TESOL 2014 - Professional Development for Novice Teachers

As a teacher trainer and a researcher in teacher development, when attending the TESOL Conference in Portland last week, I gave preference to the sessions related to this field. Some of them focused on the trainer’s role and how initiatives towards teachers should be conducted. Others focused on the teachers’ role in engaging in professional development. All of them were truly interesting and added new insights to my knowledge on the topic.  However, one specific talk called my attention, for , besides being related to novice teachers, the ones I’m closer to at our institution, it addressed the teachers’  and the trainers’ perspectives.

The talk conducted by Dr. Liz England, from Shenandoah University in Virginia, revolved around an experience she had gone through when organizing and delivering a sixteen-hour orientation program for novice professionals as English Teaching Assistants – ETAs -  at the start of their programs. The group of novice teachers had just gotten their BAs in different fields and most did not have any background in TESOL.  This group of seventy-five professionals accepted the challenge of going to Malaysia to work with groups of kids and teens in primary and secondary schools. 

The first aspect pointed out by Dr. England was related to the beliefs the group of professionals had in the beginning of the training program and, afterwards, how they changed their points of view in such a short period of time. First of all, the group was made up of Americans; therefore, they believed that because of being native speakers, they would face fewer challenges than non-native EFL teachers. Second, they thought that lesson planning wouldn’t be important since they had many activities and nice ideas in mind. And third, they bet they wouldn’t have problems concerning classroom management, for they were nice, young, and cool teachers.

As Dr. England went on describing the instant training program she had been required to deliver and all the challenges she had faced, I started thinking about how I myself sometimes feel when I wish I had a magic formula to give novice teachers to make them feel ready and confident to teach any groups.

For us, teachers and teacher trainers, it’s meaningless to point out all the reasons why a sixteen-hour course will never be enough to prepare a teacher to face the numerous different situations a classroom presents, but, as Dr. England mentioned, if we trainers have little time to help inexperienced teachers, we must make the most it.

After the sixteen-hour orientation program, a survey was conducted to verify how helpful the training was and in what ways it could be improved.  Having already faced the first difficulties in teaching, most of the ETAs pointed out that what they could benefit the most from in the training was related to lesson planning and classroom management, for these were the most challenging aspects of their new experience.

By getting this feedback, I could confirm the idea that despite where novice teachers come from and the particularities of the English language programs they are involved in, the target issues in teacher training are pretty much the same. Thus, I felt really pleased to acknowledge that the training and development opportunities the Casa Thomas Jefferson has offered to novice teachers are in sync with the most updated research conducted in the field of language teaching and training. Also, I reviewed my own passion for the field I’ve chosen to dedicate myself to, and own proud of being part of such a wonderful team of teachers and teacher developers.

TESOL 2014 Educational Snapshots

I could be here focusing on the interesting ideas that I learned from presenters in the TESOL Conference 2014, but by having the snapshots, quick notes I took during some sessions, you  might come across interesting references, links and people that will inspire you. 

Some topics that caught my attention:

Many Intersections Sessions that I attended focused on Mobile Learning. It is noticeable that though we all work in different contexts, the challenges are very similar, lack of infrastructure, difficulties with bandwidth in an ipad rollout program. Teacher training is also in the agenda of every Institution who wants to have a successful program. In my notes, I added some apps and resources that were mentioned. One thing that I missed was more presentations on learning outcomes with a more intensive use of mobile devices. Any qualitative and quantitative differences in the results of students who have been using smartphones/tablets and the ones who are not?

Marsha Chan, in her presentation on how to help students improve their oral communication skills, suggested using Youtube Playlists to help students find relevant content for further practice. At the end of my notes, you can find Marsha´s notes with all the links she mentioned. 

Nick Robinson´s advice and thoughts on the future of ELT publishing really got me hooked. Many interesting points about possibilities for self-publishing and concrete examples already in the market. I had the pleasure to meet Andy Boon (thanks to Nicky Hockly!), one of the authors in a self-publishing/independent project. We were immediately hooked to the story and downloaded the multi-pathways stories available in Kindle. You can learn more about those great interactive stories at http://atama-ii.com . Learn more about Nick Robinson´s ideas at http://www.eltjam.com/  and https://twitter.com/nmkrobinson 

Another excellent presentation that got me with an irresistible thirst for more was one on gamification by Josh Wilson, who focused on the game-like mentality for educators to prepare better, more engaging lessons. Josh´s presentation was much more focused on the strategies and mechanics that we can learn from a game designer mindset to make our students learn in a more enjoyable way, not in the aspects that many consider as the core of a gamified lesson, points and badges. Not at all. Josh consistently mentioned that these are just part of the sum. Here are some key concepts:

