Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Teaching Seniors but Were Afraid to Ask

Today I received an email from some nice educators at a very good service provider organization in Ontario saying they were toying with the idea of starting a seniors class but had no idea how one would handle PBLA in such a classroom. They wanted to know how I do it. In attempting to compose a response, I realized I have volumes and volumes to share with the world on the topic of teaching seniors. It also crossed my mind that I've been at a loss for what to blog about lately. Thus was born the world's longest blog post about the tiniest ESL niche in history: newcomers to Canada who are over the age of 50.

When I took over the seniors class in 2011, it was eight students, and in the beginning they were all men. Bernie dropped out due to his deafness and a couple joined. Finally we had one woman in the mix. Back in those days, we had a car mechanic, a truck driver, an electrician, a courier, and a ruby diver by trade. Two of the students were still young enough to want to look for work.

Even though he felt too uncomfortable continuing classes with his hearing impairment, Bernie spread the word in his building that I was a good teacher. Very soon, with the government cap of 10 seats for this special demographic, I had a waiting list.

At some point my admin requested two more seats. IRCC approved that, but again I had a waiting list. They asked for three more seats, and today I am allowed up to 15 in the class. That's all the room will hold, anyway. The makeup of the class with regard to average age and background has changed a lot over the years. This was the class in May of 2019. We were headed out on a field trip with our bus passes.

At one point the average age was 73 and my oldest student was 86. The youngest was 69. In more recent years, professions represented have included doctors, a nurse, a pharmacist, many engineers, a chemistry professor, a high school physics teacher, a banker, a vaccine biologist, and the head of a famous hospital specializing in contagious diseases. We often joked that we could open our own clinic.

Seniors are an absolute JOY to teach. They don't arrive late, they arrive early. They look forward to Monday as much as most of us look forward to Friday. They are sassy and funny and brimming with ideas and wisdom to share.

At one point the class makeup was mostly Chinese, and during that time I had a lot of trouble navigating our cultural differences. They were private, formal, and insisted on copying down every single word I wrote on the board. They had difficulty with the concept of a needs assessment or a show of hands to find out how many wanted to go to the computer lab on Fridays and how many didn't. They just did not "get" classroom democracy, as I call it. "You are the teacher," they said. "You decide." I told them that's not how it works in a student-centred model. Finally, after weeks of trying to get everyone to put a hand in the air to show a preference for one option or another during votes, they got it. And when they finally caught on and felt the power they held quite literally in their hands, there was no turning back. They became downright bossy.

Teacher, can you give us a lesson on XXX? The teacher at our last school couldn't explain it. Teacher, can we YYY? Can we go slower? Can we each have a copy of that? Can you make the font bigger? Can we watch a movie? Can you print out all the words to the movie? The list was endless, and I gave them every single thing they asked for and more. About that time my waiting list got even longer.

Here are some tips I've come up with for anyone considering teaching seniors:

Do a series of needs assessments to ensure you are always tailoring the class to their needs: do they even want reading and writing? Grammar? Do they like games or dislike them? Field trips? Guest speakers?

Provide frequent opportunities to get up and stretch; old bodies get stiff quickly.

Ensure your classroom has seating with cushioned seats; old bony bums get sore on plastic chairs.

Make sure all handouts are in 24 pt font or larger.

Keep a box of dollar store reading glasses in a box - various strengths.

Keep a lighted magnifier and other magnifying tools for students to borrow.

Keep the pace very, very, very slow and provide lots of opportunities for reviewing and recycling (John and Chirawibha Sivell's 'Back to the Well' is compatible with seniors' way of learning.

There's no need for PBLA since seniors do not change classes or care about benchmarks.

Teacher of seniors class will need a first aid and CPR certificate and will need to keep it current.

Have the class learn together about the AED in the building and how to use it.

Partner with local agencies who can send in guest speakers on topics such as advanced care planning, how to make a will, etc. (Yes, you may think this is morbid, but you could be surprised how older adults want and need to learn about these things. One of my most successful modules with filed trip was on hospice.)

Expect students to vote to study health A LOT; as they age, they find themselves having to communicate with health specialists more and more. While the family doctor may speak their first language, all the technicians and specialists do not.

Seniors are often on fixed incomes and can be frugal; they like to learn about all free services in the community.

Take lots of field trips to help seniors connect and feel part of the community as well as to learn how to navigate and be part of it.

Explore 'free things to do' in the community: parks, library, art centres; my group took a field trip to discover a free outdoor ping pong table.

Seniors are just as keen as young folks to learn to use an iPad, open a FB account, open an email account, send and save photos of grandchildren, etc. Digital literacy should not be overlooked.

Seniors have a wealth of knowledge to share with others; tap into this for special projects and presentations!

Okay, now for the big question: How did we get out of having to do PBLA? I approached the PBLA lead; at that time she was also site supervisor. I said I thought seniors should not be subjected to PBLA. I was told to submit a proposal in writing. I took my time and poured my heart and brain into it. Permission was granted.

BUT! 

Because my other class was literacy, I was afraid of the professional consequences of completely skipping PBLA with this multilevel class, as that might leave me without the ability to tell a potential future employer that I knew how to "do" PBLA at a level higher than literacy. And so over the past two years we have cherry picked and modified PBLA in a way we --the students and I-- find to be suitable to their way of learning, as follows.

>> We do a needs assessment; I have believed in the importance of doing needs assessments since getting my TESL training, which was long before the advent of PBLA. Even when I was 95% sure I already knew what the learners needed, I did it. Going through the process of consulting them causes them to become more invested, for one thing, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

>> We do learning reflections at the end of each module so that I find out whether their needs were met and so that they can reflect on the language, skills, and knowledge they've gained. Mind you, a module often lasts four times longer with seniors than it might with younger learners. Don't worry about boredom. Remember the six strategies for effective learning. We employ interleaving. That is to say, we may interrupt a three-week module on our LIHN to do some urban foraging then come back again to the module on the LIHN. Three or four weeks on one subject can be broken up nicely through interleaving AND you're increasing the chance of long-term retention to boot!

>> We do use the inventory sheets at the beginning of each skill section. Since the students do not progress to other teachers, we are now on our third or fourth inventory sheet per section, having filled our binders to overflowing several times over. We remove artifacts that are over a year old, but we keep the inventory sheets as a 'cover our asses' insurance policy just in case my management should turn over and new administrators not believe me when I tell them we've been exempt. There's the proof we've been (sort of) doing PBLA all along.

>>Two years ago, when I needed to prove to myself that I could do this thing called PBLA, we filled each section with senior versions of assessments as much as possible considering it is a widely ranging multilevel class. If I tried to explain all the ways I've attempted to create and execute valid assessments over these two years, we'd all be here till Christmas. None of it, in my opinion, has been valid. All the ways in which my assessments are an exercise in futility is material for another day's blog post.

Now that I feel that I'm as well versed in rubric creation as I'll ever be, the pace has slowed and the expectations have softened a lot. When I say senior versions, I mean that we decide together what the criteria will be and they always have the option to take the "test" home if they want to. It is always up to them how often they are assessed, what competency and skill they want assessed, and how they wish to be assessed. For example, many times they mark their own papers and give themselves the scores. Other times, for receptive skills in particular, they fill out a self-assessment (4.25" by 5.5" sheet) stapled to the artifact and circle whether the task was easy, so-so, or difficult. This translates to a mark of beginning, developing or achieved.

