2023

Presenter: Carl Slater, FullBloom    

While nobody likes making errors, especially in public, adult education practitioners and their students must make peace with them—or better yet even welcome errors as part of the learning process. Creating a miscue-friendly classroom not only cultivates expert learners through critical thinking and problem-solving development, but also encourages self-reflection necessary for social-emotional health. In this workshop, we will share best practices within ABE/ESOL instruction that nurture errors into positive learning moments. Participants will engage with activities, from both teacher and student perspectives, focusing on problem-solving processes which tend to diminish when fear is activated in the brain. Participants will use a collaborative Jamboard or Padlet to contribute sample praises and declarative sentence stems that engage students in learning. Participants will take away a summary of instructional strategies and a curated list of gamification tools. 

Category: ALL (BE, ESL Literacy, ESOL, Family Literacy, HSE, Civics) 

Presenter: Rhonda E. Harrison, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

The purpose of this workshop is to demonstrate how learners’ career goal topics can be integrated more deeply into an academic classroom. After a PowerPoint presentation, we will start the conversation with the premise that one’s career/educational pathway is a process of discovery. We’ll share our own career discovery processes and talk about specific strategies and activities which can be used to help students identify their own career interests and career pathways. This will help students understand that lifelong learning is one of the keys to career success. Participants will take away a list of career goal-related resources that they can use in their classrooms and share with students. 

Category: BE, ESOL, Family Literacy, HSE, Civics, Instructional Technology

Presenter: Madeline Cohen, Symphony Space/All Write!

Using a poem ("Word Collection," by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater) that employs funny-sounding, but real, words, and the concept of lists as creative writing, participants will contribute their own favorite words, sound out the words of the poem, examine its structure, and finally write their own fun, funny, and fun-sounding poems. The goal of this workshop is, honestly, fun with language, as well as practicing hearing and saying wonderful words in a way that emphasizes meaning. Suggestions and discussion for doing this for in-person classes will be included.

Category: Creative Writing; ALL (BE, ESL Literacy, ESOL, Family Literacy, HSE)

Presenters: Susan Knott, Brooklyn Public Library

Building a community of learners in our classrooms and using that community to enhance student learning is a worthwhile and common goal, but it’s not always obvious how to make this happen in in-person and virtual classrooms. During this workshop, participants will work with Fisher and Frey’s Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) instructional framework to intentionally weave student-to-student collaborations into our lessons. Using Zoom’s breakout rooms, shared Google documents, and a sample writing lesson, we will practice the GRR framework. With these interactive activities, a three-minute video, and participant discussions, together we will explore how we can and do use student collaborations as we strive to guide each learner toward autonomy and ownership of their learning.

Category: BE, HSE

Presenters: Sara Z. Gutting, Sara Z. Gutting, LLC; Dan Helms, ProLiteracy/New Readers Press

The four components, alphabetics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, are essential in teaching reading. In this interactive workshop, participants will practice activities that help promote fluency, such as duet reading, phrasing, and pencil tracking, to help students become more fluent. Without fluency there isn’t comprehension, so this is an important first step. The Reading Skills Builder tool, my favorite in my class, provides structure for any reading material and is a great way to help differentiate any classroom and promote comprehension. Participants will learn how to use the Reading Skills Builder in their class with any reading material by working through the steps with me. We will also practice using Webb's Depth of Knowledge and learn how this can be used with any reading material to enhance learning, understanding and mastery. We end the workshop by discussing and demonstrating how all of this can be used to differentiate the classroom. Participants will walk away with ready-to-use activities for any adult education classroom.

Category: BE, HSE

Presenters: Yasmine Marie Garay, NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, The Literacy Review; Allyson Paty, Gallatin Writing Program

What is “home”? Is it a place? A person? What does it feel, sound, smell, and look like? This workshop presents participants with works that represent “home” to their writers and introduces methods for bringing one’s own associations to life for a reader. Using word-association activities, discussion questions, and writing prompts, participants learn strategies for guiding students to draw on memory and imagination in order to use sensory language and practice approaching an abstract topic through concrete examples. Participants receive a collection of writing published in recent volumes of The Literacy Review for use in their classes.

Category: BE, ESOL Intermediate and higher

Presenters: Uma T. Mohanty and Sierra Stoneman-Bell, Literacy Assistance Center

Are you interested in learning how your students can participate in a citywide adult education student stories project? Listen Up for Literacy & Justice is an audio-story project which lifts up the experiences of adult education students and alumni across NYC and the impact of adult education in their lives and communities. This workshop will demonstrate how students can record and share their Listen Up stories. Workshop participants will exchange ideas about how the project can be integrated into lessons about digital storytelling, personal narratives, or social justice. Listen Up is a project of the Literacy Assistance Center and its Literacy & Justice Initiative.

