TESOL 2010

For anyone who checked in with this blog last night or today, please know that this is the first opportunity I have had to get online. Today was the first ever K-12 Dream Day at TESOL. I saw lots of Maine folks. Bumped into a contingent from Sanford coming out of the Howard Gardner plenary. Was sitting next to an empty aisle seat in an earlier session when Grace Valenzuela breezed into it. I had to nudge her to recognition. It’s a lot of fun to see people and reminds me of the professional loneliness a lot of ESL teachers feel.
Meanwhile, I have been to some fantastic presentations. The first was this morning and was entitled Becoming Pedagogical leaders for Transformation. The presenter, Annela Treemant, was very dynamic and articulate. Dr. Treemant is at Purdue University in Indianapolis and has set about transforming the way ELL education occurs in mainstream classrooms. She describes the traditional mainstream content classroom as a cemetery where the inhabitants are by definition mute. Her aim is to breathe life into that situation. She works with eight principles devised by CREDE and her short –term goal is to get the teacher to implement three of them. She advocates centers at all levels and sustained engagement with literacy activities, which is a message I heard all day. It was a great presentation and I would like to hear from her again.

Then I moved into a room where some people from Boston college were discussing their research project regarding RTI and ELLs. They worked with several Boston K-5 schools and tried to find out if RTI were working with the ELL population. They described a three-tiered approach with universal screening three times a year using DIBELS at Tier One. From that Tiers Two and Three were identified. Tier Two students received targeted intervention through centers in mainstream classrooms with ELL and literacy specialists pushing in and monthly progress monitoring. Tier Three students received one-on-one with weekly monitoring. A n interesting outcome after two years was that ELLs who had been previously identified LD made the same progress as ELLs never identified, indicating that they never should have been identified.
After a hurried chicken Caesar with Grace Valenzuela,, Ruth Dater and Sue Chevalier, I raced back to catch Jim Cummins. I have always loved his combination boyish looks, Irish-Canadian accent, and radical ideas. He outlined how educational policy decisions are at odds with the research and elicited some heated political comments from the audience.
I was very happy in the afternoon to attend a wonderful hands-on book binding workshop. The presenter was incredibly charming and we actually made at least five small books that we can duplicate in the classroom. After so much time in your head that sort of workshop can be really refreshing. It was a lot of fun!

The day was not over until 7:00, when Howard Gardner finished his plenary. It was all I could do to get myself there, but was it ever worth it!!!! Dr. Gardner presented his new project, which is entitled something like Five Minds for the Future. These are not intelligences, he stressed, but policy matters. The first three are Discipline (learning something well), Synthesis (so much information out there now it needs this), and Creativity. These comprise “the box” as in thinking “out of the box”. Numbers four and five are out of the box. They are Respect and Ethical Behavior. I know I cannot do this justice here, but it was very inspiring and he made a wonderful case for why these habits of mind are crucial in a digital age. I am really glad I was there.
It is now almost 11:30 and I have to stop. Eli Hinkel speaks at 7:30. See you tomorrow-Linda