The MLA's Articulation Initiative:
High School to College in Foreign Language Programs

Some Lessons Learned: The Ohio Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project
Diane W. Birckbichler, Ohio State University

In his book on educational change, The New Meaning of Educational Change, Michael Fullan and Suzanne Stiebelbauer, his cocontributor, listed certain assumptions that they made about the process of change. Below are some of these assumptions, reworded and elaborated on in the light of lessons learned from our Ohio Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project.

1. Don't assume that your ideas are the ones that should be implemented; in other words, don't presume that you have the answers without asking questions and without allowing others the opportunity to put forth their agendas. One of our more memorable meetings was the one planned to discuss the types of oral tests to use in our early assessment battery. Midway through the meeting, which was going poorly, we realized we had forgotten to ask the most basic of questions: Did the group want to include oral tests or not?
2. Individuals need to understand change in their own time and in their own ways. Equally important is providing the opportunity for participants to express their ideas, reformulating them when and if they are ready. The process of collaboration is often more important than the products that result from it, and ample discussion and recycling of ideas are as important here as in the classroom.
3. Fundamental change requires discussion and will bring with it disagreement and some conflicts. Early on, project participants realized that certain ground rules, even in the liveliest of discussions, were important (e.g., don't attack anyone personally, don't make evaluative remarks about the quality of someone else's work, don't assume you know a priori someone else's motivations and context). Collaboration means withholding judgment and listening to what others have to say.
4. Sometimes people need some pressure to change, but they need to be able to operate in a nonthreatening environment where they are comfortable asking questions and seeking information. The rules suggested in the preceding paragraph will help develop this type of facilitative atmosphere. Careful planning of group discussions to allow the expression of differing points of view is essential to this process.
5. Change takes time; collaboration takes time. Collaborative projects designed to bring about change take even more time and patience. Michael Fullan cautions against unrealistic deadlines and says that "persistence is a critical attribute of successful change" (Fullan with Stiebelbauer 106).
6. Just because people don't change right away doesn't mean that they have rejected out of hand innovations and the values embedded in them. Find out why people are not changing. As Fullan suggests, it could be for a variety of factors, such as inadequate resources or not enough time to assimilate the ideas. Teachers from one of the high schools in our project had designed an innovative proficiency-based curriculum and had consequently already discussed issues that many of our participants were confronting for the first time.
7. Don't be surprised or worried if not everyone in a group changes. Individual acceptance of or resistance to change shows as much variation as exists among the learners in our classes. Psychologists often say that individuals continue to bring up the same issues because they haven't yet resolved them.
8. Fullan suggests that "evolutionary planning" and "problem-solving models" (107) are important to the change process. In other words, don't be too rigid in your planning; be flexible; and be willing to modify timelines, goals, and process. If it's broke, fix it. Early in our project, it became clear that university participants were planning meetings, which was clearly not in the spirit of the collaborative process. Solution: a steering committee composed of representatives from different constituencies that planned project activities collaboratively.

These thoughts about change and collaboration were presented in the hope that they might be of use to those in High School to College in Foreign Language Programs about to embark on collaborative projects and for those who will be serving as mentors to the start-up projects.

Work Cited

Fullan, Michael G., with Suzanne Stiebelbauer. The New Meaning of Educational Change. New York: Teachers Coll. P, 1991.

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