Falk Middle School Spanish teacher Valerie Rossi is in her twentieth year of teaching, but that doesn’t mean she’s finished learning.

“Spanish grammar isn’t changing, but people are always coming up with new ways to deliver it to students,” says Rossi.

That’s why attending conferences in her discipline and pursuing other forms of continuing education are so important.

With the support of Falk’s professional development fund for faculty and staff, Rossi and a number of Falk teachers have been able to attend conferences and take advantage of other opportunities for professional development. The fund helps teachers and staff defray the costs of conference registration, travel, and lodging.

Attending conferences like the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NECTFL) has expanded the set of tools Rossi uses to teach Spanish to Falk Middle Schoolers. It was a conference presentation on using Spanish-language novels in the classroom, for example, that inspired her to adopt that method.

“I would never have had eighth-graders read novels had I not attended NECTFL,” she says. Rossi now supplements novel reading with a lot of authentic resources like Spanish-language magazine articles, interviews, and music.

“It’s important to teach Spanish as more than just vocabulary and grammar structure,” she says. “Going to conferences helped me learn that.”

In addition to improving her own practice, Rossi has often been able to bring new ideas back to share with her colleagues. Many conference presenters give handouts that Rossi and her fellow Spanish teachers have found useful in adapting and referring to for their own classes.

With the support of the professional development fund, she’s also been able to present at conferences, speaking on the topic of differentiated instruction and how to design classroom activities to match students’ interests, readiness levels, and abilities.

“This fund allows me to be curious, think about current practice, reflect on it, then go to conferences and learn, then come back to the classroom ready to try these things out,” Rossi says. “We’re all really good at what we do, but we’re still curious.”

For third-grade teacher Becka Wright, attending conferences with the support of the fund has helped deepen her teaching practice.

A longtime devotee of the works of William Shakespeare, Wright was unsure how best to incorporate the Bard’s works into her classes until she attended the Stratford Festival, a Shakespeare-themed festival in Ontario, Canada.

“It was invaluable,” Wright says. She was able to take the stage with actors from the Globe Theatre, delivering lines, and to work with Ben Crystal, who runs the website Shakespeare’s Words, which emphasizes Shakespeare’s use of language. Wright also got to see actor Brian Dennehy play the role of Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.

“That conference put the p-l-a-y in ‘play,’” Wright says. “It’s supposed to be fun. Shakespeare didn’t write plays so people could dissect them into themes.”

The experience had an even broader impact on Wright's approach to how she engages students.

“I learned performance-based teaching techniques there I use to this day," she adds, "and not simply for teaching Shakespeare. My experiences at the Stratford Teachers Festival taught me to treat my classroom as an ensemble, and to build community and ensure that strengths are highlights and areas of growth are consistently supported.”

Today, performing scenes from Shakespeare’s works is an integral part of Wright’s classes. Her third-graders just performed scenes from Twelfth Night to an audience of family members.

She reflects, “I was very fortunate to be able to attend that conference.”

Valerie Rossi echoes that sentiment.

“This support from the school matches the mission of a laboratory school,” she says, “and staying curious as an educator and growing your practice.”