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As we reported last year, the UO Chinese Flagship Program and the PSU Russian Flagship Program received a new grant from the National Security Education Program to support increased collaboration with the K-12 schools and community colleges in the Pacific Northwest through the creation of Pacific Northwest Pathways Collective. The collective brought together Chinese and Russian classroom teachers, pedagogy experts, and curriculum designers at all levels to enhance program articulation ad develop curriculum so that regional students have clear pathways to continue their language learning from kindergarten through their undergraduate degree programs.

This summer has been pivotal to meeting the goals of this grant. In order to increase best practices in instruction and assessment, the UO Chinese Flagship Program worked with Portland Public Schools to provide an ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) training to secondary and community college instructors. During this four day training, instructors learned about identifying the different major and sub proficiency levels of students and engaged in practice evaluations of learners with different proficiency levels.

Additionally, the PSU Russian Flagship Program hosted a weeklong summit for Russian immersion teachers entitled, “Assessment, Curriculum Development, and Articulation”. This summit was focused on understanding the Russian Immersion Language Curriculum Framework that was developed between 2012-2014 in partnership with Portland Public Schools and the Woodburn School District. In addition, educators were given the opportunity to refine their knowledge of current best practices and created and refined resources to be shared on an online repository.

We are excited to see the positive impact of these efforts in the upcoming school year and to continue our work in the region.