Sunday, October 28, 2007

Welcome Back

As you heard from President Deegan in his email sent around on Friday afternoon, most of the college was going to re-open tomorrow. The final decision came earlier this afternoon confirming that starting tomorrow (10/29), all Palomar sites will resume operations except Ramona, which will re-open on Tuesday, and Fallbrook, which will re-open on Wednesday.

This has been a very difficult week for everyone in our district, and our department is no exception. Starley Dullien, who teaches in the night General ESL Program in San Marcos, lost her Ramona home to the devastating fires. Many of you had to evacuate. Many more have spent this weekend cleaning up the ash and soot.

The extent to which our ESL students were affected by the fires will become known once classes resume. Please keep in mind that Counseling Services, Health Services, and the Office of Student Affairs all have plans to provide for the needs of impacted students. As we go back to a heavy workload, Vice President of Instruction Berta Curon wants us to be flexible and sensitive and "create an environment that will be crucial to assisting and supporting all students through the end of the semester, but particularly those who have been displaced from their homes and have experienced loss."

As with any natural disaster, the wildfires this week truly brought out the best in all of us. I was heartened by the caring ways that each of you displayed during this emergency. Via emails and phone calls, colleagues inquired about each other's situations, provided updates, and offered help. Some, like Kevin Staff, who teaches in the night General ESL Program in San Marcos, even volunteered at various community centers for evacuated families and their children. Some kept their instruction going by receiving student papers and giving assignments through email and the Blackboard online course site.

Students cared about their ESL teachers, too. Many emailed their teachers to ask how they were doing. Joyce Rogers, who teaches in Fallbrook, accepted an offer from a former Vietnamese student to stay with her after the Great Fallbrook Evacuation. And Joyce had her like 10 years ago!

The union leadership on Tuesday and the college administration on Friday both responded positively to a legitimate concern of many adjunct colleagues: a possible loss of wages and salary. According to President Deegan's email this Friday, "We want to assure you that all District employees will be compensated for their assigned work schedule during the time in which the college and/or education center/sites is closed."

So, it is in this caring and supportive community spirit that I gladly welcome you back to work, albeit starting on various days depending on your work site. But remember that special arrangements will be made for leaves needed to recover from the fires. If you need such assistance, please let your coordinator or supervisor know. I am also available via email or at ext. 2273.

Monday, October 22, 2007

A Conference Report (depite the Fires)

This past weekend was a fun one (until the fires broke out, of course). Part of the fun was due to San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference that took place on a beautiful day and on the gorgeous campus of Southwestern College. In addition to running into old friends and making new ones, I really enjoyed the company of like-minded educators. I managed to make it to a few presentations and am excited to report the ideas I learned or relearned.

Keynote: Learning IN English: Content-Based Instruction

The plenary speaker was Professor Frank Noji of Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he spearheaded a content-based ESL curriculum revolving around a different theme for each semester, not unlike themes for Palomar College’s Campus Exploration. The innovation was born out of a need ten years ago to save the ESL Dept. because it would have been wiped out along with a forced disappearance of other college remedial courses. Frank argued that “ESL ≠ remedial” and created the content-based program to prove it. Over the years, Frank and his colleagues have been successful in shifting their model from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” The purpose of their syllabi is now aligned with those of mainstream courses, aiming for a rooted relevance. That is, they link the skills learned in the ESL classroom to the college courses the students will soon take. Instead of “finding the topic sentence” and other easy-to-assess comprehension questions, they now utilize writings, seminars, and poster sessions to gauge the comprehension of a topic at hand. Instead of spending much time explaining why a main idea is a main idea, they now require getting information from a text and using that to complete a task. The thematic input now drives the instruction of grammar and vocabulary, both of which are in turn practiced in writing tasks. Frank reported that the purposefulness in such integrated content-based instruction has enabled the students to converge on similar cultural literacy, reduce the noise in reading texts, and navigate reading more easily. Even though I wonder if the students won’t become bored by an extended theme throughout a long semester (for example, the historical perspective of food, the psychological perspective of food, the nutritional perspective of food, the culinary perspective of food, the cultural perspective of food, etc., etc.), I am nonetheless very impressed by Frank’s approach to the overriding goal of having ESL students become savvy language learners.

