Teacher Resilience in Africa During the COVID-19 Pandemic

As teacher associations across the globe gear up to support teacher development during the difficult times created by the COVID-19 pandemic, themes related to teacher professional development consistently appear in response to the crisis. In Africa, teacher resilience has strongly emerged as a theme defining teacher-shared practices. The efforts to open up and create teacher support groups and teacher networking platforms during this pandemic like never before have demonstrated the concept of relationships as a fundamental principle of teacher resilience (Luthar, 2006).

Teacher research has followed a similar path, as it is happening in real-time when teachers exchange their ideas through open-access virtual platforms. This blog post highlights examples of teacher development efforts and provides examples of teacher resilience by reporting on the work of Africa TESOL and the first-ever Africa TESOL Online Symposium held on 15 August 2020.

New Trends in Teacher Development

As Berry et al. (2020) state it, in response to the pandemic,

Teachers who may have spent a career in relative isolation are now building virtual networks with peers from around the world to share and adapt crowdsourced ideas that better prepare students with the skills to thrive in a rapidly changing world instead of just on a test. (p. 14)

Online platforms such as Zoom, Teams, and, in the case of Africa, WhatsApp, have enabled teachers across the globe to connect like never before. Adopting a social perspective to teacher agency (Imants & Van der Wal, 2020), these events have facilitated sharing the insider perspective for dealing with the contextual challenges of teaching during these difficult times, demonstrating a more personalized and contextualized approach to teacher development.

Examples of Teacher Resilience in Africa

The Africa TESOL Online Symposium demonstrated teacher resilience and agency with numerous examples in the context of the pandemic in Africa. At the symposium, Harry Kuchah shared examples of teacher efforts during the lockdown, such as the teacher from Mali who started using WhatsApp to assign her students homework and help them learn from home. Another teacher from Burkina Faso started a professional network for teachers and students to seek and find help when needed. Furthermore, Kuchah called for celebrating these success stories of teachers and adopting an “enhancement perspective” to teacher education in Africa. He affirmed that the best global practices were developed locally when teachers adapt and overcome contextual challenges.

In addition, teacher associations in Africa, such as NileTESOL, GETC, and BETA, in Egypt, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, respectively, shared activities during the pandemic that included organizing webinars, online discussion groups, and creating WhatsApp professional groups.

Other examples, published in the Africa TESOL Newsletter, Issue 7 and presented through the Weekly Discussions on the Africa TESOL YouTube Channel, demonstrated how teachers from Cameroon, Senegal, Egypt, Angola, South Africa, Morocco, Nigeria, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Tanzania joined together to find solutions, often without external assistance, and illustrated how empowering teacher education efforts can originate from the ground up.

References

Berry, B., Doucet, A., & Owens, B. (2020). Teacher leadership in the aftermath of a pandemic: The now, the dance, the transformation. Independent Report written to inform the work of Education International. https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_research_covid-19_nowdancetransformation.

Imants, J., & Van der Wal, M. M. (2020). A model of teacher agency in professional development and school reform. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(1), 1–14.

Luthar, S. S. (2006). Resilience in development: A synthesis of research across five decades. In D.Cicchetti & D.J. Cohen (Eds.), Developmental psychopathology: Risk, disorder, and adaptation. John Wiley & Sons.

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/teacher-resilience-in-africa-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/

The Rise of Adjunctification: From Surviving to Thriving

Adjunctification is on the rise in institutions of higher education across the United States. This is not a new phenomenon; colleges and universities have been steadily relying more and more on the underpaid labor of part-time, nonbenefited faculty. As tenured faculty positions become more scarce and full-time positions disappear from departments, departments around the country are starting to worry about the future of their programs. In addition, the very part-time faculty that help to keep departments afloat fear for the future.

Credit-bearing ESL programs, programs that offer academic credit for ESL coursework, at community colleges and 4-year institutions are not exempt from this phenomenon. As ESL educators retire, departments are left wondering about how they will continue to support their programs with fewer long-term faculty members. Many departments have become saturated with adjunct faculty members who have taken over some or most of the teaching load within the department. These part-time faculty members often work at multiple institutions, lack job security, and lack a pipeline to full-time employment.

This begs the questions:

1. How is the higher education landscape changing?
2. How has the rise in adjunctification impacted ESL programs?
3. What is the future of credit-bearing ESL programs?

What Is Adjunctification?

The term adjunctification is relatively new and still somewhat unknown by many in higher education. Though someone may not use the term adjunctification, they are more likely than not familiar with the phenomenon. Adjunctification is the push for institutions of higher learning to hire as many adjuncts (part-time, nonbenefited employees) as possible to teach courses at a lower rate and without job security. (Adjunct can also be used as a verb or adjective: “to adjunct part time” or an “adjunct professor,” respectively.)

If you are graduating from college, the majority of your professors were probably part-time, adjunct faculty members teaching at one or multiple institutions to string together a somewhat livable paycheck. Some of these faculty members might adjunct as their sole employment, while others might only adjunct to supplement their main job. Regardless, adjunct professors can be employed one semester with multiple classes or go semesters at a time with no classes at all. If you are an adjunct, you are probably familiar with the constant fear of not getting assigned coursework. Even when given classes at the beginning of one semester, there is still a feeling of dread when thinking about what will happen in 16 weeks when the semester is over.