Design the experience

Quantify everything (score; progress)

give choices

External pressure

Constant feedback 

Design the context

Imagine your learners as players

In fact, this is an area that I´ve been consistently studying, and two resources that you might want to check, a Google Talk, Smart Gamification: Designing the Player Journey with expert Amy Jo Kim

Also, the book "The Gamification of Learning and Instruction" by Karl Kapp

Another presentation that was very useful, highly intense in terms of ed tech resources we can use in our classrooms was Lea Sobocan´s digital tools session. I´ve just checked her scoop it, which is a true gem: http://www.scoop.it/t/tech-gems-for-teachers 

I could go on and on with my highlights of TESOL 2014, but I´m sure you´ll find your own treasures by exploring my Evernote notes with some great presentations I had the chance to attend. I´d love to know what you found.

Crossposted at http://carlaarena.com/tesol-2014-snapshots

TESOL 2014 - Pronunciation with Obama

I have attended several Tesol Conferences along the years and, since one of my great interests is Phonetics and Phonology, I tend to participate in several presentations on the topic.  To tell you the truth, I have not been happy with what I have previously seen. Presenters have repeatedly used the same activities and strategies to help students overcome their difficulties – minimal pairs, rubber bands, tongue twisters, traditional songs, nursery rhymes, among others.

When I came across the title: Obama as pronunciation Teacher: Using Political Speeches for Suprasegmentals, I was really curious about how the presenter would use Obama’s speeches to teach pronunciation.

The presenter’s objective was to make clear how essential pauses, stress and intonation in sentences are to accurate pronunciation. Her point was to provide students with effective models to help them successfully use suprasegmentals when they use the English language. The presenter, Mary Rommey from the University of Connecticut, used Obama’s political speeches as examples.

She offered a six-month course at the University of Connecticut for candidates as Teaching Assistants for whom English was not  their native language. She conducted a pre test and a post test with these candidates. She videotaped them when they were talking about familiar topics related to their daily life before and after the course. The results were fascinating ! Students improved a lot regarding pause, rhythm, stress and intonation.

She started by asking students to mark the pauses on transcripts of Obama’s speeches. Then, they watched videos and checked their markings. She explained that he was a convincing speaker because of the pauses he makes. Then she worked with stress and later with intonation. When students received the transcript, they read the speech first, solved vocabulary doubts, and asked about content. She made sure the text was grammatically transparent and that the meaning was clear to all students. 

The presenter’s objective was to show that suprasegmental aspects influence communication and that the speaker has to be intelligible to communicate effectively.

Lúcia Santos

TESOL 2014 - How Wide is the World of Pronunciation?

With every year that passes, TESOL is acquiring a more egalitarian personality and is more dedicated to the recognition of the various purposes for English teaching, the broad spectrum of ownerships of the somewhat organically mutating language that we know as English, the ways in which this language unites many different collectives around the world. That’s a long sentence; in a way, it tries to convey the scope of the conference we attended and the direction it took. 

Among some of the teaching concerns being approached along refreshing new lines is pronunciation. With the acceptance of the nature of English as a multi-communicative connector, the influence of pronunciation is also shifting slightly in intent and interpretation. In previous conferences, I have attended several sessions dedicated to a focus on pronunciation as having a form of purifying influence on the production of English, creating exercises and games to attend to the oral exactness of the “th”, the shaping of vowel sounds, the oddly difficult combination of “orld” in “world”, etc. Attention to pronunciation more recently is not related to what, in the past, were common references like “standard American English”, “standard collegiate English”, etc. After all, what is “standard” in South Carolina is not necessarily standard in Oregon or Nevada, and the “college” in question might be in Sidney, Glasgow, London, New york, or somewhere in South Africa or India. 

Twenty speakers in different locations around the world might give surprisingly different renditions of the following sentence: “I hurt myself working on the hood of the car in the late half of the day.” What is definitely a priority concern is the intelligibility of the message, the immediacy of its power to communicate; this concept broadens the scope of how to regard pronunciation and its effective connection  – for better or for worse – to the result of an attempt at general communication.

One of the sessions I attended took me momentarily back to a bus tour that I took some years ago in Scotland.  I was sitting right behind the bus driver and happy to be receiver of many side comments he made during the trip; one of these remarks was offered to describe what a large number of laborers were doing on the road at almost dusk…the driver said they were walking/working on the road, and in my interpretation of the driver’s tone, neither activity was appropriate for that time of day. The problem was one involving accent; I couldn’t for the life of me determine (even upon further inquiry) whether those people were “walking” or “working”, because of the pronunciation of the vowel in the main verb….and no amount of repetition on the driver’s part shed any definitive light on the subject. I finally decided that those men just shouldn’t be on the road doing anything and would be better off at some nearby pub. End of subject. 

