I think we should all write – and keep updating – a mission statement about why we do our work in the way we do. We should not write it because we have to, because someone forces us, but for ourselves, to guide us in our preparation to honor our students in the way we would want to be honored if we ourselves were our own students. Below is my own mission statement, which has taken almost 45 years to develop into its present form, and is now directed at helping teachers get better at the work:
Despite huge expenditures of public funds, most language students in American schools see themselves as failures in their study of languages. This is not good for America. Don’t our children already have enough on their plates? They are not aware that they are not at fault and that they can, in fact, learn another language, and with surprisingly little effort, if only their language instructors would teach them in alignment with the research and according to the Communication standard.
It is my goal to properly train and fully provide American second language teachers with every skill they need in order to fully reach and engage their students. My mission as a language teacher is to continually find new ways to:
- guarantee strong classroom management for my students.
- ensure that classroom management by guaranteeing the place of ALL of my students in a community where ALL of them count for something and are recognized as an important part of the group, and there are none excluded for any reason.
- provide those things via a proven pedagogy, the StarChart™, which provides the classroom management piece and the community-building piece in ways that have to be seen to be believed.
- make my classroom (online or regular) a place where good mental health is a result of the objectives listed above.
- help my profession break away from the old concretized pre-Covid way of forcing kids to memorize lists (useless) and verb conjugations (useless), study grammar (totally useless), fill in worksheets ad nauseum, and generally be made to feel that they can’t do, when the research proves otherwise if we would only teach in alignment with it and with the Communication standard and ACTFL’s Three Modes of Communication.