Tag Archives: multilingual education

08.07.15
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Meet the Newest Addition to TNCS’s Administration!

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Welcome to TNCS, Ms. Sanchies!

This summer, The New Century School welcomes Dominique Sanchies to the vibrant and dedicated administrative team. Ms. Sanchies will adopt a somewhat new-for-2015 “combination role”—she will take over as Admissions Director (the position recently vacated by Robin Munro as she returns to the Biology classroom) as well as becoming Assistant Head of School to support current Head of School Alicia Danyali.

Ms. Sanchies and her husband moved to Baltimore in March from Portland, Maine, a move she expected to be a bit of an upheaval. Instead, she says, “We love it here. In fact, Fell’s Point is a lot like Portland, which in turn is a lot like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is Fell’s Point’s sister city.” Good to know! So far, they are glad to see the cobblestones, which remind them of home, but are still acclimating to the notorious Baltimore accent (“hon”). Also, hailing from the “Pine Tree State” as she does, she notes that we have a lot more deciduous trees, whereas Maine features largely coniferous varieties.

She arrives at TNCS with quite a diverse background, experiences that will serve her well in her new multifaceted position. Her degree is in Communications, earned at the University of Southern Maine. After graduating from college, she first worked in the television industry as Affiliate Relations Manager for Resort Sports Network (RSN), an independent cable sports network now known as Outside Television. In addition to traveling all over the country and getting the chance to “ski in some really wonderful places” she negotiated contracts between RSN and their more than 30 affiliate networks in all of the key U.S. destination skiing and golf resorts.

After 6 years with RSN, she became an account executive for a local Portland network where she fortuitously encountered a former colleague who was starting up her own local production company. Ms. Sanchies was hired as Director of Sales for Bohler Productions, a lifestyle television network with multiple Emmy-award-winning shows to their credit. “We sold nontraditional television media to area businesses,” she said, for such shows as Maine Home and Design and The Best of Portland. “Instead of traditional commercials, we sold 90-second spots that told the story of the business.” What emerged was basically a showcase of the best area spots for dining, shopping, lodging, etc., which was a very effective approach to advertising, a testament to Ms. Sanchies’ ability to innovate.

“From there,” she says, “I went corporate!” She became a Senior Analyst with the Fortune 500 insurance company UNUM, adjudicating claims in the long-term disability department, which she says was a surprisingly nice experience. “I had been accustomed to working for small companies, so to go to a major organization where I was pretty much just a number taught me the value of accountability and giving really clear expectations to not only myself but also to the people I was mentoring and managing. So, it brought a lot of formality that was kind of new to me but that I grew to love.”

The experience showed her that the right systems can be actually liberating rather than confining. Here at TNCS, she hopes to help the team implement a similar structure with upcoming initiatives and future school planning, “so that we work smarter, not harder to realize our new goals” she said.

While certainly dynamic, Ms. Sanchies’ résumé is nevertheless unified by a common thread. “I’ve been a relationship manager the whole time. If I were to distill selling media, for example, or working as a long-term care analyst, it all still comes down to relating to people,” she said. It’s this capacity for civil collaboration that will make her the ideal fit for her new position at TNCS, in which she will interact with teachers, other staff members, families, and, of course, students from ages 2 to 12.

Oh, and by the way, she’s multilingual—yet another plus! She grew up in a bilingual French/English household with most of her relatives from Québec, Canada speaking only French. She also picked up some Spanish along the way as she put herself through college working as a group representative for EF Foundation for Foreign Study, a foreign exchange student company headquartered in Switzerland. Her role was initially to find host families and teachers for her group of 22 Spanish students, but she ultimately traveled to Madrid, Spain to teach English as a second language there.

As if this impressive portfolio wasn’t enough, she is also a musician and has spent time as a part-time preschool music instructor—yet another boon for music-loving TNCS students! She describes the music in her two albums as “Cheryl Crow meets Dave Matthews.”

So what are her initial impressions of TNCS? “It’s summertime, so I haven’t gotten to meet all of the teachers—let alone the students—but what I’ve seen during the summer session is a charming place with lovely little people and a really dedicated staff,” she said. “So far so good!” She thinks the multilingual approach is “brilliant” and speaks from firsthand experience. Scientific research (see Immersed‘s Resources and Links pages) demonstrates that TNCS students are at the perfect age to learn languages because their nimble young brains are so nimble. “It also wards off dementia in old age and is really good exercise for the brain,” she said. (This phenomenon is known as “cognitive reserve”; read Ellen Bialystok and team’s fascinating research here.)