A few interesting facts in Frank’s ESL Dept.:
  • about 700 students, 50% of whom are international students, 30% Gen 1.5 students, and 20% immigrants
  • each faculty member takes 3 to 5 Gen 1.5 students under his/her wing to advise them
  • reading as the central part of the ESL classroom

Learning English through WebQuest

Although I was familiar with WebQuest, I had not created one for my students. So I decided to check out this workshop provided by graduate student Yi-Chia Lin of Alliant International University. Sure enough, she reviewed the usual five basic sections of a WebQuest:

  1. introduction
  2. task
  3. process
  4. evaluation
  5. conclusion

I learned about four websites one can go to create WebQuests:

  1. QuestGarden (http://questgarden.com/, fee-based with 30-day free trial)
  2. InstantWebQuestV2 (http://www.zunal.com/, free)
  3. TeacherWeb (http://teacherweb.com/wq_home.html, free)
  4. PHPWebQuest (http://eduforge.org/projects/phpwebquest/, free)

Writing Peer Evaluation with Google Documents

Also facilitated by Ms. Yi-Chia Lin, this workshop introduced the Google Documents online that can be used by writing teachers who don’t want to spend much time doing peer review in class. Here are the major steps:

  1. open a free Google account at http://www.gmail.com/
  2. go to “Documents” from within the Google account
  3. click to upload students’ writing
  4. click to share students’ writing
  5. type students’ email addresses
  6. type a message to students

Students will then receive the email from you with a link. As a peer reviewer, the student will click “Indent more” and type his or her answers in the box. You as the teacher can click “Insert” and choose “Comment” to comment on the peer reviewer’s comment.

Based on my limited hands-on experience during this workshop, I would suggest not assigning a group of larger than 5 members to review one paper, especially not having them access the paper at the same time. The way Google Documents handled the roomful of participants, it still looked like a Beta version.

TELL-IG


During lunch, I sat on the table that was supposed to the meeting place for the Technology Enhanced Language Learning Interest Group (TELL-IG) Rap Session. The prepared agenda was abandoned due to the noise level in the large dining hall. However, I did learn that TELI-IG now has a new website at http://www.tellig.org/, along with its listserv at http://lists.catesol.org/read/?forum=tell-ig and its discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/tell-ig.

Take Action! 20 Minute Problem Solving

Too often, we complain without taking any action. Four ESL teachers gave a poster presentation about a useful solution called “NAB IT,” an acronym of the following steps:

Name (put a name to the problem)
Analyze the problem (causes, effects)
Brainstorm solutions (no judging)
Identify two solutions to try &
Think them through (set a date to report back)

Once a week for 20 minutes, groups of five students can form problem-solving circles, where each member plays a distinct role: a problem poser, a leader, a timekeeper, a facilitator, and a record keeper.

Simple Strategies for Effective and Authentic Writing Assessments

Jan Forstrom of Continuing Education of San Diego CCD presented ways to give effective and authentic writing assessments to her adult ed students. To be effective, a writing task cannot be on just any topic and must be appropriate to the student level. To be authentic means that the writing task can be replicated outside of the classroom, not just one that asks to describe something in the classroom, for example. Effective writing assessments also need to be fair. For example, “Christmas around the World” is not free of bias, so it is not fair. In short, writing assessments need to be meaningful to the students so that they want to communicate. In addition, clear, exact directions must be given either orally or in writing. The most important step in creating writing assessments, however, is choosing measurable objectives to develop a rubric to determine how all of our students are to be graded. The rubric is what enables our ESL students to receive meaningful feedback. A rubric covers form, content, and language. For example, for form/mechanics, we can have—

For content, we might have the following:

  • 90% correctly completed as instructed =12 points
  • 80% 10 points
  • 70% 8 points
  • 60% 6 points
  • 50% 4 points
  • Less than 50% 0 points