More than anything, I've tried to get them to assess themselves based on a personal goal that is really none of my business. I encourage them to record their progress in the binder so that we all cover our assess should a government inspector come sniffing around. But in the end, the choice has been theirs to make. Needless to say I do not expect octogenarians to cart the heavy binder back and forth daily. Their binders live in our black cabinet nine months out of the year and get taken out on artifact pass-back days--about one or two Tuesdays per month. They are required to take the behemoths home for summer break and take them upon changing classes or schools.

Did I mention that these guys all have more university education than I have? From day one I knew that I was not going to stand over them and impose upon them any Mickey Mouse secretarial exercises. They already know how to take notes, organize their notes, study, etc. PBLA workshops endowed me with a set of protocols I found to be embarrassingly patronizing to the learners, and I did not follow through as instructed. I came to class and was utterly transparent. I told them about my PBLA training and how it was a government mandated experiment being carried out all across Canada. I explained to them the parts I disagreed with and the parts that even I thought could be useful. I told them I had no expectations from them either way--to like it or join me in rolling my eyes at it. I simply informed them of each element and gave them choices. For some things I told them, "I need to learn how to do this, so bear with me while we do it a few times." 

At the beginning one woman told me she had nightmares the night before assessments. That's when I realized we needed to have a talk. I said, "Think about this. What happens if you do poorly on every assessment? What happens if you do very well?" My beloved student Huarong spoke up from the back, "Nothing."

"That's right. Nothing happens. You still come back next term to this same classroom and this same teacher no matter whether your benchmarks have all plateaued and never budge one inch. Even if you can't remember what we did yesterday, this is our class where you are all welcome to keep coming back to semester after semester. We know we're learning. These papers are just for the government and to keep my manager happy." Wink, wink.

They relaxed again after that and we went back to the business of learning.

So that's it. That's pretty much everything I know about teaching seniors and surviving (or faking) #PBLA with them.

My 'Principled Eclecticism'

My afternoon class is literacy--refugees either learning to read and write for the first time in any language or learning the Roman alphabet for the first time WHILE learning to speak and understand English. That is a whole other can of worms. I'm hoping to do an online class soon on what works for me with that group of learners. So let's not talk about them today.

Let's talk about an average week with the seniors, the group I blogged about here last week. In that blog post I mentioned some things that have not worked very well.

No more fighting the translators
Because so many of them have set-in-stone study habits when they emerge from forty years of grammar-translation style second language education, I have abandoned all attempts to pry the translators from their hands. I have read and heard a lot lately about the value of those electronic dictionaries, so now I am working with instead of against them. By compromising and allowing a lot of prep before activities designated as 'no pencils, no dictionaries,' I'm seeing much better levels of cooperation when I ask students to put the machines away just for a little while.

What Happened to PPP?
In response to this post, Geoff Jordan said he was happy to hear about some aspects of how we teach settlement English in Canada, but was "not so pleased to hear that [we] were given the PPP lesson plan as a model." You know what? I am feeling vindicated right about now because within about six months of landing my first teaching job, I was starting to feel like either PPP was unrealistic or I was a defective teacher. I remember trying to get students to the 'free practice' part of the lesson by the end of the class period, and in the case of my lunchtime pronunciation class, that meant get there in under an hour! I did it in the beginning, but it never felt quite right. When I landed the job as teacher of a class full of senior citizens who were always begging me to slow down, I made an executive decision to stray from that model.

So if I am not following Presentation Practice Production or Controlled practice, semi-controlled practice, free practice, then what am I doing every day? That's a good question. I'm not sure I really know or can articulate it well. I know that I am continually listening in on what other teachers do (such as by participating in #CdnELTchat on Twitter, being an active member of Global Innovative Language Teachers on Facebook, attending webinars, reading books, and listening to podcasts by people like Joe Barcroft and Scott Thornbury. I bring all sorts of ideas to the classroom and try them out. Some become part of our routine and others don't withstand the test of time. Following are some of the ideas and practices that have stuck, at least for now.

The Structure of a Module
Everything begins with a needs assessment. Not only do I conduct formal ones at the beginning of each five-month semester, but we often do impromptu votes to help me with minor decisions all through the module.

Secondly, I plan out a module on a particular topic that satisfies one of the needs expressed by the students. For example, students voted to study health. Topics voted for included talking to medical professionals, making appointments, etc. When I mentioned meeting a naturopathic doctor over the weekend at a How to Fair, students perked up. "Would you like me to invite him to speak to you?" They were keen. So we are now doing a module on naturopathic medicine as we gear up for his visit.

I decide what the objective of the module is: have the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand Dr. Oake's talk, to ask him a question or two, and to make an informed decision on whether to seek a consultation from an ND. From there I do task analysis: what skills do we need to build up between now and the presentation? That's what I try to give them over a period of one to two weeks. This particular group has requested no writing and grammar only as the need arises. So I plan some listening, speaking, and reading lessons.

For every module, we make a vocabulary acquisition plan. We keep an easel chart at the front of the class where that module's vocabulary is recorded--often colour coded and grouped by part of speech. We are mindful of which terms promise good 'surrender value,' as Gianfranco Conti calls it. We may quickly turn to COCA to check frequency of use and pencil a number next to the term.

A Lesson
Every lesson begins with a warm-up. Cognitive science tells us that it's helpful to prime the brain for the topic. I use a variety of activities to accomplish this. It could be a brainstorming session where I'm secretary with marker standing at white board, or it could be "think, pair, share" or a KWL chart. I like to activate prior knowledge. My class is made up of engineers, doctors, scientists, pharmacists, etc. They have a lot of knowledge to share with me and with each other.

I would say that from there, things get a little intuitive on my part. I have my very rough plan scribbled out in front of me, but it's not unlike me to completely scrap the plan if I start to feel that it's not going over well. I try to tune into the learners and get a feel for what they need next.

As for that old PPP model, I haven't forgotten it altogether. I loosely follow the idea behind PPP if you consider that early in the week I am asking students to do something with that week's text (audio or written) that is more 'controlled.' I'm trying always to be mindful of the cognitive load of a given activity. In his book Input-Based Incremental Vocabulary Instruction, Joe Barcroft points out that if we cognitively overload students during the initial phase of new lexis exposure, we can actually inhibit uptake / long-term retention of new language! Sometimes I just let students have a block of quiet time with translators. Often I give examples of usage; I pantomime, draw pictures, and pull up Google Images.

Activities
I would say that my teaching style is very activities-based. Once I know what is to be achieved in a particular stage of the module, I reach into my grab bag of activities and choose one that I think fits the need while matching the current mood and interest of the class. If we just did a Dictogloss last week, I probably won't repeat that one this week. Some of my go-to activities are:

• Each one teach one (Divvy up new vocab two terms per partnership. Each pair produces a small poster with definition, pronunciation, example sentence, illustration. Partner A stays with poster while partner B circulates around room as a student, then As and Bs switch roles.)
• Jigsaw
• Dictogloss
• Conversation groups with photo prompts
• Extemporaneous speaking (E.g., Students line up As across from Bs; I give each A or perhaps both sides an index card with a topical question and they begin to chat. I ring the bell and Bs move clockwise.)
• Read aloud with focus on good prosody (linking, phrasing, sentence stress, intonation), remembering that English is a stress-timed language a la Cows Eat Grass.
• Back to the Well with graphic organizers I developed with John Sivell, Professor Emeritus, AppLing, Brock University.
• Read or tell a short interesting story then do 'circling,' i.e., yes questions, no questions, which/binary questions, wh- questions
• projects, presentations, posters
• role plays
• pair work
• group work
• guest speaker
• one hour of computer lab per week (buffet-style choices, self-directed)
• field trips

