Leadership in Language Education

This seminar will be taught online in fall semester 2021. It will focus on developing leadership qualities and skills for professionals in the broad field of language education. Whether you aspire to train language teachers, develop curricula, run language programs, write materials, work in language assessment, or be a teacher-leader in your own school context, there are leadership skills that you can develop and employ to be more effective in your chosen role. The following goals and student learning objectives will be addressed in this seminar:

1. Participants will be familiar with key frameworks describing the components of leadership.

2. Participants will interact with successful leaders in our field, in order to understand typical leadership experiences—both challenges and successes.

3. Participants will recognize the characteristics of successful leaders in our field.

4. Participants will develop initial plans for their own future development as leaders in the broad field of language education.

5. Participants will demonstrate their leadership potential by engaging in and sometimes managing activities in our seminar.

6. Participants will gain confidence and skill in their own abilities as leaders.

These goals will be accomplished through a series of readings, discussions, and small projects as well as a substantive final project.

This is a variable unit seminar. That is, it may be taken for either two or three units, depending on the individual student’s needs and/or course load. All students will attend all the synchronous sessions and complete the required asynchronous activities on schedule, but the students taking the course for three units will do an additional assignment (to be negotiated with the instructor).