Fortunately, the subject of pronunciation has not ended, and this conference was an example of the variety of views that are developing with regard to the influence of pronunciation on communication and to how general is the acceptance that the “native English speaker” is not “the” norm, but - instead – just one of them.            

Katy Cox

TESOL 2014 Highlights

Participating in International conferences is an amazing opportunity to network and see what is going on in the world concerning education. This was my first time as a presenter but my second time as a TESOLER. And I can say this was a great chance of seeing how Casa Teachers are avant garde in so many areas! People stop us when they see we belong to the Casa and anxiously ask us when our presentation is going to be once they are used to attending them and always learning something new, creative and interesting! It's a pleasure to work in such a well recognized bi-national center!
Also, I am the incoming EFL -IS chair elect (2014/2015) of TESOL and this was a totally different experience and I have to confess I was kind of frightened. I didn't know what I was going to do... But I must say that keeping in touch with the EFL community from all over the world is rewarding and enriching.
All in all, sharing is of great relevance and I am sure I myself benefited a lot not only as a professional but also as a person; and my students will consequently profit from my experiences.

          by  Carol Barreto

The Art of Designing eTasks

There are at least two different ways to help teachers who are designing iPad activities with students to evaluate the tasks they create. The  SAMR  model helps a  teacher/task designer become aware of what stage the task falls into in terms of the use of tech.  The Bloom Taxonomy applied to apps helps teachers think about the kind of questions we ask students and how we should vary the tasks we offer. By delivering the workshop From Image to Deep Learning, I started to understand that  teachers can also look into the learning cycle as a whole, and how the human learning brain works to promote deep learning. The ideas I share here were inspired by the book The Art of Changing the Brain, which is a must read for any educator willing to take a look into the biology behind learning.

In the workshop, I asked the audience how to teach questions with does to teens, and develop tasks having the learning cycle in mind. After a quick debriefing, I showed a simple iPad activity I carried out in class of 11-year-olds, talked about my take in the lesson, and expanded on why I think this task pleases the learning brain. Now, I post my ideas here to help me reflect on my practice, having the learning cycle described in the aforementioned book in mind.

I showed students a quiz about a famous person I knew they would be interested in. Students took the quiz, and I inductively helped them notice how to make questions about a third person`s likes and dislikes. Then, I asked them to gather information about a celebrity they follow to make a quiz of their own.
I was afraid that I`d have no pictures to work with on the following class, but to my surprise, students had bought the idea and had pictures and lots of information to work with. I was ready to go, so I set the iPad activity and monitored students. Here is what two pairs produced using a wonderful app called visualize.

In the art of changing the brain, Zull talks about phase 1 - concrete experience. In this phase, there is activity in the sensory cortex, where we receive, gather and begin to process the visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory information. Phase 2 - reflexive observation, seems to describe an activity that takes place in the integrative cortex. It is time to connect sensory images to prior experience in one`s neural network or schemas. In class, passing from phase 1 to phase 2 might take time as learners need to relate new information to what they already know. We cannot rush. We must allow time for thinking/recalling as well as time to reflect upon the learning experience.

In the activity I proposed, my students were exposed to a visually appealing quiz about a person they were genuinely interested in, and took the quiz themselves to find out how much they knew about the person. As I see it, students went through stage one and two of the learning cycle before we started the second part of the activity.

In phase 3 - abstract hypothesizing, the front integrative cortex is at work. Students start to prepare to do something with the recently acquired knowledge. In the iPad activity, I asked students to get the information about their favorite celebrities and start to put it in the format of a quiz for the other students in class. And by asking students to make these quizzes to communicate their recently acquired knowledge, teachers allow students time to test their hypothesis and think. In phase 4 - active testing, students shared their quizzes, and by doing so, provided peers with concrete experiences, so the whole class was back to phase 1. Learning becomes cyclical and on going, and hopefully they will remember the language point long after the day of the test.

In conclusion, instead of asking students to pay attention, it is better when we can engage students in tasks in which they  are supposed to reach outcomes, or ask them to look at the topics from different angles. Instead of sitting still, learners could be asked to move around to see the details. In other words, by making learning more concrete, we might reach concrete outcomes.

Five myths about formative assessment

As I am involved in the planning and execution of a formative assessment system for my institution’s adult course, this is a topic that has been on my radar lately. In fact, my previous post was exactly about a formative oral assessment activity. I was also recently invited to conduct a discussion with a group of Language Arts high school teachers implementing an innovative portfolio system for the assessment of their students’ writing.

This recent and extensive contact with teachers in my institution and our partner high school, both piloting formative assessment systems, has raised my awareness of some common myths about formative assessment:

Myth # 1: Formative assessment cannot result in a numerical grade

It is common for educators to associate summative assessment with numerical grades and formative assessment with qualitative performance descriptors. Actually, it is not the grade or the lack of grade that makes the assessment summative or formative. You can have summative assessment with qualitative descriptors and formative assessment with numerical grades.