Team 3 - Teaching us how to fish

Principles

While I'm stitching together this patchwork of activities with more scaffolding at the beginning of a module, there are certain principles I'm attempting to adhere to. The whole thing might appear to an observer to be heavily influenced by dogme.  Even though it was just my undergrad minor, I feel confident when it comes to applied linguistics. Having studied ten languages and having aced advanced English grammar courses, I feel able to respond in the moment to intriguing questions about a grammar point or even a trivia question. I try not to let these raised hands hijack an entire 2.5 hour class, of course! I check in with the students to see if the majority want the tangent. If not, we may put it in the parking lot for a dedicated lesson. But if it's desired by the majority, I often give 'pop-up' grammar or pronunciation lessons.

field trip

Within the last year I've become aware of The Learning Scientists' website and materials. I've shared them with my students and together we've made it a goal to incorporate the six strategies for effective learning in my teaching and their practice. So for example, instead of three solid weeks of health, we did a week on reviewing parts of the body and organs followed by a week of their second chosen topic, Canadian culture (Thanksgiving), then a return to health. That's interleaving. We also have two fun games we play for big review, a way to revisit past pages of that big easel chart. Supposedly this is going to help us get new language into long-term memory!

You will notice that not once have I had to mention Portfolio-based Language Assessment. That's because I wrote a proposal asking for the seniors to be exempted, and this was granted. :) We still have the big white useless binders that I force the seniors to lug home over the summer break. We maintain the About Me section and sometimes even create artifacts--not an easy task since their abilities span CLB 2 to 8.

Materials

In putting together modules for my learners, I tend to create or find one simple audio or written text and use it in a gazillion different ways throughout the week. I long ago learned to, as Leo van Lier once said, "cover less, uncover more." That one text could be from the LINC 1-4 Classroom Activities binder/pdfs or from the Citizenship Resource. It might be a true story about me or a set of pharmaceutical labels. Sometimes, though not often, I do give an explicit grammar lesson, but it is always driven by a need that has arisen while we were using the language, and I always allow students to vote on whether or not to pursue the grammar formally with rules and exercises and all of that. I'd say we agree to that about twice a year. Otherwise, we focus on grammar in context.

Edited to add: I wrote this quickly without much revision or proofreading. Please point out my typos or errors. Also, I notice I didn't say anything under PRINCIPLES about comprehensible input or bottom-up listening activities. These concepts have made it onto my radar but are not yet a fully-formed conscious part of my teaching approach. I'm still studying. I will attempt to blog about emerging practices and principles very soon.

This Teacher, These Students, What Hasn't Worked

Last week I said I would write about how principled eclecticism plays out in my classrooms. The more I thought about what to write, the more I realized that there is SO MUCH a reader has to first understand about my very special group of students. I think it's too much to try to talk about both of my classes since they are so different from one another. So for now I'll just talk about the morning class of seniors, not the literacy class.

Much of the reasoning behind what I do is based upon my discoveries of what did not work with my groups when I tried it. I suppose that while I'm at it, we should also look at the experience, perspective and biases I bring to the table. My beliefs about language learning and their way of approaching language learning both come heavily to bear on what my classroom practice ends up looking like on a given week.

First let's talk about me. When I was in high school, I discovered a facility for language learning. After raking in top prizes and awards in German, I decided to see if I had the same ability to master Spanish. Yes, I won blue ribbons in poetry declamation and extemporaneous reading in both languages at an annual state-wide foreign languages festival in the same year. I became a ravenous student of languages--studying French at university during the day and classical Latin, Demotic Greek, Italian for Business and Travel as continuing education courses at night. Portuguese I studied on my own using Berlitz records. Yes, vinyl LPs!

In each case, I did my best to find a friend who was a native speaker and then offered this person something in exchange for just hanging out with me speaking his/her mother tongue. In some cases I traveled to a country where I could practice. At the age of 21, I went to Japan where I lived for a year with a Spaniard. I insisted we have a completely traditional Japanese household without chairs or forks. In keeping with "when in Rome, do as the Romans," I offered my subway seat to any male I saw standing. I was all in, as they say. I wanted the experience of full immersion. Because Xavier was a graduate fellow at the University of Hokkaido, I qualified for free Japanese classes every week day. I was a student of the same sort of classes I teach today. The Japanese we learned was intended to help us learn to navigate life on campus. We learned to say things like, "Where is the cafeteria?" and "Go past the engineering building and turn right. It's just past the library." The text book was excellent. It came with a set of cassette tapes that I listened to over and over at night in the small apartment we rented on the low-income side of town.

In case you haven't guessed yet, my approach to language learning is obsessive. I want to listen to target language (TL) radio, watch TL television, and learn the lyrics to TL songs. If I run into compatriots in public, I refuse to speak our common mother tongue. That's me. I wonder what biases spring from this perspective and how those inform my approach!

And what about my students?

The LINC Seniors' class was mandated by the government to be one of the specialty niche classes warranting a lower student-teacher ratio--about ten students maximum per class instead of the 20-25 found in mainstream classes. In that way it's not unlike my afternoon literacy class.

Getting library cards

For the past four years, the class has been comprised of at least half immigrants from China with the rest being refugees from Iraq. The Iraqis tend to be risk takers with solid listening skills and good strategic competence; their weak area is often the mechanics of writing. The Chinese students arrive with set-in-stone study habits (such as a compulsive need to copy into their notebooks EVERY SINGLE WORD I write on the board and EVERY SINGLE IMAGE that I doodle next to any word). I suspect their English is the product of forty years of grammar-translation method. They can write well punctuated sentences with lovely spelling, though I note more than a little L₁ interference--such as dropping of the copula or subject pronoun, or a sentence like, "The goes-everyday-to-Tim-Horton's man is my friend." They know their metalanguage inside and out and sometimes challenge me as they peer into their electronic translators. I'll say, "Yes, beyond can be a preposition, but in this sentence it's an adverb. Do you want me to explain why?"

Through a series of needs assessments, I have learned which settlement themes and topics they want us to explore. I've also discovered that the Chinese students do not want me to spend any class time on writing. "We don't need to know how to write a composition anymore," they tell me. "We don't need to write resumes," they add. It's why they've migrated here from another school where they were integrated with younger students.

What DO they need me for? The Chinese students want me to help them improve their listening skills and pronunciation. And the Iraqis? They seem content to build their vocabulary and gain the knowledge imparted during a typical semester of settlement English: how to use a bank machine, what is considered polite and rude in this culture, that sort of thing. The entire class enjoys daily opportunities for oral practice. Neither the Asian nor the Middle Eastern seniors want me to spend much time on explicit grammar lessons. About once or twice in a semester we do a sort of on-demand week of grammar. Last term it was a four-week course on the English article system woven in among topical lessons. This semester it was causative verbs and passive causative after one Dictogloss team had written on their chart paper, "M's uncle took his prostate out."

So my big challenge is helping the Chinese students improve their listening skills. Now before I tell you next week what I am doing in class these days, let me tell you what hasn't worked. My attempt at a "Listening Boot Camp" pretty much failed in every way. You can read about that using the following links:

The Listening Skills Dilemma
Listening Boot Camp - Week One
Listening Boot Camp - Week Two

Okay, well that's enough from me for one week! Next week I hope to share not which practices and approaches I've abandoned, but which techniques I'm now employing and how that's going.

Looking Back

Our spring term is coming to a close this week, and I've been reflecting on which techniques and activities worked well this time around and what did not work well.

