Our path to a Proficiency-based Language program.

Adapted by Mme. Mallais - based on the "Path to Proficiency" framework.

As our school (an American International school) has started the conversation about becoming a standard-based school (at least on paper), this was perhaps the way to get everyone on the WL Department on board the conversation on also moving into a proficiency-based program.

As the conversation started and we thought about piloting it toward the end of last year's SY, we were presented with the opportunity through a NESA Winter Institute to participate in Carol Commodore's session titled Standards-Based Assessment Literacy for Specialist Subjects — Art, Drama/Dance, Physical Education, World Languages, Music, Media Arts.

My major takeaway was about defining as a department what would our learning targets be. Establishing clear learning targets would enable our language learners to better demonstrate what they can do (Can Do statements came to mind). 
Carol mentioned that there are four types of achievement  targets: Knowledge, Reasoning Skills, Performance skills and finally Product Development. This means that if we as a department wanted to become a proficiency-based program, we needed to establish our learner's learning target to be based on the last two achievement targets previously mentioned as they would clearly provide the evidence we needed to identify our learners' proficiency in the target language.