What makes an assessment tool summative, be it a test or a performance assessment, is the fact that it is administered at the end of a learning cycle. Examples of summative assessment are final exams and proficiency exams. An oral test with qualitative can-do statements, administered at the end of a course, is summative. Conversely, formative assessment is used to “evaluate students in the process of ‘forming’ their competence and skills with the goal of helping them to continue that growth process” (Brown, 2004, p. 6). A graded test aimed at gauging student’s retention of the course content, followed by re-teaching of the areas students had difficulty with and re-testing, is an example of formative assessment, even if it generated a numerical grade.

Myth # 2: Formative assessment can only be used as an informal assessment tool in more traditional settings

This second myth is the result of the first one. It is believed that because formative assessment cannot result in a numerical grade, systems that rely on numerical grades cannot use formative assessment or can only use it informally.

Some time ago I attended a talk in which the presenter showed various examples of how her institution used formative assessment in its courses. At one point during the presentation I asked her what percentage of her final grading system comprised formative assessment. None! Despite the beautiful work done with formative assessment, such as projects, at the end of the day, what really counted were the tests! Thus, the formative assessment ended up being only informal assessment, the type that “elicits performance without recording results and making fixed judgments about students’ competence” (Brown, ibid, p. 5). With well-developed scoring rubrics, though, encompassing not only the product but also the learning process, these formative assessment tools can generate a grade that can compose the general grading system.

Myth # 3: Multiple-choice and selected response tests are always summative, while performance assessments such as portfolios and projects are always formative

How an assessment tool is used  determines whether it is summative or formative, and not whether it is a test or another type of assessment. . Even a portfolio can be summative if students collect work during a period of time and only receive feedback on it at the end. The same applies to project-based learning. If grades on projects are based on the final product only, with no consideration of the process and no feedback during the execution of the project, then the assessment is only summative. Thus, the use of rubrics per se doesn’t qualify an assessment as formative. It is how the rubrics are used and what they consist of that makes the difference.

On the other hand, as mentioned above, a very traditional multiple-choice test can be formative if it is used to gauge student learning and there is opportunity to take the test again. I remember when I moved to the United States to get my Master’s Degree and had to take a driving test. I failed the theoretical test and was asked to go home, study the items I had gotten wrong, and go back the next day to re-take the test. To my surprise, it was the exact same test. What they wanted was for me to master the content, not to punish or trick me!

Myth # 4: Formative assessment isn’t rigorous enough, so it cannot compose a major part of students’ final grade

We tend to confuse rigor with punishment. Traditionally, rigorous tests and other types of assessments are those that are extremely difficult and that very few students do well on. According to traditional testing theory, a good test is one that discriminates the good and the bad students effectively.

Formative assessment is based on a different logic, or paradigm, one in which it is believed that every student can do well under the right conditions and the right amount of practice. If a student needs to retake a test again and again until he/she masters the content, why not? Formative assessment is for learning, not of learning. Thus, the rigor of formative assessment is of a different nature. Formative assessment is not a funnel that only a few get out of, but rather, it is an inverted funnel, which few may get into at first but all or most will get out of eventually.

Putting together a writing portfolio with multiple drafts of compositions, based on the teacher’s and the peers’ feedback, and writing a reflective piece explaining what one has learned from the experience and how the portfolio portrays growth requires much more critical thinking and agency, and is thus much more rigorous, than merely writing a number of one-shot compositions and receiving a meaningless grade on each one.

Myth # 5: Formative assessment is not realistic because students will have to take summative tests all their lives

Students might have to take summative tests all their school lives, before schools adopt more formative types of assessments. Other than that, how many tests do we really take in life? A university entrance exam (in the case of Brazil)? A foreign language proficiency exam? Or perhaps a public service entrance exam? How many of our students overall will actually take these types of exams, and how frequently? Of course, we do have to prepare students to face high-stakes exams and must include summative assessment in our curriculum, but does it need to be the only type of assessment we use?

With the exceptions mentioned above, most of what we learn in life is assessed formatively. We make a mistake, receive feedback on it, and have the chance to correct our path the next time. I’m in the process of learning how to make risotto. I’m not a good cook at all, so I looked up a recipe that I thought was straightforward enough for me, tried it out with my family, received feedback on it, improved my risotto, and then felt ready to invite some close friends over to try it out. Now that it seems that they, too, liked my risotto, I might be ready to invite other people over, maybe even some friends that cook very well. This sounds more real-life to me!

Reference:

Brown, H.D. (2004). Language assessment – principles and classroom practice. White Plains, NY: Longman.

photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

This is a crossposting from my blog TEFLing