The Moving Tectonic Plates of Higher Education

Like moving tectonic plates, shifts in higher education run deep and impact many. The landscape in higher education has been changing for some time, even before COVID-19. Many institutions were not prepared to support the rise in part-time, first-generation, and nontraditional students. Traditional models used in 4-year institutions are starting to crack as many realize that they do not support their current student audience. This has pushed institutions of higher education to try and adapt quickly for fear that they may become one of many small colleges to permanently close their doors.

In many cases, the Band-Aid solution to many issues and changes in higher education is to increase adjunctification on campus and across all disciplines and departments. Adjunctification allows a campus to easily offer a course at a cheaper price. Instead of having to offer benefits, reassigned time, prep-time, and assured work every semester, adjuncts professors can be teaching one semester and gone the next. There is no permanency. If a full-time faculty member retires, it is far cheaper for a college or university to hire multiple adjunct faculty members to complete the work. Sometimes, a college will hire fewer adjuncts and give them more work. However, many will hire many adjuncts and give them only one or two courses. It is also important to note that many adjunct faculty contracts state that someone could get paid more if they teach more courses. This reality can sometimes shape the decisions that colleges make when they decide how many people to hire and how many classes to offer. In many ways, this feels like a game of “Chutes and Ladders” to adjunct faculty who desperately want to teach and want consistent employment within their field.

The Value of Adjunct Faculty

Adjunct faculty have been around for a long time, but it was not until more recently that this shift in adjunctification has taken place. Adjunct faculty serve an important role in many departments. They offer quality instruction to students and help to support departments with a variety of projects. Adjunct faculty members are part of the academic community, skilled educators, and are professionals within their discipline.

However, the current shifts in adjunctification have presented new obstacles for adjunct faculty members. Previously, it might have been common for an adjunct faculty member to adjunct a few classes or a few semesters before a full-time, benefited position opened up. Having been in the department already, adjunct faculty are perfectly positioned to take on a bigger role within that department. Hence, they had a pipeline to full-time employment, and departments had a pipeline to future programmatic security. Unfortunately, this is just not the case anymore. Full-time teaching positions are harder to find, and departments are working harder than ever to try to encourage their institutions to fill vacancies when someone retires. Depending on the economy, campus enrollment, and campus leadership, this can be harder at some campuses than others. Therefore, adjunct educators are left to pick up the pieces within not only one department but often multiple programs at multiple institutions. This can make it hard financially and mentally for adjunct educators who want to teach and are desperately needed by their departments.

So, Where Does This Leave Credit-Bearing ESL Programs?

Like other disciplines and departments, credit-bearing ESL programs have been caught in the crossfire when it comes to securing their programs and filling full-time vacancies within their programs. As many of the educators decide to retire, it is becoming harder and harder to build and sustain credit-bearing ESL programs. As seasoned educators and ESL program developers/founders retire, departments are left at a loss. They lose a quality educator, a campus member with instructional memory, and in many cases the glue that holds the department together. The full-time faculty, if any, who remain have to take on even more work to both teach their courses and sustain the program. The additional hours and work fall on their shoulders, but the fear of losing their program entirely keeps them doing the best that they can. This model is often unsustainable.

Programs that have somewhat consistent enrollment are then often able to hire new adjunct faculty to help carry the teaching load. These faculty members could teach for one semester or 19 years; however, the opportunities to move into a full-time position are few and far between. This can push educators to leave the profession, leave teaching, or try and find employment elsewhere on the campus. Again, this causes additional changes within the department and therefore additional pressure on the department to survive. The constant change and adjustment can feel like a perpetual “Groundhog Day.”

Looking to the Future

The reality is that credit-bearing ESL programs at 2- and 4-year institutions are facing an uphill battle. Adjunctification and lack of full-time faculty positions only touch the surface of what is going on in these programs today. This draws one to question, what can we do about this? Educators, near and far from retirement, are questioning what they can do to move from this defensive position to a proactive position both for their department and for the field of TESOL overall. Unfortunately, there is no one right answer that will magically solve everything. I believe that change is possible; however, significant collaborative work is needed to move beyond change management and to a new future for credit-bearing ESL.

Though the answer might not be fully formulated at this moment, I do think that there are a few things we can do to help bring about the positive change that we and our departments so desperately need.

