Workshop & Webshop Offerings
The following professional learning opportunities can be offered in-person, virtually, or as a hybrid session.
Fusing Literacies
(aka Opening Digital Doors)
In the first quarter of our century, digital literacy and traditional literacy are inextricably woven together, creating a complex tapestry of communication. For the multilingual learner, being digitally fluent is a necessity on par with mastering listening, speaking, reading, and writing in English. This overview session provides an introduction to transferable techniques and routines to help learners simultaneously build their English language skills while acquiring foundational digital skills, practice online communication skills, build digital literacy, and develop digital resilience. By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
• determine the role of digital literacy and digital resilience in their learners’ lives
• identify 4 ways to integrate digital literacy into common ESL instructional routines
• use the framework of content, process, and product to fuse literacies in their classes.
Scaffolds and Differentiation: Building Knowledge & Making a Difference
Working with learner variability factors is a reality in effective English language instruction. These factors go beyond language proficiency levels to include varied backgrounds, goals, interests, etc.. To support all learners in their classes, instructors need to identify and employ a variety of scaffolds and differentiating strategies. By including these strategies in instructional routines, teachers can streamline planning time and focus more on facilitating a learner-centered and learner-directed approach to building content knowledge and language skills.
This session engages participants in a series of exploration, reflection and collaboration tasks that will enable them to
• discriminate between scaffolds & differentiation strategies;
• identify common ways to scaffold instruction;
• explore 3 types of differentiation; and
• determine what types of scaffolding & differentiation might be needed by their adult multilingual learners.
Listening In/Listening Up
Listening well is key to effective communication, but listening can be a barrier for adult English learners–especially if they lack confidence in their listening skills. Providing direct instruction in listening strategies helps English language learners transfer what they do automatically in their first language to their experiences listening to English. In this workshop you’ll experience active and focused listening tasks that allow learners to see immediate results in their community, classroom and workplace interactions.
By the end of the session, you should be able to:
Identify the stages of listening and their correlation to the stages of a listening lesson
Provide learners with active listening practice in person or online
Use a task-based approach to help learners choose and apply various listening strategies
Reading Minds
Close reading and ed tech are well matched. The access to a wide array of texts, the ability to zoom out and zoom in on a text, to “clean up” a webpage, and to use annotation tools on computers and mobile devices are all reasons to embrace reading strategy instruction in the online environment. In this session, teachers explore ways to deliver reading strategy instruction; experience paired and jigsaw reading tasks in person or in breakout rooms with level-appropriate texts; and develop text-dependent questions for a level-appropriate complex text.
Write Away!
Teaching writing in this first quarter of the 21st century has a unique set of benefits and challenges including helping learners use their phones to plan, type drafts, get feedback, and edit their work. In this session, you explore how the stages of the writing process can be addressed using ed tech and a variety of creative work-arounds and a few old-school approaches (pencil and paper anyone?).
Communicate, Cooperate,
COPE!
Teamwork is a required of adults in all aspects of their lives outside the classroom—and with team tasks creating an authentic purpose to engage with the content and language being learned inside the classroom, the integration of cooperative learning and adult education is even more meaningful than it was forty+ years ago.
This workshop/webshop revisits the concepts of cooperative learning through a 21st century lens using ideas from both Kagan and Johnson & Johnson and explores how routines, roles, and rubrics support both teachers and learners in virtual and F2F learning.
ADDITIONAL WORKSHOPS/WEBSHOPS
The Art of Asking Questions
What is the connection between questions & thinking?
In this session, we …
Explore and work with a variety questioning strategies (Early Production, QFT, TDQs, etc.), and
Work with instructional routines that build learners' questioning skills.
Taking Our Teaching to Task
How does Task-based Instruction benefit adult learners?
In this session, we …
Examine the benefits and challenges of a Task-based approach to language instruction, and
Engage with and develop tasks for the English language classroom.
Grappling with the Group Dynamic
How do group dynamics affect team tasks?
In this session, we…
Examine the language of collaboration,
Work with cooperative structures that promote learner agency, and
Problem-solve for challenging group dynamics.
Mastering the Magic & Madness of Multilevel Instruction
What makes multilevel classes both magical & maddening?
In this session, we…
Explore ways to differentiate content, process, and product, and
Engage with routines that provide practice for same- and different-ability groups of learners.
A Lexical Feast: Learner-Centered Vocabulary Lessons
What does vocabulary instruction look like?
In this session, we …
Explore Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLS), and
Engage with routines that integrate VLS into learner-centered instruction.
Complex Visuals Today - Complex Text Tomorrow
Visuals and text complexity: What’s the connection?
In this session, we…
Work with Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and identify their connection to college and career readiness skills, and
Explore ways to use VTS with learners at all levels of language proficiency.
Fostering Learner Agency: Integrating Voice & Choice in the Adult Class
What is the role of learner agency in adult instruction?
In this session, we …
Define and discuss the concept of agency;
Explore ways to foster agency by promoting voice and choice in the learning environment, class content, and assessments; and
Engage with tasks (analog and digital) that foster learner agency.
How’d We Do? Recognizing and Quantifying Progress in the Learner-Centered English Language Class
How do we quantify our learners qualitative work?
In this session, we …
Examine the common terms and concepts related to formative and summative assessment;
Explore ways to quantify and give feedback on proof of learning tasks; and
Work with formative or performance-based assessment tools.
Keeping It Real: Using a Problem-based learning approach to instruction
How does Problem-based learning support contextualized, standards-aligned adult instruction?
In this session, we…
Analyze a problem scenario and engage with the problem-based learning approach;
Examine the skills and language strategies that are part of the approach; and
Plan how to integrate problem-based learning in upcoming lessons or units.
I create new workshops & webshops all the time—based on the needs of the field.
Feel free to click on the “Inquiry” button below if you are interested in a topic you don’t see listed above.
Image Credits: Fusing Literacy Tree: Prompted by JAG and Rendered by Dall-E on ChatGPT 4o; Scaffolding and Differentiating: composited by JAGusing Canva Pro. Brain-Unsplash: David Clode; Zoom class-Pixabay: Mohamed Hassan; Laptop-Unsplash: Alexandra Koch Team pushing arrow-Deposit Photo, Standard License