It's been a whirlwind couple of days for us! After months and years of hard work, so much of what we as IWLA members and world language educators have been fighting for is being realized this summer: state world language model competencies for Iowa AND a representative at the Iowa Department of Education!

If you've seen the pictures we posted earlier today on Facebook & Twitter, you've seen that several IWLA Executive Board members (Kat, Linda, Jason, Kate, and I) have been collaborating with Marcia Powell and Sandra Dop from the Iowa Department of Education and the 2015 Iowa Teacher of the Year, Clemencia Spizzirri, to pull together information from Iowa Learning Online, ACTFL, and other sources to formulate Iowa model competencies in support of the competency-based education movement in the state. We have more work days planned this summer and we will be sharing our work with all of you soon, but it's a great feeling to have this initiative moving forward!

As part of this process, it has been wonderful to meet Clemencia and to begin to foment a new collaborative relationship with her! Part of her platform as Teacher of the Year is to advocate for language education, and she is doing many exciting things that are great for students, great for us all, and great for our profession. If you are on Twitter, you can follow her there: @elspizzirri. We hope she will join us in October for our fall 2015 IWLA conference, too. 

The other HUGE event from today was meeting Stephanie Wager, who has worked as the Iowa Department of Education's Social Studies consultant for the past couple of year and who has recently been asked to also support World Languages as part of her job. (As many of you know, we have been lacking a voice within the Dept of Ed and the AEAs in recent years, so this is fantastic!) Stephanie has studied Spanish, and taught English in Mexico for a year, and is excited to support our efforts and be a voice for us at the Department. Please join us in thanking Stephanie for her efforts!