OF NOTE

From the INTESOL Conference in Carmel, IN, on October 21

The Indiana affiliate of the national TESOL organization held its annual conference in Carmel in October. Although the turnout may have been slightly impacted by heavy rain and fall breaks in several school districts around the state, many ESL teachers, district coordinators, and school administrators were in attendance.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Annela Teemant, the newly appointed managing director of the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) at the University of California, Berkeley. The ESL endorsement program for mainstream teachers at Brigham Young University, which she helped design and implement, although different from the ICP and TACIT programs, requires interdisciplinary academic collaboration that parallels the collaborative efforts of our participants.
 

Dr. Teemant shared from her first-hand experiences collaborating with over 100 university and public school colleagues who have been seeking positive avenues of change for language minority students in public school settings. With humor and insight, she shared some of the many lessons she has learned about collaboration and ESL pedagogy gleaned from her teaching and research. As an advocate for students and highly effective teachers, Dr. Teemant straightforwardly examined with us the politics, pragmatics, and potential of changes in our field.

Dr. Thomas A. Upton, from IUPUI, discussed the need to support Indiana’s growing numbers of ESL students in both language and content areas in his presentation “Research-based Sheltered Instruction: An Overview of the SIOP Model. The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), which ICP teachers are introduced to in their first course with us, provides a framework for teachers to better support English language learners (ELLs) in their classrooms. Dr. Upton began his presentation by having participants view a brief classroom activity on video and rate the teacher’s performance on a SIOP assessment. Amazingly, Dr. Upton then discussed the eight components of the SIOP model providing a quick overview in the 25 minutes provided for presentations.

A highlight of the conference for us was the session by ICP alum, Erin Harvey Brown, who energized her audience with “Making English Fun,” where she presented clever and practical games that encourage English language learning. After divulging many of her own secrets, Erin turned things over to the audience, whom she asked to share games or activities that they have used in their classrooms. Her session proved to be very positive and left her audience with dozens of new ideas to implement with their students. Thanks, Erin, you made us proud!