For my morning students, all over the age of 60, jigsaw activities seemed especially useful and engaging. This is the technique I used to help students become familiar with a select few of the sculptures we would see on our field trip to Windsor Sculpture Park. I used it again to help them get ready to visit The François Baby House and Museum, and again when we learned about staying safer in hospital. For the 'safer in hospital' module, one group became experts on VRE, one on MRSA, and one on C. diff.

Expert groups will later split up into colour groups.

What didn't work? Rushing. I have to remember that I cannot just tell these students what I expect. I need to produce an exemplar for them to model their work on and I need to provide the rubric ahead of time so that they really understand which criteria I'll be using to judge their work. Also, the next time we do reports or posters, I need to impose a maximum word limit. Although I stressed many times the importance of brevity for a poster to grab the attention of students passing by it in the hall, we still ended up with posters drowning in text. So I definitely learned my lesson and will provide both an exemplar and rubric next time. That being said, they are proud of the "my hero" posters that were part of preparing for a trip to Jackson Park.

In the afternoon class, a high level (CLB 1L-2L) literacy class, the techniques and activities that worked the best were Language Experience Approach books and multi-sensory lessons. In some cases, we had a multi-sensory experience that we then turned into an LEA book.

Tasting our way through the regions of Canada

Sometimes we cannot go out and take pictures of ourselves having an experience. In those cases, we can still make the new language and concepts personal by giving our opinions and expressing preference, which is how I turned the topic of "summer in Windsor" into an LEA book. Instead of going to Summerfest, the beach, fireworks night, etc., we talked about which ones we planned to enjoy this summer and then built a true story around that. This book becomes the basis of a week's worth of activities. We spend some time each day practicing reading it until we reach fluency, starting with choral repetition and ending with being able to read it individually by Friday. I love being able to load up our sentences into SpellingCity, which then gives us myriad games and worksheets using the same terms and sentences.

F. wants to eat cotton candy at Summerfest.

M wants to take her children to Sandpoint Beach via bus #2.

After helping compose sentences, students copy text into blank versions of LEA book.

And what didn't work? Well, they are a very agreeable group. I find that most anything helps them improve their language skills and helps them learn how to learn so long as I follow a few basic principles. Language must be taught orally first and must be personally relevant. Also, I need to change things up a lot--both week to week and also about every twenty minutes--while also maintaining certain predictable routines.

So if we use a reader from Bow Valley College, School of Global Access one week, we will write our own LEA book the next week, and follow that up with a chapter from the Talk of the Block series the third week. Within a given class period, I try to go back and forth between activities that focus on meaning (questions about the story, relating the story to our lives) and activities that focus on the building blocks of language (copy, pronounce, spot the intruder). I also try to switch every twenty minutes or so between a sedentary activity (writing) and one that gets us up and moving around (peer survey, flyswatter game, coming to the board).

To be honest, I think the ideal lesson is a multi-sensory one or a lesson that is based around a field trip. I have to admit, however, that I don't find myself having the energy to manage such lessons every single week. It takes a lot out of me when I cart 20 pounds of kitchen equipment up to the school so that we can make gingerbread cookies while learning fractions. But if I could snap my fingers and have a host of helpful elves appear every time I needed them, I probably would take students out into the world or into a kitchen or maker space almost every week.

How about you? Is your term coming to an end soon? How are you feeling about it? Which activities will you bring back again because they were successful? What might you abandon because it fell flat?

Get More Bang for Your Lesson Planning Buck

One thing that I love about the principles of Back to the Well is that both teacher and student get something out of it. If you're interested in what the students get out of it, you can read a whole whack of posts on this blog under the category label of 'Back to the Well.' You can also read A Year of Slow in the Spring 2015 issue of Contact, an article I co-wrote with John Sivell, recently retired from Brock University's Department of Applied Linguistics.

What I want to talk about today is one of the reasons it is teacher-friendly, namely that it increases the ROI of my lesson planning time and energy.

This week the seniors, for example, were studying The Battle of Vimy Ridge. This topic was being explored in response to their request for more lessons about Canada. They also have requested more field trips, and I thought that studying an historic event like the victory at Vimy would be a great way to prepare for a trip to Jackson Park, where they will encounter many war memorials and monuments.

I invested my time in the creation of a short text about the battle. It is a simplified combination of two texts I found on the Internet. It was not easy for me to get the story down to five short paragraphs with pictures. It took the better part of an evening.

But now that we have it, there are so many ways we are able to milk this text for many types of linguistic affordances. Here is how our week played out in a class. (It is for the most part a listening/speaking course.)

Monday we did a KWL warm-up followed by my pre-teaching new vocabulary and introduction to the text. We did choral repetition, which they repeatedly ask me for. I threw out some discussion questions to give them their daily dose of oral practice and to up the student talk time.

Tuesday they read the text again individually and for a partner. After break I circulated some trench image cards that I had been able to download for free from the Internet over the weekend. In groups of 2-3, students had to ask one another, "What's happening?" The lower level students were able to participate easily since pictures were of familiar activities (a soldier is cutting his friend's hair in the trench; a soldier is eating bread in the trench; the soldiers are washing their feet in the trench).

Wednesday I distributed one trench image card to each student and gave them 15 minutes of dictionary time. Next I gave them ten minutes to practice telling a partner about a photo card. Finally I had each student come to the front of the class to tell about his/her card. NB: I took all cards away from students so that they would give their full attention to the person at the front of the room instead of nervously continuing to look at their translators, study their card, etc., in preparation for their turn. As each student came up, I held up his/her assigned photo card for all to see.

Thursday before the break we went back into the text with two discussion questions and two vocabulary exercises:
1) When we studied Confederation, we learned that Canada's birthday is July 1, 1867. So then what did Brigadier-General Ross mean when he said that at Vimy he had seen 'the birth of a nation?'
2) Can you think of a historic event that contributed to a sense of nationhood for your first country? What is it? (Not all compatriots will agree.)
3) Choose 3-5 useful words or chunks from the text and use them in new sentences.
4) Choose one interesting word from the text and look up its synonyms. Can any of the synonyms be substituted for the original word? Discuss your answer with a classmate.

Higher level students tackled all four items while lower level students skipped the abstract discussion questions and did the vocabulary study.

After break was a dictation with short, simple sentences on this now very familiar topic. For example: The trenches were cold, muddy, and full of rats. Soldiers could get trench foot. German prisoners helped carry out the wounded. And so forth.

After taking up the dictation, I then had them do another activity with the same sentences. Students got into small groups and I gave each group of 3-4 students one die.

On the board I wrote, "Start with the first sentence. Take turns rolling the die. According to your roll of the die, do one of the following:
1 - Read the sentence.
2 - Change positive to negative / negative to positive.
3 - Change the tense of the sentence.
4 - Make a question that the sentence answers.
5 - Change one word in the sentence to a synonym that works as well as the original word.
6 - Say "Really?" and then the sentence with surprised, questioning intonation."

Friday we had to postpone the field trip due to rain. Instead students used Flipgrid for the first time. I enticed them to give it a try by offering them a video tour of my apartment that I had created on the weekend. Each student recorded an introduction under that thread and then moved on to reflections on the week's learning. I wish there was a quick and easy way to convert the URL of our grid to a QR code for inclusion in their portfolios.

Seniors can use Flipgrid!

In short, not only does going 'Back to the Well' allow students' brains to make more neural connections with the lexis, but it frees up many evenings for a teacher who wants a life outside of eternal lesson preparation.

I'm on Instagram !

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

That's a saying the seniors and I have been having a lot of fun with lately.

We are discovering that you can, indeed.

We are just in the midst of our needs assessment for the new term, which means we have to choose which themes and topics are of greatest interest to us. We'll be setting goals and plotting courses for reaching those goals.

