 A topic that we're going to be looking at together is language. I love language, I love multilingualism, I love all the things that language represents including kind of serving as a proxy for intelligence. We know that people who enter school who get behind in the number of words they've just heard or been exposed to start behind and they stay behind unless they have great teachers, teachers who know how to take advantage of filling in those gaps because the way you are able to express yourself influences the level of cognition that you have. So we're going to be looking at this from multiple different angles. One of the first ways is just to sort of ask if you know anything about languages or anything about bilingual education or about the multilingual brain. Just anything that relates to language as a whole, things that contrast the Hawaiian language with English language, anything. But at least one thing you know and one thing that you want to know about languages, okay? So we're going to do a quick one minute paper when we get together. Then we're going to use that and base a lot of our conversation in this session on what you know and what you want to know so that we can really begin from our own starting point of what this group really knows about languages and wants to know about languages. Then we'll jump into a couple of things that are true and false quizzes about the brain and language just to see how you kind of score on some of these things and also offer you some really concrete information about the brain and how the brain actually puts together languages. Are some languages easier to know than others? Does it get easier to learn the fourth language if you already know three for example? Does language take up brain space and like are you not learning something else because you're learning a language or are there optimal ages in which you should learn a language or like adults can't learn it as good as kids, is that true or false? But the main thing we're going to look at together has to do with the role that other actors play in our own language development. What roles for example to the peers of that kid play in his language development? How do kids influence each other's language development? And how could we actually take advantage of some of those things? So we're going to ask you to talk about that a little bit and then we're going to come back to the larger group and try to pull apart some of those big ideas and see if there's any patterns and some of the things that you're all finding within your own classroom context. We'll also look at the role of quantity and quality language exposure and how that influences learning outcomes as far as language is concerned and then we're going to think about the school itself, how does the school context, how does the decision of a school on how to integrate curriculum or how to introduce different languages, how does that change learning outcomes and what we want to look at it where some of the best school examples are on the world that integrate multiple languages and how does that actually work in practice and we'll consider some of the research that talks about you know qualities of great teachers who work in multilingual environments and types of program designs that seem to work the best, the ways that different teachers will use and work with different level learners in their class for example and we'll consider some of the basic characteristics of great teachers in these contexts. And finally we'll round this out by looking at some of the different activities and methodologies that can be used within the classroom structure that enhance language learning. And two of the big takeaways I hope that we get from this day are that number one all learning is mediated through language. The International Baccalaureate recently proclaimed that all teachers are language teachers. This means that if you teach science or art or or math or history you're a language teacher and the main reason they they decided to put that out very explicitly is that we know that you know language is definitely a proxy for intelligence the more complex the vocabulary you have the greater variety of ways you have of expressing ideas that is a way of showing the things that you know in your own head right so we can all be super smart in our own heads when it comes down to actually sharing what we know and being able to collaborate with others and actually grow our ideas in social context we need to have strong language skills so that's number one the second part that we're going to look at has to do with the multilingual brain or the bilingual brain. What are the general cognitive benefits that exist and I'll give you a quick hint executive functions are improved through bilingualism greater working memory capacity cognitive flexibility inhibitory control are all enhanced through learning another language so we're going to talk about those things and the general benefits of language learning and when we get together if you have any questions beforehand go ahead and write me an email I look forward to seeing you soon