Category: All (BE, ESL Literacy, ESOL, Family Literacy, HSE, Civics, Instructional Technology)

Presenter: Lori Sbordone, Catholic Charities of New York International Center

For those looking for a game for beginning English learners that is relatively easy to play on a small screen, Flippity is exactly what you are looking for. This little app makes it easy to adapt many tried-and-true strategies for use online. It’s extremely flexible, can be easy to set up in less than thirty minutes, and best of all, it's free, requiring no login, no password, and no trial membership. All you need to start playing or creating games is a Google ID. In this workshop, we will dip into the menu of possibilities; then, participants will be introduced to 5-6 of the "games" I have found to be the most useful with my students. Participants will learn the basic moves of copying and adapting the Flippity templates, adapting them to fit their purpose, and creating a link to share with their classes. I will share some of my strategies for using these to assess and extend learning, but I am mostly looking forward to hearing how you are bringing games into your classes. Time and space will be left to share ideas.

Attendees are requested to bring a list of 16 vocabulary words they would like to create games with for their Level 1 students.

Category: ESOL, Instructional Technology

Presenters: Nina Triplo and Julian Colón, NYU Steinhardt

Verbs are an essential part of language; however, they can be tricky. There's a difference between “look up” as a physical action and to “look up” an address on the internet. English language learners will often hear these verbs in different contexts and think they share the same meaning. Consequently, these verbs are difficult for English language learners to comprehend and use. This workshop delves into why these verbs are so tricky for ELLs to understand and presents lesson activities for meeting these challenges while expanding the lexicon of learners, leading to more interesting verb choices, the use of critical thinking, and greater language inclusivity among their peers.

Category: ESL Literacy, ESOL

Presenters: Missy Watson, Marcelis Elizabeth Campo, Gloria Nguyen, Erkinaz Shuminov, and Sunny Talero (presenters), Ana Guerrero, Danny Katch, Tessa Miller, Anna-Kay Rose (discussion leaders), City College of New York, CUNY

Teachers in and beyond NYC are eager for opportunities to learn about and practice adopting more antiracist and decolonial approaches to teaching English language and writing. This workshop provides space and guidance to begin this work. Workshop facilitators will summarize some of the key concepts informing antiracist and decolonial pedagogies for participants. Participants will then be afforded ample time to practice applying these analytical concepts, brainstorming new pedagogical materials and classroom teaching practices.

Category: BE, ESOL

Presenters: Javid Buchanan and Jennifer Hartzel, Adult Learning Center, Lehman College, City University of New York

In this workshop teachers will learn how to use Jean Michel Basquiat’s work to support argumentative essay writing. Participating teachers will explore ways that Basquiat uses words/images in his art to make bold claims that can be used to encourage a lively classroom discussion and/or debate. In this art-infused workshop, participants will also learn how to create visual writing prompts that can be used to help adult learners identify main ideas, compare and contrast, and form arguments based on evidence provided in Basquiat's work. By the end of our presentation we hope to leave workshop participants with an understanding that using visual art to support writing instruction allows students to incorporate creative processes in their essays more effectively.

Category: BE, HSE

Presenters: Reginald Garner and Lisa Baines, Buffalo Public Schools

The Game is a board game that uses narratives of the past journey of people (mentors) who are currently successful. It is used to help students strengthen their decision-making skills and both critically evaluate and navigate life choices that can impact student success. It allows for qualitative learning in a mentor-based approach. After two or three rounds of "play" students will be asked to join in and be given an opportunity to state their opinions about the mentors' responses and/or give instances when they made similar decisions in their past, something they are currently experiencing, or what decision they would make in the future. The goal is to have only the students play a subsequent round or two using the experiences of the mentors in framing (or not) the mentors' responses. The presenters will demonstrate the game and then share it with participants, who can use it in their own classes.

Category: HSE, Career Decision

Presenter: Mary Carpenter, New York University

For learning to take place, students need to know that their ideas are honored and their goals understood. Teachers need to create meaningful and inviting learning experiences for their students, and this requires interpersonal communication between students and teachers. In a sense, a strictly teacher-centered curriculum often communicates that students are not important as individuals. Adults come with experience and ideas. When students feel if they are not being understood and given the opportunity to speak out, they often stop learning. Strategies and activities, such as distributing and sharing “I feel” questionnaire, and a culminating discussion of a popular quote by Mark Van Doren that “the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery…” will be shared and explored to activate opinions, needs, goals, diverse perspectives, and cultural experiences.

Category: BE, ESOL

Presenter: Leah Clay-Youman, City University of New York

Our elected officials represent all of us, regardless of immigration status. This workshop will introduce six lessons for ESOL high beginning-level students centered around the powerful We Speak NYC episode “Shola’s Voice.” Students explore the terms "issues" and "matters" to discuss issues of importance to them and their communities. They then delve into topics such as: What are the levels of government? Who are my representatives at the various levels? How can they help me? The lessons were developed for a virtual class but can be easily adapted for use in-person.

Category: ESOL, Civics

We Speak NYC is New York City’s very own ESOL/Civics drama series, with content relevant to the big tent of adult learners and educators—immigrant and non-immigrant alike. BE/HSE instructors will find topics which can be integrated into math, science, social studies, reading, and writing lessons.

This year, we will be launching a new season of episodes on the linked themes of democracy, sustainability, health care and housing. In this plenary, we will present clips from dramatic, humorous, and inspiring new episodes, and share ideas on how they can be used to empower and enhance the learning that takes place in both ESOL and ABE classes.