Pine TreeIn closing, Ms. Sanchies says she is “looking forward to meeting all of the students and families and really getting into her new role. And from what I’ve seen so far, the staff is invested on such a deep level.” Of course, there’s aways a bit of trepidation associated with taking on an entirely new endeavor, so perhaps to make Ms. Sanchies feel more at home, TNCS could debut a “Pine Tree Classroom” for the 2015–2016 school year. That would make a lovely addition to TNCS’s growing arboretum of Lemon Tree, Apple Tree, Pear Tree, Gingko, Oak, etc. classrooms :)!

05.29.15
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TNCS Elementary Skypes with Students from other Countries!

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Señora Hodapp and her upper elementary Spanish class hold their first Skype call with the Colegio Margaret Mead in Peru.

This spring, The New Century School elementary students began an exciting new multilingual endeavor—connecting with other students and schools around the world via Skype! This program is the fruit of the joint efforts of TNCS Director of External Programming Catalina Dansberger Duque and the school’s Language Directors Jennifer Hodapp and Xie Laoshi. Ms. Dansberger Duque credits the germ of the idea to TNCS Co-Founders/Executive Directors Roberta Faux and Jennifer Lawner, however, saying, “I believe it is part of their mission to connect TNCS with world culture and create authentic experiences for the students.”

Other cross-cultural exchanges are also potentially in the works, such as with summer camps with both Spanish and China through groups like Each Futures, who TNCS has worked with in prior years to bring Chinese students to the school. “They have also had individual student exchanges from Spain and China that were very rewarding for everyone,” said Ms. Dansberger Duque. To augment these efforts, Ms. Dansberger Duque has been developing a program for visiting Chinese students to attend TNCS for 2 weeks, with classroom time and tours of nearby historic points of interest, with the help of TNCS Chinese intern Monica Li.
The next step was to expand such efforts to Latin America. Ms. Dansberger Duque and Ms. Li came up with the idea for a series of Skype chats as a way to launch their bigger programs. These could take the form of class to class, teacher to teacher, family to family, etc. “The idea behind the chats is to provide options for schools to build a relationship with us that would instill trust and inspire families to come visit us and vice versa,” said Ms. Dansberger Duque. As it is turning out, though, the Skype chats are in and of themselves an enormously beneficial way to make languages and cultures come alive for TNCS students.

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Intercambio internacional—everyone was all smiles for this fun and rewarding class!

As a native of Bogotà, Colombia, Ms. Dansberger Duque has a deep understanding of Latin American culture and was able to prospect 14 schools across Central and South America and the Caribbean that were both Montessori based and/or multilingual as well as interested in building a relationship with TNCS. “The first school I found was the Montessori British School in Bogotà, Colombia. They teach Spanish, French, English, and Mandarin. They already have an established exchange program with China and are interested in setting one up with us. The Colegio Margaret Mead in Peru, while having maybe the least amount of technology resources compared to some of the other schools I contacted, was the first one to come through and commit to a specific date and time to do a classroom chat,” she said.
As mentioned, Colegio Margaret Mead was the first school TNCS students connected with, and the unqualified success of this chat will pave the way for regular exchanges of this kind. On Thursday, April 30th, TNCS 3rd- and 4th-graders gathered to find out all about their new Peruvian friends. They were each prepared with written questions and took turns in front of the screen, as did the students on the other end.
What’s your last name?
What grade are you in? What’s your favorite sport?
What’s your name? How old are you?
Where do you live?
Señora Hodapp facilitated and also provided the sometimes necessary encouragement when a student got stuck. “Our students were shy but also very excited!” she reported. “We will also start an in-class pen pal program with the Margaret Mead School.”

One especially rich moment was when the Peruvian students asked TNCS students in Spanish how to say “hello” in Mandarin. Think about that for a moment, because it’s tremendously impressive that TNCS students can field a question in one non-native language about a separate non-native language altogether.

But, as the ever-diplomatic Ms. Dansberger Duque reminds us, this endeavor has much larger implications than just the cognitive acrobatics necessary to manage more than one language:
I think this program is important for TNCS students because it is through meeting people of other cultures that people build bridges. By promoting an international language and cultural community students become accustomed to a world view of inclusion and diversity as the norm. While it obviously has long-term personal, academic, and professional benefits in a world market, in my opinion, its most important quality is that it dissolves the idea of foreign and creates a sense of unity and appreciation in the diversity that exists in the world. It helps to mold our young ones into understanding world citizens. That is something difficult to come by from secondhand experiences like textbooks and movies.
The next chat will take place Tuesday, June 2nd with a class from the British Montessori School in Bogotà. The native Spanish-speaking students are also fluent in Mandarin and English, so all three languages will be spoken during this call, with an emphasis on Mandarin. Ms. Dansberger Duque says, “There are schools in Argentina, Costa Rica, Panama, Grand Cayman, and Bolivia that have also expressed interest. The school in Grand Cayman, Montessori by the Sea, has opened their summer camp experience to our students.” TNCS is fortunate to offer these extraordinary programs thanks to the ongoing hard work of our TNCS ambassadors!