Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

I wrote previously this school year about the San Francisco Unified School District’s decision to end true immersion past 5th grade by no longer offering content courses taught in Mandarin (or Spanish or Cantonese) in middle school.

But there’s good news in that at least for this year and next year, SFUSD will continue to offer two classes in Mandarin in 6th grade at Aptos Middle School: Mandarin language arts and a second class, social studies, taught in Mandarin.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students no longer get anything beyond Mandarin language arts, but for at least through 2021, 6th graders will get one final year of an actual subject taught in Mandarin.

Parents who’ve asked SFUSD why got the answer that there wasn’t money to implement the District’s planned Middle School Redesign Initiative for Aptos, so the district left things as they were.

What can parents take away from this? Here are a few lessons from San Francisco:

• When your district tells you how your MI Program will work through high school, get it in writing. At least that way if they try to  shift to something different later on, you can pull out the actual promise.
• Ask early and often (if your program is still in grade school) how articulation will work in middle school and high school. (Articulation is education-speak for how educational systems are linked. For example, how grade school classes and skills link to middle school or how high school classes link to college.)
• Begin working with your district early in grade school to ensure that a middle school (and later high school) program is mapped out. School district funding cycles often mean that no one starts thinking about the next academic year until late the year before. But creating a Mandarin immersion middle school program requires more time than that, so someone needs to start working on it by 4th or even 3rd grade.
• Make sure you have buy-in from the administration at the middle school where your program will land. Think in terms of what the program will do for the school and how it will make the principal’s job easier. Middle schools are usually big, complex systems and the last thing the principal wants or needs is a new headache.  Scheduling two immersion classes a day, for example, can be difficult in an existing schedule — especially in schools that try to keep 6th graders in their own cohort.
• Remember that in grade school your program is big and important to your school’s staff and principal. In middle school and high school, you’ll be a tiny proportion of the students. Your program’s needs matter less. Be prepared for the shift.

You can read my original article about the SFUSD change here.

This is the big one, where new data and ideas about Mandarin immersion programs are presented and discussed. The field has really matured and we know a great deal more than we did when my kids’ school first started its program  back in the Dark Ages (i.e.  2006.) It’s really one of the main go-to conferences for the field. Anyone who’s looking to start a school, or currently working in a program, would find it useful.

I’ve gone as a parent and learned a great deal too, but as you know I’m a little geeky on the whole language immersion topic. In general, it’s for educators.

More info on the conference and registration here.

 

Hello to all of you who follow this blog.

It’s generally directed at parents but I realize that a fair number of teachers and administrators follow it as well.

I have a question for you. Is it useful for me to post information for teacher/administrator workshops? They’re not meant for parents, but as a parent myself I sometimes found that I was passing along information about opportunities to our teachers which they themselves had not heard about.

On the blog, I don’t know how many teachers and administrators are actually reading, so not sure whether it’s helpful.

This comes up because I got information about the workshop below today and was going to post it, then realized it was 1) only useful to teachers who have a significant number of heritage speakers of Chinese in their classes and 2) only to teachers, not parents.

I was going to skip it but then thought I’d ask. Please use the comment space below to tell me. I strive to make this blog topical and useful for the entire Mandarin immersion community, though with a focus on parents and schools.

Thanks!

Beth

Sign up for the conference below here.

More information about the conference here.

Dr. Tara Fortune is one of the top experts in immersion and will be speaking in San Francisco on March 5th. You need to RSVP by March 4 so they know how many people are coming.

Tara Williams Fortune is an immersion teaching specialist and director of the Immersion Research and Professional Development Program at the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at the University of Minnesota. She devotes most of her professional time to the preparation and continuing education of language immersion educators throughout the U.S. Her publications include two co-edited volumes on immersion research, Pathways to Multilingualism: Evolving Perspectives on Immersion Education (2008, Multilingual Matters Ltd.) and Immersion Education: Practices, Policies and Possibilities (2011, Multilingual Matters Ltd.), and Struggling Learners & Language Immersion Education (2010, University of Minnesota). Fortune’s current research interests include immersion students’ oral language proficiency development and the struggling immersion learner. She also serves as a member of the editorial board for the new Journal of Immersion and Content-based Language Education (JICB), John Benjamins Publishing.

From The Jefferson Star

Nov. 27, 2019

Two Jefferson School District No. 251 administrators took a trip to China in October with the hope to build connections with other schools and improve the district’s Chinese immersion program.

Chad Martin, superintendent, and Kevin Cowley, world language immersion program coordinator, were the only two Idaho delegates on the Chinese Bridge Delegation.

More than 100 administrators, school leaders and decision-makers attended the 10-day program, which is organized and paid for by the College Board and Confucius Institute. Cowley said he and Martin were in a smaller group composed of administrators from Ohio, Texas and Utah. During the program, they visited local schools and met with educators, administrators and students.

Please read more here.

 

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Dec. 1, 2019

Edmonton school board welcomes Chinese program while others cut ties over concerns about state involvement

After tying his sneaker shoelace, Laur An-Yochim jumps back to his feet.

Gym is his favourite class, and the fifth-grader does not intend to miss a moment of physical literacy consultant Stacey Hannay’s instructions.

“What is this in Mandarin?” Hannay asks, hopping around the basketball court inside Kildare School in Edmonton.

The students yell the answer, then move along to a game that involves finding hidden trinkets underneath rows of plastic cups, following directions shouted in English and Mandarin.

Kildare is one of 14 schools in the Edmonton Public School Board’s jurisdiction that takes part in programming offered by the Confucius Institute. That includes Mandarin classes but also other subjects taught in Mandarin, ranging from physical education to math.

The Institute is partly funded by China’s Ministry of Education and offers programming at elementary and high schools, as well as colleges and universities across Canada. China provides annual funding to run the programs as well as Chinese instructors who are are paid by China. In Edmonton’s case, they work alongside the school’s regular teachers to deliver language immersion programming.

Please read more here.

 

It’s getting to be that time of year, when parents’ thoughts turn to summer programs.

For those in the San Francisco Bay area, one option is SkyKids, a long-running Mandarin immersion summer day camp that will be based near San Francisco’s  Japantown this year:

https://www.sky-kids.org/mandarin-camps-summer-2020

Last year SkyKids began a summer program in Taiwan as well, in New Taipei City.

https://www.sky-kids.org/mandarin-immersion-taiwan

Note that both of these programs are day camps, so you’ve got to have a parent or friend with whom your kids can stay.

Last year in Taipei the campers were mostly from other Asian countries, including many American ex-pats, with families coming from Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and of course Taiwan.

So if you can relocate to Taipei for a few weeks this summer, it might be a camp for you.

[Disclaimer: My daughter and two of her classmates from Starr King Elementary grade school in San Francisco, all now in high school, were junior counselors in the Taipei program last year. Many of the junior counselors in San Francisco are Mandarin immersion high school students.]