Friday is the day when some seniors peter out, so to speak. A five-day school week is quite a load for an octogenarian, you have to admit. And yet, I have to get them through that door somehow. So Fridays have traditionally been the day on which I offer something extra, something special. At times that has been an hour in the computer lab after break, at other times it has been a pronunciation lesson or short, easy (and amazing) true story that we read and digest together.

Now it seems that nothing I do is quite enticing enough. I have to get out the big guns. The seniors have asked me if I would please take them on more field trips. So the first two I have scheduled on Fridays. Is that wrong of me?

Oh, but I digress. This isn't even what I wanted to blog about this week.

Over the weekend I managed to open and begin using an Instagram account. You can follow me; I'm JOYofESL. I think I'm going to enjoy Instagram even more than Twitter. I really love snapping pictures in the moment and sharing them quickly with just a word or hashtag or two.

I was keen to share my discovery with the seniors. I turned this Friday into a bit of a tech tasting party. We watched this video about a Korean grandfather who now has an Instagram account with a huge following. Seeing this prompted one student to get out her phone, open Instagram, which she already had installed, and follow "drawings_for_my_grandchildren."

We also played with the Google Cardboard units I ordered over the summer. Don't tell anyone that I got knock-offs from China for $3 each, okay? The students loved them. One was keen to order her own for her family. My student who has macular degeneration can play ping pong but cannot read worksheets even when I use a 24 pt font. But he WAS able to visit the Eiffel Tower using the virtual reality viewer. Cool! I wonder what might happen if I turned a team loose on an assignment to teach the rest of the class about Google Cardboard? Hmmmm. Project-based learning, anyone?

How about you? What were your first weeks like back at work / school? I would love to hear!

Change Happens

Tomorrow is the first day of the new fall term at the agency where I teach two LINC classes. It feels to me as if this term will be different in many ways. I'm going to see many new faces. I'm entering my second term of trying to comply with the PBLA mandate while balancing work with good self care. And I'm hoping to open myself up to new ways of teaching.

New Staffing
We underwent quite a bit of turnover during the summer, something that would have been unheard of when I joined the organization in the spring of 2010. Back then I was told that you had to wait for someone to die or hit 65 in order to squeeze your foot in the door. A person just did NOT give up a LINC teaching position once she or he had secured one.

That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Seems like just the other day I was the new kid on the block, and now I'm going to be one of the oldies. I look forward to meeting all my new colleagues tomorrow and seeing the fresh energy and ideas they bring with them.

Developing My Teaching
How do I want to change how I do my job as I embark upon a new school term? I've had the entire summer break to read pedagogical books and articles, such as Ellen Langer's Mindful Learning, Dellar and Walkley's Teaching Lexically, and countless articles brought to my attention by my PLN via Twitter, such as the great blog posts over at The Cult of Pedagogy. And I've had time to look over the end-of-term feedback forms my students filled out in June.

How do I plan to evolve? In what ways do I hope to show growth? What do I want to do better than before?

There are three main areas in which I want to shake things up a bit: the curriculum of the seniors' class; the way PBLA is used with CLB 1L; how I use my time 'off the clock'.

Before the end of last term, the seniors conveyed to me that they would like more projects and would appreciate taking more trips off site. They benefited from a field trip we took to acquaint them with the free open-air ping pong table in Kiwanis Park as well as the trip we took to the Windsor Sculpture Park. These clients are long retired and do not need a syllabus that revolves around getting them into the workforce. Those days are long gone for them. Many of them, however, want to volunteer in the community. They want to better understand Canadian culture. They wish to engage socially with the people around them. I hope that by reading, talking to other teachers, and staying involved with my PLN on Twitter, I will think of ways to give the seniors more of what they value.

As for my literacy class, I will attempt to nail down exactly what is expected of me in terms of implementing PBLA at that level. On the one hand, we now have the ESL for ALL Support Kit. This should make it easier for me to help literacy learners set achievable language goals and measure progress. On the other hand, I still feel as if we are conflating formative and summative assessment with these rubrics and checklists. To me these marked artifacts feel like a summative assessment that is assembled over time. I would like to test out a system of instant feedback, such as the one my former coworker Maria employed with her foundations learners using a green/yellow/red light system that let the learners inform the instructor on the spot whether they were ready to move on.

Work Life Balance
Finally, I want to reexamine how much time I'm spending on lesson prep and whether I am spending that time wisely. My tendency toward perfectionism means that I too easily let lesson prep eat up almost all my free time. This year I must make myself a solemn promise not to let that happen. If ever there was a time for me to double down in my commitment to Back to the Well, it's now. I have to remember to trust the (audio or written) text. It's imperative that I demonstrate the courage of my conviction by guiding students back into the same language sample again and again in many ways, exploiting it for the myriad affordances it offers us. As for the students, they deserve a chance to deeply explore the language at a mindful pace.

As for me, I deserve bike riding time, time to take in cultural events with my partner, time for a good night's rest, time to cook and digest a healthy meal without rushing. Why should summer be the only season during which I find time for a printmaking class or a short road trip?

And so I return to the job I love with new resolutions, eager to see what my learners and I manage to co-create.

How about you?

Time for a little Fun!

Because it was our goal to wrap up all artifact collection before the start of Ramadan (and also early enough to leave time for binder review, student-teacher conferences, progress reports and data collation by admin in June), I get to spend the last three weeks with my learners just exploring language in fun ways with them without the stress of another assessment around every corner.

It feels so good.

Also, the weather is now perfect for field trips.

And so I find myself so full of ideas, I can't plan or execute them all fast enough. One of the ideas that is blowing my little mind comes from a recent TESL Ontario blog post by John Allan entitled, "Change the Routine without Disrupting the Class - Take a Virtual Field Trip."

Have you heard of Google Expedition? I had never heard of it before I read John's post. I already have three Google Cardboard viewers en route to my home. I'll have the whole summer to play with them and think up ways to incorporate their use into English lessons.

In the meantime, while I dreamt about those little viewers being shipped to me, I've been working on lesson materials for an upcoming trip to Windsor Sculpture Park, an open-air art gallery stretching for ten kilometres along the Detroit River. My class will visit a small sampling of about a dozen works close enough for a self-paced walking tour that takes no more than two hours to complete, even with rest breaks at shady picnic tables with water and snacks.

I've spent today putting together a little booklet of activities, including a jigsaw. I'm looking forward to tomorrow!

If you are a Windsor teacher and would like to use this booklet, give me a shout.

First Term w PBLA Fully Implemented

This novel-length blog post is for anyone who feels I am being too negative about PBLA or simply am resistant to change. I want to lay it all out point by point so that there is less room for misunderstanding of my position. Specifically, I would like to address the questions that I see batted around again and again wherever critics dare speak out.

1) Standardization
Q: Isn't standardization good? Isn't this better than before? What else would you suggest for bringing all publicly funded ESL classes into alignment with each other?
A: Yes, I believe that having a system of levels is good in that it allows us to talk to each other in a common language and pass students back and forth with clear understanding of what level of communicative ability they have reached. (Not all scholars agree with me re the CLB; I speak only for myself here.)

Q: So what's your gripe?