For language, we may use something like this: Once we have a specific rubric developed to assess the form, content, and language for a particular paper, even the students can grade each other’s papers, knowing what circling a certain point means. Here is an example of a grading form for a two-paragraph essay:

There is always an amount of subjectivity associated with grading a written piece. But Jan suggested that when in doubt, teachers give the student the point; that way, we can help to build their confidence in writing.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

CATESOL 2007 San Diego Regional Conference

The third Saturday in October has been one of my favorite days of the year because it is a day of professional rejuvenation for me. I am talking about the day for our annual San Diego Regional CATESOL Conference. This year, the day is just around the corner, namely, this Saturday, 10/20.

The theme for this year's conference is "Learning IN English: Content-Based Instruction." The keynote speaker is Frank Noji, a professor at Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he teaches and coordinates the ESOL program. Presently, he is serving as chair of the Languages, Linguistics and Literature Department at Kapiolani Community College and is responsible for developing an ESL teacher-training certificate program. He taught in the Philippines and Japan as well as in public middle school and high school in Hawaii. He designed and developed the sustained content program in 1997 for Kapiolani Community College. Since 1997, he has done classroom-oriented research to make modifications on the curriculum. Recently, he has introduced the Opportunities model to the program and is presently introducing purposefulness into content-based instruction.

If you wish to network, to check out promising summer textbooks, and/or to learn new strategies and innovative ideas for your classroom, then you will do no wrong by heading down to Southwestern College in Chula Vista this Saturday and spending a fruitful day there.

Click here for the conference flyer with the day's schedule. Click here for a partial list of the presentations.

Hope to see you all at the conference!

Monday, October 8, 2007

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes

It’s hard to believe that we’re at the midpoint of the semester already. Are we clear if we are effecting significant academic gains? To find out, many colleagues will give a midterm exam soon, especially if they have not given more frequent assessments in the form of weekly tests or biweekly writing assignments, for example.

Indeed, student learning outcomes are a big deal not only for individuals’ continuous improvement, but also for our college’s accreditation. For example, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) recently required that our college respond to the relevant ACCJC 2002 Standards by quantifying how our courses and programs have done all of the following:

1. define expected student learning outcomes
2. define assessment of expected student learning outcomes
3. assess student learning outcomes
4. analyze the results of assessment
5. plan and implement changes to pedagogy, facilities, etc. to improve learning

Under the leadership of Marty Furch, all of the courses in our dept. have defined expected student learning outcomes (i.e. “specific course objectives” in the course outline). You can access the CurricUnet and do a course search to see these objectives for yourself. We have also identified appropriate assessment methodologies for these outcomes in our course outlines. Full-time contract instructors have worked together to update the course outlines for the six levels of the courses in our general ESL program. Teachers in the 4:30 and 7 p.m. general ESL programs in San Marcos have been working hard to revise their grammar exit tests as a way to measure part of the student learning outcomes. Although our dept. as a whole may still need to do more of the components #4 and #5 above, I am sure that as individual teachers, many colleagues have taken these steps to reflect on the results of a class assessment and to change their own approach to teaching when appropriate.

If you have a savvy tip that makes student assessment meaningful, email it to me or just enter your entry as a comment to leave below.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Another grammar question?

Thanks to those of you who've talked to me about RAIN and to Lee for his nicely documented written response. As Lee accurately points out, many of these "grammar" issues are really usage questions, and I have another such issue.

When writing a bunch of test questions where students were supposed to respond with either the simply present tense or the present progressive, I wrote the following two sentences.

1a Albertson's ____________________________ (sell) many kinds of food.

1b This week-end, they _____________________ (sell) hamburgers outside.

It wasn't until I'd handed out the papers that I realized that I'd switched from a singular noun to a plural pronoun, yet even after re-reading the sentences several times, I could not refer to Albertson's as an "it" in the second sentence. Nonetheless, I had expected students to use the 3rd person singular form of the verb in sentence 1a.

Comments?