2-Hour Workshops - Thursday, October 21, 4:00 - 6:00 PM

Workshop 1 - Embedding Authentic Resources into Lesson Plans

Leslie Grahn

Understanding that it is ideal to use authentic resources as much as possible in our lesson plans, how do we achieve that goal? In this webinar, we will explore how to make authentic text work for you in the various phases of lesson planning. 

Leslie Grahn

Leslie Grahn is the former Coordinator of World Languages for the Howard County Public Schools in Maryland.  She has twenty-seven years of language teaching experience at the middle and high school levels.  She has been on the Board of Directors of the Maryland Foreign Language Association since 1997, serving as its President from 2002-2004 and 2010-2012.

Workshop 2 - Playing MatchMaker: Grammar and Your Units

Mike Travers

ACTFL’s Core Practice of Teaching Grammar as a Concept takes careful, intentional planning. When planning a unit, it can be difficult choosing the right grammar to support your goals and even more difficult to incorporate that grammar in a meaningful way. Join us for this session where we will talk about creating thematic units and finding grammar’s place in those units. We will look at examples of what to do when planning, when introducing grammar and how to follow up using grammar throughout the units all while keeping communication as our primary goal.

Travers M

Mike Travers is a Spanish teacher at Wellesley High School and a former French/Spanish teacher from Norton. Mike has a Bachelor's degree from Stonehill College and a Master's in Education from UMASS Boston. Mike is very active in local professional development events where he presents, facilitates or participates in conferences and workshops to learn more about proficiency based teaching. Apart from conferences, Mike is collaborating on the Communities committee for the new MA World Language Frameworks, working as a consultant for Idioma Consulting and recently won MaFLA's Best of State for his 2019 presentation "But What About The Grammar". He truly enjoys working with teachers to find grammar's place in proficiency and writing thematic, communication based units.