Liz Knauer: Equitable Teaching Practices for Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classrooms
The purpose of this workshop is to help professors reflect on their teaching practices to find ways to more successfully communicate with all students, and especially non-traditional students who are English language learners or new to US academia. We will explore some common classroom practices and discuss some of the often unacknowledged cultural assumptions that guide US teaching practices. The workshop will offer strategies for making these cultural practices more explicit and transparent in order to clarify expectations to all students and empower them to fully participate in classroom activities. The workshop will also offer tools for critical self-reflection–an important component to equitable teaching practices.
Experimenting with Critique Format for Better Student Participation
Traditional group critiques can be intimidating for English Language Learners (and native speakers as well!). Some students have less experience in expressing their ideas to a group or may be naturally more shy than others, and others may simply not understand fully why they need to speak up. Their inability to participate may cause them to get lower grades or to tune out during important discussions.
In this workshop I’d like to discuss strategies for varying critique format with the goal of increasing participation. I’ll share some activities that I’ve used to scaffold critiques through writing and pair and small group work. I also would like to hear from others about what they’ve done in the classroom to change up critique format and build social confidence.
Using Checklists, Peer Review and Rubrics: Smoothing the Waves for English Language Learners
When it comes to fulfilling the expectations of an assignment, English language learners can often find themselves at sea. Following assignment details to-the-letter can be leave students out of their depth, especially when some instructions are implicit. Asking for help from a teacher or peer can be a nerve-racking experience that occasionally sows even further confusion. In this workshop, teachers will review current methodologies in the creation of assignment details, and how to use checklists, peer review and rubrics to enhance student performance.
Thomas Healy: What do we Expect When Giving Reading Assignments?
This session explores teachers’ pedagogical reasoning with regard to reading assignments. Do we expect too much of learners when we give them a reading assignment? Have we made the goal of the activity and our expecta-tions explicit to learners? How sure are we that our students actually have the reading skills and strategies to handle the assignment successfully? How do we evaluate the outcome of a reading assignment? How do we give feedback and help students develop their skills? Alternatively, are we expecting too little when we give reading assignments? For example, can we help students acquire discipline-specific vocabulary through reading? Similarly, can we expect students to improve their academic writing? In this session, we will look at ways in which we can make the outcomes of reading assignments more successful by making the goals more explicit. We will examine examples of how reading texts can be scaffolded so that learners can handle academic texts more successfully. We will also look at ways in which they can develop their academic writing skills and discipline-specific vocabulary by analyzing the texts we assign.
Darleen Lev: “SOURCE COLLAGE”: Fostering Transparency in the ESL Research Paper Process
The aim of this presentation/workshop is to foster a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by international students in terms of using and writing about outside sources, as well as how to identify plagiarism in their work. It introduces the “Source Collage,” a multi-assessment step in the process of ensuring a non-plagiarized research paper. Part outline, part paraphrasing sampler, the “Source Collage” emphasizes the ESL writer’s responsibility to accurately recognize, rephrase, and respond to outside sources. The title “Source Collage” illustrates the concept of synthesizing sources into the student’s own original essay. What inspired the “Source Collage”, how it clarifies the process of writing research and prevents plagiarism would be discussed. A sample “Source Collage” would be presented for attendees to evaluate, highlighting the various skills the assignment practices.
Credits to Nancy Seidler (Director, IEP & CEP)