Looking for Guidance

We are in the process of restructuring our ESL program at our rural community college.  We are looking at different delivery methods, program models, and workforce related content.  We would like to bring in a consultant that has experience with different program models, but so far we have found individuals with mainly experience with intensive academic programs.  The majority of our students work full time and want English for work. Many can't dedicate a lot of hours per week for a class. Does anyone know of a consultant that could help, or a program that is a good model of delivering courses in a rural setting?

Comments

It's difficult to imagine that any one model can meet the needs of your audience of learners. Even if you find and adopt a complete program of materials (Life Skills ESL for example), delivery would need to be designed so it meets your situations.

Depending on the requirements of the school, the learners, and classroom educator(s), as well as the budget, the time available to prepare the program, and other factors I can't even guess at from here, an initial delivery could be ready in weeks - with lots of luck - or months. 

With a better definition of the task you are trying to complete, we might be able to be more specific.

Arthur Rubin and Elaine Kirn-Rubin

Such a challenging setting!  In Minnesota, we are about a year into some initial efforts to support our 'one-room schoolhouse' practitioners.  Some of them are in rural Minnesota, while others are in the metro area but have drop-in programming or are in corrections settings that are more of an adult ed 'lab' than a classroom.  Multi-level, multi-goals, and one teacher butterfly-ing around the classroom trying to keep everyone moving forward.  It's NOT ideal, to say the least!  But some great thinking has been happening, and this year we hosted a couple of webinars, facilitated some regional panel presentations, and started an online community of practice to assist such teachers and share expertise.  I'll just point to one of the webinars here, and you can take a look.  It's on our MN ABE PD You Tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tui4uKQDXpQ . This particular webinar focused on organizational structures and systems for monitoring progress.

I'm thinking of writing up an article for COABE about some of the big take-aways in our networking this year.  Do you think this would be useful to the field?

Patsy Egan Vinogradov, PhD

Director, ATLAS

www.atlasABE.org

I agree with the comment made. There has to be specificity of programs because the nature and needs of each ndividual will vary. For example, one student may need help with sounds and forming syllables because native language issues will take precedence over the new skill. Someone else may need vocabulary knowledge, and some learners will need a specific program to master the cognitive process (having the ability to comprehend and complete several tasks simultaneously). With that said, once there is basic evidence and understanding, and evaluation of the students priorities, a specific learning process could be assessed.

I agree with Joanne. I have found that my students make more progress in English when I give them the foundations she mentions here.

To include the workforce component it may be helpful to visit the place where the students work (if it is possible) and /or to get feedback from their managers about the language issues or communication barriers the workers face in the workplace.

Next, you may want to consider tailoring your ESL according to your findings.

It is exciting!  I wish you a great year.   

Claudia

Hi Michael-- I just have to put in my 2 cents here.   The challenges of your student population who work was an issue I came face to face with a couple of years ago in a very rural area of Maine.  I was hired to set up an adult ESL program of classes for the immigrants and migrants in our area.  Having worked with a great many programs as a consultant, having taught adult ESOL in a variety of settings, and also having really done my homework, or so I thought, about the population I was going to serve, I set up drop-in classes that met twice a week for three hours in the evening.   This design was intended to meet these needs:  at their jobs, our students often did not know their exact work schedule and could not be sure of when they would get off ( this is due to the seasonal nature of most of the work here); they had transportation challenges-- always needing a ride from someone, and they had child care issues.   Furthermore, several had been very frank about having had really bruising experiences in classes when they had had to miss classes because of work or transportation failures, and also when classes had to be the one-size-fits all model.   They did not like feeling like they would fall behind when they had to miss a class, and they did not like feeling either cheated by the slow pace of a mixed class, or overwhelmed by what others felt was the too-fast pace of a mixed class (to say nothing of being humiliated when they couldn't read or manage classroom tasks as well as other students).  

In the drop-in class, I used activities and games which I design for ESOL learning that allow learners to focus on highly personalized needs while getting lots of repetition and practice in a very informal way.   The games also allow for integration of students of different levels more easily than formal lessons do, I find (and the many teachers I have trained in this method also find).   The drop-in-classes worked very well in addressing the constraints I mentioned above-- eliminating the stigma of missing classes, of being late, of having to bring a child to class (we provided child care in various fashions), and most of all of students being at different levels.   

However, this model did not last very long for sociological reasons I had not anticipated. The community of ELLs we were serving were mostly from one very large extended family and there were  lot of intra-family rivalries, resentments and problems that got in the way of people coming to classes.  Since there were no other students for these people to hide among, they just preferred not coming to class to meet up with someone they felt had insulted their family .  The result of that was changing the delivery of instruction to individual tutoring after just over 16 months of classes.  This changeover was done as a suggestion from a member of the board of the non-profit for which I was working who had encountered a large adult ESOL program somewhere in very rural Colorado which was ONLY able to deliver services through tutoring and individual sessions.    While I personally, as a teacher of 45 years' experience, was reluctant to give up the idea of classes, I quickly found that the individual delivery model was extremely successful.  All issues of lateness, attendance, child care, transportation and self-consciousness about being able to understand and keep up were moot since I was the one who went to students' homes and I was able to design each and every lesson to meet the needs and preferences of a particular student/learner.  As a lone provider of instruction working on a relatively limited budget, I was able to tutor 12-15 students at a time.   I could go to students' houses at a time when they could be there-- thus eliminating the issue of irregular end-of-work times.    Students had to agree to a contract-- negotiated in Spanish as all were Spanish speakers-- in which they agreed to meet at the times and place the student and I agreed on, to notify me in adequate time if they had to cancel, and to agree that if they missed two lessons without adequate notice, their contract was cancelled and they could not longer receive tutoring.  In the two years I delivered English instruction this way, I had only 5 cancellations without adequate notice (one because the student's phone was in his truck which was on a lift for emergency service...!!)  