1. We need to collaborate and connect with one another. Credit-bearing ESL program members, faculty and staff, need to gather on a larger scale. They need to meet with their TESOL affiliates within their states and meet on a countrywide scale through TESOL. We need to communicate with each other about what is going on, our successes, and our challenges. There is much that we can do to support each other and learn from each other.
2. We need to publish. We need to document what is going on within our credit-bearing ESL programs. We need to document successes and challenges. We need to talk about our teaching, our pedagogy, and our program structures. This ties in with the first suggestion about connecting and collaborating. We need to be able to share what is going on within credit-bearing ESL programs on a larger scale and as evidence when we strengthen our programs.
3. We need to embrace our adjuncts and strengthen our departments. As the dynamics in credit-bearing ESL programs change, we need to embrace this change. We need to invite adjunct faculty members to the table to discuss what is happening within the department. We need to collaborate. We need all program members to actively want to support and develop their program.
4. We need to do a better job of marketing ourselves. Credit-bearing ESL can often run under the radar on many college campuses. Some people might know who is in the department or who the students are, but they might not necessarily understand our work for the profession. We need to do a better job of marketing who we are and what we do. This needs to take place during campus meetings and through campus marketing. We need to brand and market our programs on the college website. We need to also gain support from others on campus and within the community.
5. We need allies! This aligns nicely with the point about marketing; we need to find our allies and hold them tight. We need them to also market our programs, support our programs, and help us as we maintain and build our credit-bearing ESL programs. Having allies on campus and within the community cannot be understated.
6. We need adjunct solidarity. Whether you know an adjunct who is teaching in a credit-bearing ESL program or another department on campus, adjuncts need solidarity. They are often a light of hope for departments that need quality educators to teach in and contribute to their departments. Within TESOL, TESOL affiliates, and across college campuses, we need to find ways to support adjuncts. Whether there is an adjunct health care bill floating around your statehouse or not, we need to look to ways to support the growing community of adjuncts who for many will carry the future of our credit-bearing ESL programs.
7. We need to demystify our profession. For those who are not part of the TESOL profession, it may be unclear who we are and what we do. We are more than grammar teachers. We are trained in both education and trained in teaching English. We carry pedagogy, teaching strategies, quality lessons, community drive, and more. The more we demystify our profession, the more we will be able to demystify our departments.

Though changes in the tectonic plates of higher education and the increase in adjunctification do not appear to be diminishing anytime soon, there is still hope for the future of our academic programs and adjunct faculty members. The more that we can come together as a profession, come together as a campus, and come together as departments, the brighter our future looks. Even if changes in our programs might feel like they are inevitable, there is still more work. It is time that we move our credit-bearing ESL programs from the position of surviving to the future of thriving.

If you are interested in learning more about adjunctification and the current state of higher education, check out these great articles:

1. “The Death of an Adjunct,” The Atlantic
2. “Straight Talk About Adjunctification,” The Chronicle of Higher Education
3. “The Adjunct Underclass,” Inside Higher Ed
4. “The Gig Academy,” Inside Higher Ed
5. “The Corner That State Universities Have Backed Themselves Into,” The Atlantic

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/the-rise-of-adjunctification-from-surviving-to-thriving/

7 Tips for Better Classroom Discussions

We’ve all been there: You introduce what you think is a red-hot topic to discuss, but when you ask the first question, there’s so much silence you can hear the classroom clock ticking. Or, in a class of 30, two or three students dominate the conversation—and you’re so happy anyone is talking you don’t want to discourage them.

So how do you get everyone talking? What steps can you take to increase participation? Following are seven tips for better classroom discussions, whether you’re talking about a familiar topic like holidays or a difficult reading for a college prep class.

1. Warm Up

Start with a short activity that lowers affect. It doesn’t need to be related to the topic—it just needs to be fun. For instance, it can be something as simple as Two Truths and a Lie, or as silly as the game Jump In, Jump Out.

Jump In, Jump Out video by Plameo.

Jump In, Jump Out can be played without holding hands for social distancing purposes, or even online, with students participating individually in their own homes.

2. Break It Down

Don’t feel like you need to start with a whole class discussion. Small groups in the classroom or online breakout rooms help students practice what they want to say in a lower stakes environment before they speak to the larger group.

3. Practice Communication Skills

Introduce students to conversational gambits so they know how to politely state their opinion, disagree, and interrupt—and know how to get the topic back on track if they are interrupted. It’s important to practice those skills separately before the discussion. For instance, one student in a group tells a simple story about themselves, such as what they did the day before, while other students politely interrupt them (“Could I interrupt to say something?”, “Excuse me, but could I ask…”). The storyteller then uses gambits (“As I was saying…”, “Anyway…”) to get back to their story.

4. Give Students a Head Start

One sticking point for students is trying to find the words they need on the fly, so ensure that students have already learned the words likely to come up in the discussion.

Likewise, some students feel more confident participating if they have a chance to think about the discussion before class, so consider posting the questions a day or two in advance. This also allows students to look up any extra vocabulary they need to make their point.

5. Assign Roles

If your goal is for shyer students to be more involved in conversation, ask pairs to interview each other and report on what they find. Because students will share their partner’s ideas instead of their own, they need to participate equally.

For small groups, assign students roles, such as facilitator, time-keeper, note-taker, and reporter. It’s especially important to have a facilitator to make sure everyone has the chance to speak. Though it’s easier to let the students choose these roles themselves, it’s worth planning ahead of time who will do what. If you leave it up to the students, the most confident will want to lead the discussion, while the shyest will opt to be the note-taker.

“Members discussion groups” by AIESEC (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

6. Make Connections

Ask open-ended questions and make them relevant to students’ lives and experiences. What do they already know about the topic? How does it affect them? For instance, if you’re going to discuss climate change, what changes have the students seen during their lifetimes? What are some examples of extreme weather they have experienced? If students are discussing a novel, how are their lives different from and similar to the characters? Would they do something differently if faced with the same challenges?

7. Change Things Up

If you’re in a physical classroom, get students out of their seats and up at the board. They can use it to answer questions, list ideas, or write up two sides of a debate—whatever is appropriate for your discussion. For brainstorming, students can write at the same time, limited only by space and the number of markers. Online, you can change the scenery by asking them to cocreate a Google doc or Google presentation based on their discussion that can then be shared with the class.

