Iowa World Language Association
Meeting of the Executive Board
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Des Moines Downtown Marriott / Dubuque Meeting Room
Call to Order – 8:33PM. Members present: Tracy Dinesen, Kim Huegerich, Kat Akers, Stacy Amling, Carrie Morris.
Review/approval of minutes of last meeting – Carrie will add note about increasing the funding of Wild Apricot. Kat motion, seconded by Kim to approve the minutes.
Treasurer’s report
Conference Essentials – Board members need to be available for troubleshooting (be visible to answer questions and fix problems, greet exhibitors), review schedules for general session and luncheon session. Be sure circulate and thank exhibitors throughout conference, try to buy something. New President leads the conference wrap-up session and the post-conference board meeting. Need to get post-conference publicity and website updates done. Kim is taking pictures to add as well, including award winners, need to remind them to come back up for pictures and get pictures of all presenters. Kat would like to compile the data from the conference survey. We can talk about that data at the December meeting. Tracy has several ideas for next conference. Some details could be added to the binder about conference planning.
Follow-up on Advisory Council Meeting
Approve grants – one grant winning, 3 that applied. There should be more effort in encouraging people to follow the instructions and may want to ask them to re-submit and share detailed feedback to those who have applied and ask for follow-up information. There were at a time fall and spring grants. We may want to go back to having this again. If you make changes and resubmit for spring deadline, or could give them until December 1. Grants for fall deadline April 30th. Could talk to the grant winners in advance so a check can be presented, just need to find out who the check needs to be written to. We give them the first half of the award and then the 2nd half. If they are not at the conference, we will need to get in touch with them. May want to establish a time limit for how often they can apply. We could be open to awarding grants twice a year, 2 - $500 awards in the fall and 2 in the spring.
Standards Committee group (next steps and future dates) – Still waiting on information from some groups. Standards session will meet at 3:45 on Friday in the Waterloo room, the hospitality room. Need to do something in November as it will be good timing. Summer can be difficult. Run into ACTFL later on. Want to allow a period of time when we can get comments on what has been submitted. Need to let people know about the deadline and make it clear. Need to have draft plan from everyone by November 15th and then December 1st for feedback from the group. Meeting in January to give ideas of things that can be done within a unit. It won’t be the whole program, but could treat a unit with this information. It will help to pull together Linguafolio items, and things that we already have. Should be feasible to do in the spring as it’s about letting students know about what is being done, implementing it, testing it out and getting feedback. Need to create examples of things that can be done with this information and give people things to try and collect possible resources. Need to be under a pressure guideline with Central States because of the leadership academy. We would like to follow through with our plans. Curriculum changes can take up to a decade and we don’t want to stall. We need somebody who will try it in a live classroom. It will be hard to keep people on the workgroup past 2 years, but we need the documents to be up and ask for edits. We’re not asking for a curriculum to be created. Need to communicate these things to their students and see how it works from the other end. It isn’t a matter of changing everything you do, but being more purposeful in your activities, and helps reinforce what you do in your classroom already. Need to have people who have gone through and done the things that we’re recommending. It would be great to have a year of implementing it and then come back after a year. Meet December or January 1st and find out where people are willing to try it out, come back a month later and figure out where the kinks are. It is a relatively quick timeline, but don’t want it to be rushed. We will be looking for volunteers to try it out for the next year. Need to figure out who’s going to do it for the following year. The whole thing won’t be finished by next October, it will be an ongoing thing and we’ll ask people to help do it during the entire year, need to have units and to be trying out some of the standards before that happens. We’re not expecting this group to come out and say what we have. This won’t be something we can roll out next year, it may be in 3-4 years when there is enough documentation, rubrics, units, and examples. We should be asking for volunteers for after January. Need to set goals and deadlines. We want to be able to reach out to other teachers to participate in some level of the process.
Central States membership issue (levels of membership)–Central States has rolled out a plan for states to pay for membership. Regular joining fee, a slightly more expensive one, can pay for a year or pay for 3 years. If we pay by November 1st, then the 3 years is cheaper. Stacy recommends we sign up at least at the patron level by December 1st for 3 years at a total of $480. Kat made a motion to be a benefactor for 3 years at $950, seconded by Tracy. We could put an ad in the ACTFL program if we want to do more with them. Need to support Central States, should be fine financially. Motion carried. Stacy will contact Patrick Raven about our sponsorship.
Webpage updates for next year (planning) – When things are posted, need to make a note on Facebook or Twitter and tweet out links to the updates as we have a hard time getting traffic to the website. Need to make all the conference changes. Tracy will be working on getting the 2014 keynote photo and bio on the website. We should share documents from Don’s wiki for out webpage. Could add exhibitor page to our website, could give Chris access to that portion of the website. For October to November, change our homepage to say thank you to our exhibitors. Have a link to materials and such. Would like to get all the exhibitors on our page and make them hot links.
Exchange Job Binders with new officers
Sell t-shirts for $5, want to get people to wear our logo.
Adjourn - Stacy Amling motion to adjourn, Kim Huegerich seconded, motion carried, meeting adjourned. 9:47PM.