A: I am personally not seeing an improvement in consistency under PBLA. At my agency, we have some students leaving our school because we are complying with the funder's non-negotiables. Some of the exiting students are seeking out schools that are softer on PLBA. There are other schools where the roll-out has been such a complete failure, with teachers up in arms, that they have been given special dispensation to delay implementation. Before PLBA, there were always some centres with competent management and good teachers; there were always some with incompetent management and poor teaching going on. PBLA does not change that. In my opinion, PBLA simply introduced a new and different sort of inconsistency. Also, I still occasionally see students arriving from the assessment centre with wildly inaccurate benchmarks, meaning that teachers still have to use their common sense in order to best place the client. (Please do not take away our ability to do that!) I am for anything that teachers can realistically accomplish while being fairly compensated that truly improves the quality of service delivery for the client, that truly enhances a client-centred model of service delivery while making efficient use of taxpayer money.

2. The learner-centred model
Q:  PBLA makes our programs more learner-centred! Don't you believe in that?
A:  Where I have the privilege to work, the program was more learner centred before PBLA, not less. I was already conducting regular needs assessments because that's how I was trained at CCLCS. I was using the Canadian Language Benchmarks and all the available documents when creating exit tests. I was keeping portfolios of work samples for all students and passing those on to the next teacher when students progressed. Although portfolio artifacts received a lot of weight in my decision, I was also free to use common sense and keep the wellbeing of the client in mind when making decisions regarding class placement. Formative assessment was a natural, regular, and ongoing part of my delivery of instruction because, again, that's how I was trained.

Now, with the current incarnation of PBLA, we are less free to put the needs of the clients before bureaucracy and dogmatic imposition of a one-size-fits-all prescription. I'll give you three examples.

Example one:
We once had a teaching assistant who went from class to class supporting students struggling to learn to read by giving them one-on-one tutoring in word attack skills, phonics, etc. Almost all her time is now taken up with helping teachers with PBLA housekeeping. The struggling new readers have lost their tutor. THAT is taking a needed service away from clients who need it and thus is less learner-centred.

Example two:
Next door to my class we have been blessed to employ, for just one term before she sails off to do post-graduate work, Maria Margaritis. If you've had the good luck to attend one of her workshops on PTSD in the classroom, you know why I say that our centre is fortunate to have her. Because she has a degree in psychology and has worked in other settings with clients who share some of the same challenges, her literacy classroom has become the safe and welcoming haven for: clients experiencing PTSD and its impact on ability to acquire second language; clients with acquired brain injury; clients with serious learning disabilities; clients needing extra patience and support due to physical disability.

Maria welcomes them all and even encourages other teachers to send her such students. She is amazing with them. And yet, in spite of her formal recommendation to excuse these clients from the rigours of artifact collection at a rate of 8 x 4 per term, she was not able to procure such relief for them. So, she has done her utmost to show them that the formative tests are not tests of their ability but simply feedback on her teaching. Only because of her gifts has she been able to turn the situation into one that does not add to their stress and nightmares. When she goes away to graduate school in the fall, there is no telling whether her replacement will be someone as gifted at that delicate dance of collecting work samples without further traumatizing and needlessly badgering these special clients. They have their own way of learning, their own pace of learning, and there should not be a bureaucratic requirement forced upon their class. We have all met those newcomers who will probably never hold jobs, except perhaps in sheltered workshops. We have all met those who will never make it to level 3 or 4 or be able to pass a written citizenship test. Well, imagine them all in one class. That's a class where the instructor should be allowed to put her allegiance to the code of ethics of her profession before the still young "rules" of PBLA implementation. Eventually the funders will have received enough feedback that they will realize some classes deserve exemption or should be allowed to modify PBLA. Until then, some teachers are faced with not knowing whether defiance in the name of protecting their clients will result in punitive measures or dismissal. It all depends on whether they work under administrators with the courage to stand up to the funders and say, "We have a situation at our agency that merits special consideration."

Example three:
I teach a multilevel ESL class for seniors. Most of them found my class by word of mouth and have stayed because of how very learner-centred it was (before PBLA). Through regular needs assessments, I was able to learn why these older clients had migrated to my classroom and then tailor English instruction to their very different set of needs. They told me, for example, "We don't need to learn how to write a résumé," and "we already know how to write an essay." Because I believe in the learner-centred model, we have changed the class and do not spend an equal portion of our time on each of the four skills. Rather, we focus on reading or writing only when it is a natural part of that particular module. For the module on air travel, we learned to fill out a Canadian customs declaration form, for example.

Seniors teach each other to use iPads.

The class welcomes seniors with any level of English language ability. At one point the range spanned literacy to CLB 7; we somehow made it work. Currently the reading ability ranges from CLB 2 to 6 while the speaking ability goes from CLB 3 to 8. Before PBLA, this vast range in abilities was not an issue for me because their benchmarks are not the focus of the class. They have not come to me because they want to eventually pass the citizenship test or get a job. Their goals are social integration, combating isolation, learning to navigate every aspect of their lives in Canada without help from a child, grandchild, friend or neighbour. They love to be self-sufficient!

These clients--in their sixties, seventies, and eighties--do not progress through the levels the way their much younger counterparts do; they do not move on to other teachers. Over time, receiving feedback from them through a series of needs assessments, I have tweaked and sculpted the curriculum in order to give them what they need and nothing extraneous. They are gaining a treasure trove of knowledge about their communities and are mastering the language needed to: call 911, 311, and 211; become volunteers in their community; join a hobby club; avoid scams; report a crime; or communicate with every medical professional they encounter throughout the year.

This past five-month term of PBLA has been very interesting for us. From an aspect of PBLA implementation, it has been an utter failure. Each of these seniors has a Language Companion, and they are free to leave it at school or take it home. They take it home one or two nights when they first receive it and also during summer break. Otherwise, they find it to be a cumbersome burden (some of the clients weigh under 100 lbs; one uses a walker). Because I was collecting artifacts before our official PBLA launch date, each one of them has well over the required 8 per skill between benchmark changes. However, each of them does not have 8 artifacts at the "challenge level," so to speak. That would have required me to create 8 x 4 tasks for H at the 2/3 level, 32 tasks for N to see if he has moved from 7 to 8 in speaking, and so forth. Did I spend hours at home creating assessments spanning CLBs two to seven when these clients do not care about their benchmarks? No, I did not. I collected 32 work samples in a five-month term, each with a marked checklist or rubric attached in order to be able to say that I attempted to comply with the funder's mandate. I was honest with my group about this. By the way, I did once use a multi-level rubric when Rana Ashkar at the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmarks provided it as part of a pilot. Although still not appropriate for a group of people whose L2 abilities have mostly reached a plateau, I would use one again in a mainstream settlement English class that spans just two or three levels.

So this brings me back to a question that an unidentified PBLA defender recently asked me in the comments section of this blog: what do I mean by unethical and unfair? I will present many reasons for that characterization here today, but here is one: I believe it is unethical to force special demographic groups such as Maria's special ed class or my seniors' class to jump through a hoop that has the strong potential to shine a light on their failure to move up in benchmarks over time. It is unnecessarily demeaning and demoralizing to repeatedly point out to a client, "No, your x skill still hasn't improved. Once again, there's been no change." Instead, I propose that teachers of speciality niche classes be given the freedom to use their intimate knowledge of their clientele along with good old common sense in order to design formative assessment methods that give the teacher needed feedback while NOT adding to the clients' stress levels, not demoralizing, not framing progress in terms of benchmarks in classes for which benchmarks are not and should not be the main focus.

3) Not fair?
Q: What do you mean by 'unfair?'
A: I will provide what I consider to be the most salient reason that the current iteration of PBLA implementation is unfair to teachers, and you will find on this blog post a few reasons why it can be unfair to students, some of them already mentioned above.