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I hope these tips will liven up your classroom discussions and increase participation from all your students. If you have other tips that have worked well for you, please share in the comments, below!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/7-tips-for-better-classroom-discussions/

Online Teacher Education Resources in ELT: Content-Area Language Demands

This is the fourth post in our blog series. Previously, we’ve focused on supporting teacher candidates preparing to work with multilingual learners more broadly, while here we focus on specific content areas.

We teach sheltered English immersion courses to teacher candidates working toward a teaching license in content areas, and in these courses we focus on cultivating asset-based dispositions and culturally responsive teaching so that teacher candidates can develop critical perspectives and pedagogical practices to become linguistically responsive teachers. However, while the teacher candidates we work with are committed to being the best classroom teacher they can be, we know that good teaching is simply not enough when working with multilingual learners. Further, though most teachers work with multilingual learners, not all of them necessarily identify as teachers of multilingual learners.

All teachers need to develop an awareness of the (English) language demands in their classroom and use it to inform their curricular and instructional decisions. In this post, we explore the following question:

How can we help teacher candidates
recognize the role of language in their content areas? 

Language Demands in Content-Area Classrooms

Because teachers are often focused on their respective content areas, it can be challenging for them to take a step back and see the language inherent in their lessons, including the specific disciplinary language demands as well as the general academic language and English vocabulary used throughout a lesson.

Vocabulary Activities

A basic element of disciplinary language is vocabulary. We ask our students to view instructional videos and to identify and categorize the kinds of words they hear. These can be either basic, Tier 1 words a newcomer might need to learn; more academic but cross-curricular Tier 2 words all learners might benefit from; or highly specialized, disciplinary  Tier 3 vocabulary. To prepare teacher candidates for this task, they can be asked to review ELT blogger Tan Huynh’s reader-friendly articles about each tier.

For this vocabulary activity, we recommend using the Roble Education Trigonometric Functions and Crash Course organic chemistry YouTube playlists for secondary STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers and the Homeschool Pop and Kids Academy videos for various content at the elementary level. In addition to videos, students can do the same activity by reading texts; we like to use texts from Teaching Tolerance and NewsELA for humanities. This activity works well in both synchronous and asynchronous remote instruction.

Language Complexity Activities

Teacher candidates also need to know language isn’t just words. Each content area has its own language, including certain genres of texts, discourse conventions, and ways to organize information.

An activity that introduces students to the complexity of language more broadly is reading a content-area passage in a language familiar to the instructor, but not the students. First, students read it with no support, the second pass they are provided with some vocabulary, and the third attempt they are provided with some grammatical rules (e.g., how to identify past tense). After each read, we discuss how the additional supports enhanced their ability to access the text. Before students are asked to read the passage for a fourth and final time, we do a mini-lesson where we activate background knowledge and build knowledge of vocabulary and language structures as a way to further model the importance of language instruction.

Example content-area texts in other languages can be found in NewsELA’s Spanish collection as well as in Holt, Reinhart, and Winston’s U.S. history book, which has chapter summaries in English, Spanish, Arabic, Khmer, Hmong, Vietnamese, and Chinese (click on “Holt United States History © 2007” and then choose a chapter to view the language options).

We like these sites also as a way to introduce teacher candidates to resources they can use to supplement English-language lesson materials in order to build onto multilingual learners’ linguistic assets. Additionally, immersing teacher candidates in another language can increase empathy toward multilingual learners by simulating an environment newcomer students often experience: being surrounded by an unfamiliar language.

We also use English text to illustrate disciplinary language demands. Mary Schleppegrell’s book on the “language of schooling” can be used to give teacher candidates the experience of trying to make sense of highly complex text on a topic they usually know little about. We ask our teacher candidates to read and make sense of a section of the text in pairs. Then, we discuss what strategies they used, such as rereading, discussing, and annotating—in other words, the type of strategies multilingual learners may need to be taught. We also use the text to introduce teacher candidates to specific features of academic language, such as nominalization, passive voice, complex sentences, and the use of specific connecting words.

Supporting Language Development in the Content Areas

Writing Language Objectives

A strategy for thinking about language in practical terms is writing language objectives. We like this article by Susan Ranney, which contains a flowchart to “extract” one or more language objectives from a content objective through the different domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing; and at the levels of discourse, sentence, and word. First, we model the process with an online flowchart tool such as FormSwift, and then we ask teacher candidates to do the same independently. An additional resource we like is Shanthi Kumar’s sentence frame for writing objectives.

Integrating Language and Content

Integrating language and content instruction is an important component of working with multilingual learners, especially newcomers. Though there are general instructional strategies that work across content areas, there are also specific considerations for particular disciplines.

We draw some of our ideas from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education modules for remote teaching in the content areas. Following are some of these and other resources that are particularly helpful in demonstrating how language and content instruction go hand-in-hand. The resources can be used in various ways for reflection, analysis, and lesson planning support.

