on the topic of research-informed teaching practices. Research-informed teaching practices, referred to as “high-leverage teaching practices” (Glisan & Donato, 2017) which are “specific practices deemed as essential to foreign language teaching by deconstructing them into various instructional moves” (p. 1). In other words, we will approach the research-informed teaching practices as discussed in this workshop series from an applied, hands-on perspective, building on instructors’ existing pedagogical knowledge. Participants who attend all four sessions will receive a copy of Glisan & Donato’s 2017 book, “Enacting the Work of Language Instruction: High-Leverage Teaching Practices”, published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
All workshops will take place on Friday mornings from 10am-12pm, and will be offered in a hybrid format.
Dates
- September 8, 2023: Focusing on Cultural Products, Practices & Perspectives in a Dialogic Context.
- October 6, 2023: Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts (in two parts)
- Part 1: Guiding Learners to Interpret Authentic Texts
- Part 2: Leading a Text-Based Discussion
- February 23, 2024: Engaging Learners in Purposeful Written Communication
- March/April: HLTP #10: Developing Contextualized Performance Assessments
Additional details to be announced on the Events page.