When this first rolled out, we were expected to continue to create the content of our courses while taking on the new responsibilities of creating all assessments and assessment tools, be those simple checklists or complex rubrics, as well as marking those 32 artifacts per client per term. As Patrice Palmer pointed out on an earlier post on this blog, many of us have been in the field close to ten years and have rarely seen a raise in pay. In seven years I have received, I believe, three raises--all of them around 1 or 1.5%.  So while our workload has just increased exponentially, we are all actually having our pay reduced year after year. The costs of food, fuel, utilities, etc. have all risen dramatically since I entered this field. The Ontario government has raised the minimum wage an average of 4.5% per year over the past ten years. At the same time, my pay has not come close to keeping pace with the increased cost of living.

While I have been told by a coworker that our original contract considered our hourly rate to cover a certain amount of off-the-clock prep time, I have never been told how many minutes of prep this rate is supposed to cover. But I can tell you that when I first started trying to implement PBLA in a way that made me feel proud of the work I was doing, I was not being fairly compensated for all the work I was doing at home. I was cranky and sleep deprived, as were my colleagues.  I'm told there are some schools where teachers have flat refused to give of their own personal time in order to meet these impossible new demands. My hat is off to them! If the rumour is true, this has left a bottleneck resulting in students unable to progress for lack of marked artifacts. THAT is unfair to the clients.

To roll out PBLA before all the supporting resources have been developed is unfair. To threaten teachers with dismissal and characterize them as "resisters" when they dare to speak out about a workload that has suddenly become ten or twenty times what it was when they agreed to the job description is wrong, unfair.

4) Solutions
Q: All I see you people doing here is complaining. Where are the suggested solutions?
A: I have a few suggestions, and I'm sure we'll get some more in the comments section below this post.

• Put a moratorium on this entire project until more research has been done. And if you cite other instances where portfolios or passports have been used, know that the comparison loses validity if the other study was done with K-12 instead of in adult settlement. Apples are not oranges.
• Put a moratorium on mandatory implementation until all supports are in place. This means teachers have at their fingertips all classroom materials and course content as well as ready-made assessments and assessment tools for each module within each settlement theme.
• Pay teachers fairly for after class / before class work (module writing, content resourcing, materials creation, marking).
• Give all settlement frontline workers paid sick leave and extended health benefits as a show of investment in them, the most valuable resource in helping newcomers settle and integrate into Canadian society.
• Do away with dogmatic requirements regarding HOW portfolios are to be kept. Do not spend taxpayer money on an impractical 2-inch binder that is made unnecessarily heavy by housing together both the portfolio and reference book. Provide students with a 1" binder (or let them provide their own) for carrying class work home each evening, as was the perfectly workable case before PBLA. Allow for materials that do not need to go home each night, such as past assessments and reference materials, to remain at home or at school when not in use.  This would be MORE client-centred and more fair to frail seniors, expectant mothers, those who have to wrangle strollers onto city buses, etc.
• Do not continue to spend taxpayer money on the printing or development of the Language Companion in its current form. Poll teachers to find out how many times they (or students on their own initiative) reference it, and collate these data by level. It is highly likely that, at least for literacy instructors, it is a complete waste of money that could be so much better spent.
• Allow school administrations, in consult with teachers, to designate certain special classes as "pre-PBLA" or "post-PBLA." These teachers would be free to adopt a lighter version or an adapted version of PBLA that truly serves their clientele.

In closing, I will let you in on what my plans are for my second term of supposed 'full' implementation. 

I haven't said much about my literacy class. With only 10 students, marking is not a burden. However, I do not feel confident that my assessments are valid. All of the literacy teachers at my centre need time to sit down with the new ESL for ALL Support Kit so that we can (one can only hope) design assessments that better reflect a learner's progress from Foundations and up through the sub-levels of literacy learning. Until then, I will continue to use needs assessments, checklists to mark tasks, learning logs, and other things that help prepare students for the PBLA routines they can expect to encounter in subsequent classes. None of the teachers at my agency has found time to revisit students' goals individually at mid-term. We will probably begin to use the T.A. for that (formerly the reading tutor).

As for seniors, I have pointed out to my supervisor that all of these students now have accumulated in their portfolios well over 20 artifacts per skill since their last change in benchmark.

May I therefore slow down on the formal artifact collection and rubric marking for that group? Yes, I was told that I may do so. I'll switch almost exclusively to self-assessment and reflection, such as you see here on three assessment / reflection tools used with the seniors class.

I will, as always, provide seniors with as much marking of their work as they want. I always give them a choice between handing in work for me to take home and mark or going over answers in class so that they can check their own work. They have told me that taking it up on the spot is more valuable to them. The size of this class is limited to 15, so when it comes to marking, once again I get off easy compared to my colleagues.

To sum it up, I will continue to advocate for the clients. I will continue to protest any framework that is imposed in a dogmatic and overly bureaucratic way that does not make room for common sense consideration of individual client needs. I will do what I've always done in order to sleep better at night.

Outdoor Classroom Day

For two days I have pushed up sweat-slipped eyeglasses with the back of a soil-dark hand. The back of my neck is sunburned, and muscles are so stiff and sore that I will barely be able to get out of bed tomorrow. But the Early Girl and Roma are in the ground, empty cages waiting above them for vines that will branch and climb. Nasturtiums (shouldn't the plural be Nasturia?) and Marigolds guard the Dinosaur Kale and Rainbow Chard, seedlings all. A three-inch promise of Zucchini sits atop a rich, black mound.

Covered in rosebush scratches, I know that I am alive.

I'm told that May 18th is Outdoor Classroom Day. The educators who thought up this annual event probably had K-12 in mind, but I think outdoor time could be good for adult learners, too. What do you think?

Tomorrow is not May 18th, but the seniors' class and I are hopping on the city bus in order to check out the recently donated open-air Ping-pong table in Windsor's Kiwanis Park. This follows a module on free and low-cost things to do in Windsor and another module during which some students taught the rest of us how table tennis is played.

If I remember to take pictures, we can turn these into a Language Experience Approach (LEA) story afterward. I've never used LEA with any group other than literacy. This will be a good way for us to go materials light and will save the day after teacher spent all her lesson planning time holding a pitchfork. I wonder how seniors will like LEA, whether it will prove to be a valuable tool worth using again.

How about you? With the interminable wet and chilly weather finally abating and the sun smiling down, are you thinking of ways to combine an ESL lesson with a bit of fresh air? I would love to hear.

"Unbelievable Waste"

I guess it's time for a little update on my implementation of PBLA in both my morning and afternoon classes. I also want to share a bit of what I'm hearing around me.

My morning class consists of 15 people over the age of 55. Most are immigrants, four are refugees. They do not change teachers. Their stated goals involve social integration and being able to live independently, navigating our healthcare system, the banking system, shopping, and other activities of everyday life without having to depend on their grown children or grandchildren for help. They want to be able to talk to and understand healthcare professionals. Because I am a champion of the client-centred model, they have sculpted and tweaked our class until it is exactly what they want and need. We do very little writing, focusing mostly on their weakest areas: speaking intelligibly and listening comprehension. Though there are exceptions, most have a long way to go when it comes to strategic competence. So that's something we focus on, as well.

I'm not quite sure how to handle my PBLA mandate when it comes to this group. They do not care about their benchmarks. They never progress to a "next level." So for now I am in a sort of "cover my ass" mode, entreating them to humour me as I administer assessments of their skills. I resent having to lead them through a process that brings into the light the fact that their skills have plateaued. I do not want to demoralize them. I look for ways to emphasize what they CAN do, not what they still cannot do. Therefore I have moved to checklists instead of rubrics, have designed the assessment tools in such a way as to highlight what they have learned to do and not the fact that the benchmarks seldom change.