STEM
Article		Language demands and opportunities: NGSS
Article		Improving math curriculum for ELLs
Classroom Video		Math instruction for newcomers
Classroom Video		Finding variations in living organisms: Grade 2
Lesson Planning		Ensuring ELs aren’t left of out of STEM
Lesson Planning		Engaging ELs in science and engineering
Humanities
Article		Social studies for ELLs
Article		ELLs in the Common Core English Language Arts
Classroom Video		ESL grades 1-2 – Justice, courage, and fairness
Classroom Video		Exploring topics in womens’ rights: high school
Lesson Planning		Engaging social studies lesson for ELLs
Lesson Planning		Using primary sources with ELLs
Performance/Visual Arts
Article		Art as a tool for teachers of ELs
Article		Drama and role play with ELs
Article		Best practices for ELs: K-8 music education
Classroom Video		Learning language through drama
Lesson Planning		Visual thinking strategy for art
Lesson Planning		ELLs in music class
Lesson Planning		Engaging ELs in music education
Lesson Planning		Helping ELs in art classroom

Access Is a Civil Right

There is no question that there is a demand for well-trained English language teachers in all classrooms (especially in STEM). We want to close our post this month with an important understanding that we often communicate to our teacher candidates: Language is the vehicle for accessing curriculum and supporting multilingual learners is a civil rights obligation. If you aren’t meeting the linguistic needs of your multilingual learners, then how are they able to access the content?

How do you integrate content and language instruction in your classroom? Please tell us in the comments section below.

In our next post, we will share ideas for how teacher candidates can practice teaching through multimodal assignments.

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/online-teacher-education-resources-in-elt-content-area-language-demands/

Reyes Family Fire Relief Fund

Looks like the link is broken.

Here it is again.

Click her to donate to Reyes Family Fire Relief Fund 

 Our community working together!

https://gf.me/u/yyc38gHappy Teaching! //downloads.mailchimp.com/js/signup-forms/popup/unique-methods/embed.jswindow.dojoRequire([“mojo/signup-forms/Loader”], function(L) { L.start({“baseUrl”:”mc.us2.list-manage.com”,”uuid”:”cbf24935a27cb5f458ad62415″,”lid”:”418f1f8b09″,”uniqueMethods”:true}) })

from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2020/09/reyes-family-fire-relief-fund_14.html

💕Reyes Family Fire Relief Fund

Hello to everyone

💕💕💕💕💕

I just wanted to thank everyone who has been reaching out to us since last Tuesday.  Yes, my family and I are safe and we still have a house!  The fires in Southern Oregon have decimated our community. 

So much loss, trauma, and tragedy.

I am reaching out and sharing a Go Fund Me page for 3 families I have the honor of knowing.  I have taught their children over the years and watched their successes and accomplishments.  In the blink of an eye all was lost as their trailers and belongs burnt to the ground.

Click Below if you would like to donate now:

 gf.me/u/yyc2fb  

 

If you can, please share this ‘Go Fund Me page’ on your social media, email or blogs.

The smallest donations are appreciated.

I would love to offer some hope to these 3 families as they struggle through the unthinkable.

 Click Below if you would like to donate now:

 gf.me/u/yyc2fb  

With much love  💕 and appreciation,

from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2020/09/reyes-family-fire-relief-fund.html

4 Pathways to a Culturally Responsive Virtual Classroom

Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is grounded in the idea that educators teach to students’ unique cultural strengths.  A well-known author in the field of culturally responsive teaching, Zaretta Hammond,  has provided professional development based on her book,  Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain. She provides some excellent professional development entitled Distance Teaching and Remote Learning in the Age of COVID-19.  These webinars are available virtually.

In view of the move to virtual learning in many classrooms across the United States, I would like to link the pathways to a culturally responsive classroom to online instruction of English learners (ELs). Following are four avenues to a culturally responsive classroom that teachers of ELs need to take into consideration when teaching virtually.

1. Get to Know Your English Learner

Virtual learning may lead to isolation of ELs (and other students) because they do not have  access to WiFi or devices on which to complete lessons. They may also feel a great deal of stress and anxiety due to the pandemic. Teachers need to build relationships with students virtually just as they would if they were in a face-to-face environment. At the heart of CRT of ELs is for teachers to value what each student brings to the classroom. They need to consider what schema ELs bring and to link instruction to the students’ personal, cultural, and world experiences. They should also strive to make the information relevant to ELs.

In a recent Twitter #ellchat about ELs in a hybrid classroom, educator Jacqueline Leon commented, “If only we are willing to shift our lens; ELs aren’t ‘at-risk.’ ELs are ‘at-promise’ students who should not be unduly exposed in a pandemic to still receive the quality education due to them. Let’s value ELs’ experience outside 4 walls.”

2. Build Relationships With the Families of English Learners

The most prominent difficulty that teachers have mentioned during virtual teaching is that of communicating with families who do not have internet and reaching students who are not showing up to their online meetings during the pandemic. Teachers have also found that many of their EL families were unaware of the information that was coming from their school district about remote learning, offers of devices, or opportunities for free WiFi service from local providers or through hotspots purchased by their school district.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call to schools that they need to keep up-to-date contact information for the families of their ELs.  Many schools were unprepared to meet this challenge in March, but they have now had 6 months to prepare to provide quality education to ELs virtually. In order for ELs to have equal access to education, they and their families need to receive all school communications in their first language.

