teacher recruitment & retention

Notes from Teacher Recruitment Roundtable at ACTFL 2000

Approximately twenty people attended the late afternoon ACTFL New Visions Teacher Recruitment Roundtable chaired by Drs. Audrey Heining-Boynton and Duarte Silva. As a handout, Dr. Silva provided a copy to each participant of the California plan for teacher recruitment.

After a brief overview of New Visions I and New Visions II, several participants shared what they had done in their districts or made other suggestions for teacher recruitment. All of the suggestions were made in terms of capacity building for the profession.

For example, Fairfax County Virginia was funded by a private foundation to create a Heritage Language Literacy Club. This project provides tutors in grades 5, 6, 7 and 8. Students who participate in this program are awarded a $400 college scholarship savings bond. This tutoring takes place one day a week after school and currently has 60 tutors involved.

A book recommended during the discussion was Breaking All the Rules. The comment was that this is a good book to use with teachers. Also, administrators must become a part of the teacher recruitment plan.

Another comment suggested that the disciplines of art and music have a strong infrastructure and have done a good job in recruiting future teachers. A suggestion was made that support for foreign language from an organization such as the Getty Foundation would be important to garner funds for a well-made recruitment video. Another suggestion was made that we need a famous national spokesperson such as Gloria Estefan who would speak on behalf of the recruitment of foreign language teachers.

Another topic of recruitment dealt with student recruitment for less-commonly taught languages. Suggestions were that teachers need to assist with the recruitment.

We also talked about creating chapters of Future Teachers (Educators) of America and encouraging organizations such as Phi Delta Kappa to assist in the efforts. Another suggestion was to bring outstanding high school students to college campuses. The goal would be to pair them with excellent undergraduate foreign language education majors for the day.

One participant suggested that ACTFL re-establish their student program that aims to sponsor college majors and student teachers to attend an ACTFL meeting.

Another roundtable participant suggested that a survey be sent to high school students so that we could discover what would make a difference to the students to choose teaching, and in our case, foreign language teaching, as a career.

Finally, it was suggested that a next step is to bring interested individuals together regionally to share once again what has been implemented successfully as a capacity building way to recruit foreign language teachers, as well as to brainstorm other ideas.