Warsaw Schools Holds Second DLI Conference

Warsaw Community Schools held its second annual Dual Language Immersion Conference Friday and Saturday with teachers attending from seven different school districts across the state.
Crystal Kreider, DLI instructional coach, said WCS has had the DLI program for 10 years, “so we’ve learned a lot and we are happy and ready to share with other people. That was our goal, just to show all the good things that are happening with our teachers because they are working really hard and they are doing amazing things with the students.”
Last year, WCS started with just Spanish teachers in the conference. This year, English teachers attended the conference as well, to bring in the other side of the dual immersion program. There were even multilingual teachers attending the conference to learn about language in general.
Kreider said WCS has seen some growth in this year’s conference. Last year, mostly WCS teachers attended, while this year teachers from other school districts made up most of the people attending.
In total, 54 teachers attended the conference between Friday and Saturday across seven Indiana schools districts, including WCS, Kreider said.
On Friday, teachers were able to visit DLI classrooms at Leesburg and Eisenhower elementary schools.
“(Friday), we kinda started with talking about the program and how we do immersion here at Warsaw Schools and then some of the key things that we look for in our teachers, so they then can go for those in the classrooms in some of the strategies that they use because when you’re teaching another language, you can’t just stand up and expect to have students understand. There’s a lot of really specific and intential things that the teachers have to do like adding language supports or images or emotions and hand movements,” Kreider said.
On Saturday, several one-hour workshops were held at the central office about how to gets kids talking, literacy, classroom management and working with your partner teacher because DLI teachers work as a team. The workshops were taught by teachers from WCS, other school districts like Manchester Schools, some consultants from Multilingual Mosaics from Michigan and some people from the ALMA Initiative from Notre Dame.
Kreider said her goal for the conference is she wants learning to be better for students.
“I want them to have a better outcome and a better experience. I hope teachers get really practical things they that can walk away and implement in their classrooms really easily, but I hope they get some things that really challenge them to be better and to grow,” she said.