3. Provide a Welcoming Classroom Environment for Your English Learners

Teachers can alleviate many fears experienced by beginning ELs by creating a welcoming environment in their virtual classrooms. Provide a physical environment that invites students into your space.  One of the key features of a welcoming environment for ELs is use of asset-based language. Using asset-based language fosters your ELs’ feeling of safety, where “trustworthiness, collaboration, empowerment, and acknowledgment of students’ personal, social, cultural, and life experiences are present” (Zacarian, Alvarez-Ortiz, & Haynes, 2020).

LeighAnn Matthews, ESL Coach at Bridgewater-Raritan Public Schools in New Jersey, told me the following:

I’ve been concentrating on helping ESL teachers and content teachers develop a stronger “can do” approach to teaching ELs. In turn, this will help them see ELs from a strengths-based lens as opposed to a deficit lens. This is critical, especially in a  virtual environment, where again, everyone is hyper focused on the challenges and negativity. How can we take those challenges and use them to determine things that are actually student strengths?

The more accepted and secure your ELs feel in your virtual classroom, the more quickly they will be able to learn. The more anxiety students experience, the less language they will comprehend. Encourage ELs to write in a home-language diary and draw pictures of people and places in their home countries, and share music from their culture. Instead of asking questions where students need to volunteer a response, ask question that students can answer as a group in their chat box, by raising their hands, or by using emojis (e.g., the “thumbs up” emoji).

4. Make Academic Information Accessible to English Learners

Scaffolding academic learning so that ELs are full participants in your classroom, either virtually or face-to-face, is essential to their academic success. Lecture-style teaching excludes ELs from the learning in a classroom; they benefit from cooperative learning strategies. We don’t want to relegate them to the fringes of the classroom, doing a separate lesson with a classroom aide or ESL teacher. When teachers scaffold lessons, they break down the language into manageable pieces or chunks. This can be done by

• connecting new information to prior experiences,
• preteaching academic vocabulary,
• using graphic organizers, and
• using sentence frames.

Working in small groups gives students an authentic reason to use academic vocabulary and real reasons to discuss key concepts. (See my previous blog, “4 Strategies for Scaffolding Instruction for ELs.”)

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Please share your ideas for how virtual classrooms can be culturally responsive in the comment box below. I would love to hear about your experiences.

References

León, J. [@TrentonMakes77]. 2020, August 19). If only we are willing to shift our lens; ELLs aren’t “at-risk”. ELLs are At-Promise students who should not be. Twitter. https://twitter.com/TrentonMakes77/status/1296260832758833153

Zacarian, D., Alvarez-Ortiz, L., & Haynes, J. (2020, April 7). 5 essential trauma-informed priorities for remote learning. ASCD Inservice. https://inservice.ascd.org/5-essential-trauma-informed-priorities-for-remote-learning/

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/4-pathways-to-a-culturally-responsive-virtual-classroom/

Level-Up Your Games and Learning Knowledge: 6 Resources

Greetings everyone, and welcome to another edition of the TESOL Games and Learning Blog. This month’s post highlights books and journals that are some of my favorite games and language learning resources. These are the resources I recommend to others looking to enhance their game design knowledge, level up their games in language learning knowledge, or stay current in games and language learning research.

Books

Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games
by Tracy Fullerton

Tracy Fullerton’s book is a rich primer on the fundamentals of games and game design. Each chapter covers a step in the game design process with interstitials featuring interviews from notable game designers and developers. Read this book as a guide to the mechanics of games or as a tutorial on how to create more engaging games for your classroom, or use it as a guide for a project-based assignment where students design, playtest, and balance their own games.

Challenges for Game Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers
by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber

Brenda Braithwaite’s book is always within arm’s reach as I work on game-related materials. It is a fantastic hands-on approach to building games and pairs exceptionally well with Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop. Braithwaite fills each chapter of the book with challenges around a central theme that guide readers through varieties of games such as chance, strategy, and twitch games. Besides a great guide to building games, this book too can be used as the foundation for a project-based class where students design their own games.

Serious Play: Literacy, Learning and Digital Games
edited by Catherine Beavis, Michael Dezuanni, and Joanne O’Mara

Serious Play pairs well with Language at Play. Where Language at Play features a focus on game software, Serious Play documents student experiences around using games in education. The case-study nature of each chapter provides an active research description of how teachers use games in learning and how students perceive the use of games for learning. Though the book is not exclusively focused on language learning, each chapter provides valuable insight into how to effectively leverage games for the classroom.

Language at Play: Digital Games in Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning
by Julie M. Sykes and Jonathon Reinhardt

The stated goal of this book is to introduce educators to digital game-mediated second language teaching and learning. It’s a solid reference work for fundamental concepts around games and language learning and features a wide array of games that could be used as part of classroom activities. Interspersed through the chapters are practical activities and reflection exercises for language teachers to improve and refine their approaches to integrating games into their classroom practice.

Journals

Language Learning and Technology

Language Learning and Technology (LLT) is a research-focused mainstay in the area of computer-assisted language learning. Its back catalogue is a wealth of games and language learning-related research, and the journal frequently features reviews of games and language-learning books. For those looking to develop their own bibliography of games and language learning research, LLT is the place to start.

