At the New Visions National Priorities Conference (June 2000), participants reviewed and discussed each of the five papers that resulted from the New Visions Planning Meeting (June 1999). Participants then reorganized into groups of their choice to develop action plans for the four goal areas:

The action plans for all of the goals were designed by identifying the most promising ideas, the challenges and issues, and the emerging ideas for the goal. The results of these small group discussions were shared in the large group and the ideas that emerged for each goal were prioritized.

On the last day of the priorities conference, participants formed action groups to address the goal of greatest interest to them. Together, group members determined specific steps they could carry out in the near future to move work on this goal forward. The seven actions groups are the following:

• Curriculum/Instruction/Assessment/Articulation
• Teacher Development: Diverse Learners
• Teacher Development: Mentoring
• Teacher Development: Professional Development
• Teacher Development: National Fl Education Model
• Teacher Recruitment and Retention
• Research

These action groups continued their work through Fall 2000 with the support of Web-based discussion fora on WebCT organized by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University. The progress of the action groups was shared at the November 17-19, 2000, Annual Meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Boston. Six conference sessions on New Visions were scheduled – one for each topic and an overview forum. At these sessions, conference participants were invited to join the process of setting priorities for the investment of time, energy, and resources to move the foreign language professional agenda forward.

Progress reports of the work completed through the end of 2000 by the seven Action Groups, which include the actions taken and the documents, questionnaires, and pamphelts developed, are organized by the four goal areas.