But I do attempt to stay abreast of what my peers are learning. I am trying out the Conestoga College rubrics; I recently volunteered to field test a multi-level module plan with assessment tools. In a bid for the students' buy-in, I told them that all my colleagues across Canada were learning how to use rubrics (some multi-level) and other assessment tools for the purpose of PBLA. I told them it wouldn't be good for me to fall behind and not gain these skills. What if I one day had to teach a mainstream class again with focus on the benchmarks? I wouldn't want to be lacking in this area of my professional development. So would they be so kind as to serve as my guinea pigs? Would they play along with all these assessments that have little value to them? Yes, they said.

What wouldn't they do for me if I asked? But boy, do I ever feel like a schmuck for taking advantage of that.

The literacy students seem to like being assessed, like putting artefacts in their big white binders that we keep in the cabinet. No, they don't go home. And that brings me to what others around me are saying. One thing I hear over and over is: what an unbelievable waste!

The Language Companion for the literacy level seems to be geared for a CLB 2 or 3L. Maybe not even L. The level two teacher covets it. Goodness knows the LC 1-4 is way too high for her students. I've heard of some schools that have removed the LC part of the binders, locking all that paper up in a storage closet somewhere. It's useless to the lower level learners. I am feeling envious of the teachers at the schools where permission has been granted to gut the damned things and make them light enough to lug home and back.

Another teacher cries to me about the wasted money. Imagine, he says, all that printing, all that ink, all that paper multiplied by all the schools across the nation. That's a lot of money that we could have used on something we really need.

Yet another instructor comes to my class just to show me what she just finished printing: inventory sheets times four skills plus About Me for her two classes. "That's JUST the inventory sheets. That. That much paper!!!"

Inventory sheets

I know there is little to no chance any of this is going to change, but do you know what? It sure would help my morale and that of a lot of teachers I know if someone at the top would just acknowledge that not everything PBLA is coming up roses. Not all teachers are pleased with the wasteful aspect, just to name one problem. A simple acknowledgement of that would go a long way in my book.

Okay, rant finished. I'm not even going to ask for comments anymore. I've pretty much given up hope that teachers across Ontario or Canada are ever going to coalesce into a vibrant, mutually supportive online community.  And many struggling with or critical of any aspect of PBLA seem afraid to speak out. So I'll just keep on doing my thing over here.

P.S. This week I added a page to my website: Literacy - Health. There you will find a whole whack of free printable worksheets to accompany four different CLB 1L resources. If you use them, I hope you'll let me know.

PBLA with Literacy and Seniors

PBLA with Seniors

Day One: Seniors did a warm-up activity to gently get them back into English after the two-week break; it was not related to PBLA.

Day two: I discussed with seniors my plans to continue restructuring our course to better meet their stated needs (e.g., more listening practice). I will be testing out some different types of activities on them, such as Dictogloss, which I think will really help them focus on capturing meaning, not every word verbatim. They are keen to help me field test techniques and give feedback.

Seniors explored the Language Companions in more depth than before. We did some poking around in them, some reading in the introduction. After break they got their requisite student talk time in the form of some small group discussion questions. During the last 15 minutes of class, I surveyed the groups for the results of their discussions. They pleasantly surprised me.

Discussion questions:

1. Is the LC useful to you? Overwhelming majority said yes.
2. Have you ever taken it home? Majority said yes, at least once. All but one student limits this home use to holidays and breaks. One student keeps his at home and TRIES to remember to bring it on Tuesdays (the day T passes back marked work).
3. What is the most useful part? Students were most excited about the Helpful English section, followed by My Canada.   CLB and Where I Live tied for third place.
4. If it were lighter / more slender, would you take it home daily? All said yes and had many suggestions regarding how this could be achieved. Some suggested the LC (all content except their dossiers) be bound into one volume, others thought each section should be bound separately to allow for convenient portability. 
5. Do you like learning about PBLA? Why or why not? At least 50% said yes, they want me to teach them about portfolio-based language assessment and do some teaching from the Language Companion. This contradicts what they had conveyed to me during previous needs assessments. (They normally vote for health, health, and health, in that order.)

Day three: We read Jan's New Binder and did the associated activities as a way of warming up with material that is not in the least intimidating. After break is always less teacher-centred with opportunities for group work or discussions. Seniors like to take things VERY slowly, breaking everything into baby steps. We don't always have a complete PPP pattern in every 2.5-hour session. Do you?

Our lexis for the module is on an easel pad.

Day four: With a true dictation the day before for comparison, we attempted our first Dictogloss using a paragraph about PBLA. Well, we didn't do it exactly right, but we will learn from our mistakes. I am always honest with them when I'm trying something out and ask them to give it three or four tries before we decide if we want to stop or continue.  Personally, I really liked it and hope we are able to hone our method.

After note taking, Ss collaborate to reconstruct the dictated passage.

I dragged a poster out of dormancy to make the CLB concept less abstract.

PBLA with CLB 1L

Day One: Not everyone showed up to an already small class, which was awkward. Did a gentle warm-up activity before break; after the break we started familiarizing ourselves with the four skill sections of the portfolios. We decorated and colour coded the dividers so that in the future we might not continue to confuse "reading" and "writing," which sound a lot alike.  This idea came from Jean Campbell's webinar on PBLA with Adult Literacy Learners (ALL).

Students' drawing for his reading divider

Our easel chart

Student's illustration for her writing divider

Day two: We took pictures to illustrate a reader that we will co-create about our Language Companions and associated routines and the purpose of them. Used TPR to help Ss get familiar with sections (put your pencil under the binder, in the back of listening, at the front of speaking, close your binder, give your pencil to Farhia, open the rings, close the rings, etc.) One key to successful TPR is to keep them on their toes; don't let the next command be easy to anticipate. You have to mix in crazy commands like "put your binder on your head." This ensures they truly listen to the words. I have to fight to keep my eyes and hands from giving away the meaning since I normally use a lot of pantomime and gesture for their benefit. In TPR, it's counterproductive to do that.

Picture taken to illustrate student and teacher reviewing artefacts

cover page of our book

a page from the book

Day Three: We worked on hard C and hard G using the book This Really Works (possibly out of print). I usually give them about 90 minutes of explicit phonemic awareness / decoding lessons each week. I especially appreciate Starfall.com when we are learning vowel sounds in CVC words and later vowel teams.

We also working on reading our new book, "My Big White Binder" and did some activities with the component lexis, such as hangman, flashcards, and more TPR. NB: Ss LOVE reading a book that is about THEM with pictures of THEM doing stuff. It makes the language come to life.

Day Four: We finished up the hard C / hard G activities. Played Sentence Unscramble on SpellingCity.com using words and sentences I had pre-loaded from our story. We then did a sentence unscramble worksheet that matched the sentences in the game. Played the flyswatter game. Since we had an odd number of students, I volunteered to go up against a student. He happens to be about 6'2" and 200 lbs. We decided it was a fair handicap since I know all the words but he can block me from reaching the words. The others collapsed in tears watching 5'3" me and my fancy footwork as I tried to sneak under and around.

flyswatter game board

We did not manage to get to the Yes/No quiz; not sure if I'll incorporate it on Monday. Its' another four-day week.

We take up the answers to a worksheet.

Friday: No class due to PBLA training session #9.

P.S. I highly recommend Jean Campbell's series on teaching ESL literacy. The first one is over, but you can still watch the webcast on Tutela. The second one is in February, I believe. Oh, and my colleague Maria Margaritis is giving a webinar on PTSD in the classroom Sunday at 1 Eastern. Be there or be square!