Ludic Language Pedagogy Journal

Ludic Language Pedagogy (LLP) is a relatively new open-access journal with perhaps the most insightful understanding of games in any of the academic literature. One of the most pressing issues in games and language education is the view of games as text that teach and educators using them in much the same way they would books or film. Yet, games’ true potential rests in the understanding of them as spaces that prompt social interaction and transformation. LLP journal highlights the transformative aspects of games that make it a go-to resource for critical ideas around games and learning.

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I hope these recommendations make their way into your professional reading rotation as each can help level-up your understanding of games and how to use them in the classroom. Until next month, keeping reading and play more games!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/level-up-your-games-and-learning-knowledge-6-resources/

Distance Learning: What Parents Need to Know!

Back to School!         

click here for your free copy 

                 

Tuesday my district goes live on line with students! We are all so excited, but nervous, too.

I wanted to start my school year out helping parents organize and prepare for the first days of school, at home!  Here are some tips, tricks and ideas I shared with my student’s parents.  

What Parents Need to Know About Distance Learning 

 

Build a strong relationship with your child’s teacher.  Call, email or text your child’s teacher and introduce yourself.  Tell the teacher about your child, and your family.  Ask what you can do to help her/him and ask what you should do when you need help. 

 

Set and keep a daily school schedule and routine at home.    Students thrive when routines and schedules are followed strictly.  Consistent routines create an atmosphere that allows children to feel secure and know what to expect.  Remember to include in your daily schedule breaks at regular times for stretching, snacks, lunch and physical movement outside when possible.  Create a plan and

stick to it!

  

Locate or create a space in your home for each individual child.  This is where they will do their distant learning and school work. Organize the the space by making sure the materials your child needs are easily accessible and within reach.  Limit distractions between children in the same room by using headphones, computer privacy screens or poster boards.  Desks, tables or other working spaces, which are in the same room, need to be positioned back to back to minimize distractions and horseplay! J

  

Many parents feel like they need to teach or reteach distant learning lessons.  Let the teacher do the teaching and help your children if they struggle by having a conversation about what your child understands and does not understand about the lesson.  Help your child explain their thinking about the lesson and see if they can sort out their thinking on their own.  Sometimes kids just need a sounding board.  If your child is still stuck, contact the teacher.

click here for your free copy   

Ask for help. Don’t be reluctant to contact teachers, reach out to other parents, or family and friends.  We are all coping right now with similar worries, frustrations and problems. By reaching out to each other we build a strong foundation for our own family and the families in our community. 

 

Encourage reading. Read with your children.  You can read books, recipes, newspapers or magazines.  The point is just to read everyday with your children.

 

Set clear expectations with your family.  Have a family meeting and come prepared to share your expectations for school with your children.  Explain that school is still school even when distant learning and that you expect the best effort from your children.   Establish realistic consequences for your children if their schoolwork has not been completed in a timely manner.  Hold weekly family meetings to talk about your families agreed upon expectations.  Consider how those expectations were met. If the expectation has not been met, calmly give the consequence that you established if schoolwork was not done.   Be consistent.  Keep everyone in the family connect with student education and achievement with these important family interactions.

 

Provide feedback.  Kids love stickers, stars, praise and positive reinforcement.  Remember to always praise the behavior you are looking for (‘Wow! I am impressed with how you made sure to use your best handwriting when writing your story!’ versus ‘good job on that story.’)

  

Model patience, perseverance, understanding and compassion.  Covid-19 has created unprecedented stress in many if not most families.  Now is the time to teach your child patience, understanding and compassion.  Talk about perseverance and different strategies to create it when doing schoolwork.  Let your children know that taking a break when frustration comes in is a great skill to learn, but the real life skill is going back to a job and getting it finished!

 

Don’t forget to have fun.  Kids are kids and love to learn through play.  Make games and fun activities out of school work.  Ask your children how they could make up a game to help them with some of their assignments.  Make if fun to learn.

 

Keep track of assignments.  Make a schedule and post it on the refrigerator.  Review it together with your children each morning and set goals.

 

Encourage writing by asking your children to keep a diary or journal.  Make a homemade journal and teach your kiddos how to keep a diary.  Integrate writing into real life home activities.  These writing activities are great in English or your native language.

  

Promote conversation in any language.  Ask your child what they did today at school what was the most interesting, difficult, important things you learned today.

I am also sharing it with you, too! (click here for your free copy).  

Send this list home to take the first steps in assisting parents in making a successful transition to distance learning!

click here for your free copy 

All my best,

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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2020/09/distance-learning-what-parents-need-to.html

Teaching Workplace Writing

Much of our discussions of writing instruction revolves around academic writing and preparing students for their future studies, from high school to university to graduate school. But few of our students plan to become professors, so it’s important for writing teachers to understand the types of writing that students may need to do in careers outside of academia. In this post, I provide an overview of the writing done in nonacademic professions and discuss how to help students learn those forms of writing.

Here, I focus on the forms of writing done by professionals in what are sometimes called “white collar” or “desk” jobs, not those entailing more manual labor. These positions usually require some level of higher education (ranging from an associates degree to a doctorate). Some such workers are employees of large corporations, nonprofit organizations, or government agencies, while others are self-employed. The writing they do for their work differs from academic writing in that it “has a pragmatic or instrumental focus…it is primarily concerned with getting things done” (Bremner, 2018, p. 1).

Bremner (2018) stresses the importance of context in workplace writing; each individual text is connected in multiple ways to its function within a workplace. This is related to the intertextual nature of most professional writing: no email stands alone. Rather, emails, reports, spreadsheets, and slide decks are connected to each other, often conveying related information from the same project to different audiences for different purposes.

Compared with a few decades ago, 21st-century workplaces put a greater emphasis on technology, service, flexibility, teamwork, and multitasking (Newtown & Kusmierczyk, 2011). “These changes in turn produce new forms of workplace communication as people are required to adopt new ways of writing, speaking, and making meaning through multimedia and through an ever diversifying range of electronic communication tools” (Newtown & Kusmierczyk, 2011, p. 75). In an ethnographic study of a nonprofit organization, for example, Beaufort (2000) identified numerous roles played in workplace writing, with the employees collaborating and supporting each other to create a wide range of texts for many different audiences and purposes. Taken together, these scholars highlight the importance of knowing not only what our students will write in the future, but also how they will create those texts.

What Do Professionals Write?

I conducted an informal survey of my friends on Facebook, asking them what types of writing they do in their jobs. Here are some of the highlights from this investigation:

• Several responses came from people working in nonprofit organizations. They noted that they write for many different purposes, including grant proposals, marketing plans, reports on in-progress and completed projects, blog posts, LinkedIn articles, biographical sketches, executive summaries, and training documents.
• Friends working in the video game design industry do job-specific writing: technical or design documentation of the games they are creating. One video game designer also writes scripts for characters’ lines, some of which are presented in text format and others of which are read aloud by actors in voice-overs.
• The textbook publishing and assessment industry requires bids and proposals for new projects, as well as reports on ongoing and completed projects.
• Clinical psychologists write case studies and session notes, assessment reports, and protocols to deliver information to patients. In addition, psychologists conduct research and write journal articles and conference papers.
• An occupational therapist who has worked with both adults and children reports writing “lots of dry boring documentation justifying what I do with my clients. Assessment reports include lots of test results and current functioning and goals with specific time lines. Progress reports include progress toward goals, and daily notes include what I do and the client does during our session.”
• A bakery owner shares many of the same writing tasks as others who run small businesses: marketing messages, signs, contracts, and communication with customers and vendors.
• Classroom teachers and specialists in elementary and high schools also write a lot for their jobs, including progress reports; curriculum and materials; lesson plans; study guides; and communication with parents, colleagues, and administrators. They must also set up learning management systems, an especially important aspect of teaching online.
• Working in state or federal government agencies also requires much writing. Friends in such positions said they write many types of reports, including legal decisions, statements conveying findings from technical committees to decision-making bodies, explanations of statistical analyses, and technical briefs. They also may write memos, develop test items, do their own research, and write performance evaluations of people they supervise.

Besides these more profession-specific types of writing, there are a few types of text that span many jobs:

• Email: Number one, listed by almost everyone, and reviled by many, is email. Professional work in the 21st century requires frequent communication with colleagues, supervisors, clients, patients, vendors, and parents of students, among others. One friend pointed out, however, that Slack messaging has taken over some intra-office communication that until recently was done over email.
• Social Media: Many different jobs also involve forms of social media. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are no longer just for personal uses. Professionals post on behalf of their businesses, announcing new products, providing updates on campaigns, and summarizing important reports their organizations have released.
• Spreadsheets: These are also used widely. Some jobs require analyzing data presented in spreadsheets and reporting the results to stakeholders, while others require entering information into spreadsheets.
• Presentations in Slide Decks: Presentation slides are yet another common form of workplace writing. These presentations may be addressed to widely varying audiences—colleagues, customers, or legislators, for example—yet all require the creator to think carefully about what the audience already knows, what they need to know, and how best to convey that information in this format. Another challenge for creators of presentation slides is that the author may not be the person giving the presentation, so they must also consider how clearly the information is laid out and how much context the creator and presenter share.

Teaching Workplace Writing

So what does this mean for writing teachers? The central message is that workplace professional writing is diverse, which means we can’t teach students how to write all these different types of text in one course. Instead, we need to focus on teaching students how to analyze the situation and figure out what they need to write based on

• who they are writing for (the audience),
• what the purpose of their writing is, and
• how that purpose has been fulfilled within their workplace previously.

A genre approach (see my June blog post for more about genre) offers a framework for guiding students through such an analysis process within the classroom; once they move on to their workplaces, they can use the same process to figure out how to write the types of texts required there. In many situations, they can study models of reports, memos, and presentations that others have written in their jobs. Though my friends did not mention it, Bremner (2018) adds that much workplace writing is collaborative, which means that novice writers can learn from their colleagues as they work together to construct texts.

In what ways have you taught students to write for specific professions? Share your ideas in the comments, below.

References

Beaufort, A. (2000). Learning the trade: A social apprenticeship model for gaining writing expertise. Written Communication, 17(2), 185–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088300017002002

Bremner, S. (2018). Workplace writing. In J. I. Liontas (Ed.), The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching (pp. 1–6). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0519

Newton, J., & Kusmierczyk, E. (2011). Teaching second languages for the workplace. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 74–92. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0267190511000080

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/teaching-workplace-writing/