I worked with arch-beginners with no English and no education, with those wanting only to practice for the citizenship interview, with college students who needed a lot of guidance in learning how to do academic assignments or in understanding their textbooks, and with others who only wanted better conversational English.  This was so much more satisfying than having a class of people with ALL those needs in it but very few of which could be adequately met.   It was also very much more effective in terms of students meeting goals and being motivated to continue learning.  

The Colorado program our board member told me about had over 100 students receiving individual instruction from a whole stable of teacher-tutors over a huge rural area.   In the best of all possible of MY worlds, if I could get paid (the non-profit supporting me changed its operating structure and had to eliminate the tutoring), I would still offer drop-in classes at different times of day AS WELL as the individual tutoring.  Nothing takes the place of the social aspect of a class and of being able to have students interact with each other.  But the classes were far from effective in meeting the real English needs  and the highly individual learning needs--of the students we had. 

As I said, I have taught for many years-- in Africa in middle and high school, in private English schools for adults, in adult ESOL programs,  in a higher ed ESL program,  and in community college ESL programs---and mostly I LOVED the teaching.  But in this particular setting, the traditional adult ESOL mixed-level class -- tried often before I came along-- was the least successful model while the individual tutoring model was the one the students loved and profited from the most.     I hope this gives you food for thought!!  

Robin Lovrien (Schwarz)  

 

 

Hello Michael and all, Thank you for raising this tough issue, Michael. Thanks to Patsy and Robin for sharing the work they have been doing to address this complexity. There is no doubt that one-on-one tutoring, when it is possible to arrange, is highly effective. I am reminded of the value of providing opportunities for learners to interact as much as possible with someone who speaks English fluently-- which certainly is the case with one-on-one tutoring. While giving students the opportunity to interact with each other in the classroom surely has great value -- it is a fact that many learners often have very few chances to interact with fluent speakers in their daily lives. Tutoring offers them rich opportunities to do so. As Robin notes, tutoring is specifically designed to address an individual's needs. Hard to beat that!

Looking forward to learning more about how members are dealing with these common challenges.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, AELL CoP

Susan, Michael, Patsy, Robin and others,

Susan, you have described a common problem for some English language learners and their teachers, that the learners don't have enough opportunities outside class to use and practice the English skills they are learning in class. I wonder what strategies ESL/ESOL teachers have found helpful. Here are two examples, and I am interested to hear more strategies from others:

  • Speaking and listening skills: For students who are working at the same company or in the same industry, for example, healthcare, hotels and hospitality, or transportation, teaching work-related oral vocabulary and assigning students specific ways to practice using it at work.
  • Reading and writing skills: For students who have access by smartphone, tablet or computer to the Internet, creating a (free) private class Facebook group and using both FB asynchronous messaging and where possible real-time chatting

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

In our community based ESL program, we have recently changed our structure.  Maybe you can find something helpful with what we did. 

We have leveled ESL classes Basic, Intermediate, Advanced,  Transitions.  Students are required to take one of these leveled classes which we call a Basic Skills Class in addition to a workplace class. 

This cycle we have four workplace class options – hospitality, healthcare, finance and business.  These will vary based on the interests of your students.  They are multi-level and include Intermediate, Advanced and Transitions students together.  At intake, we have our students select the sector that they are interested in on their intake form.   We also have an Academic sector class for those students preparing for college.  This is considered their workplace class.

After testing, they are placed in their level class and the workplace sector of their choice.

Our Basic ESL students have a general workplace class that focuses on soft skills and career exploration.   It complements their basic skills class.

The students do seem to enjoy their workplace sector class as well as their basic skills class.  The sector classes include Career Exploration, Employability Skills, Workplace Knowledge, Workplace Skills, Lifelong Learning Skills and Assessments/Project Presentations.

As far as scheduling classes, that depends on your program requirements, budget and staff so I don’t want to get into any specifics as far as that goes.

Thank you, Aimee, for sharing  your model. This sounds very promising. I am especially glad to hear that you are trying out multilevel classes focused on learners' interests and goals. Of course every ESL class is multilevel --some are just a lot more so than others. However, I have long believed that teaching a multilevel class with a group of learners who share similar goals is much easier than one in which everyone has a different goal.

Could you say a bit more about how this is working for you? How did you decide on the career clusters?  How long has your program been structured in this way? Are you able to share any outcomes?

I'm also curious about the curriculum you are using. Thank you for any further details you can share with us.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, AELL CoP

We just started this in July so it is fairly new for us.  We choose those career cluster because they seemed to be what most of our students were interested in and have many job possibilities in the area. Those that aren't interested in one of the particular careers usually want to go to college for the career of their choice so that's why we also have the academic preparation class.  Others seem to enjoy exploring the career clusters even if it is not exactly what they want to do.  Right now we just have a curriculum outline with those areas mentioned above and the teachers have some freedom now to choose the topics that they will cover since it is new.  They are using a variety of different online materials as well as different texts.  Most of which can be found on the PAACE ESL Division website. 

Hi Aimee, Thanks so much for filling us in on how you are restructuring your program to address learners' transition goals. Thanks, as well, for linking us to the PAACE collection of resources. It's great to have all of these resources in one place!

Colleagues, if you have not yet checked out the PAACE resources, you will want to do so. You will find leveled instructional materials as well as career specific resources, e.g., architecture and construction, retail and customer service, hospitality, health care, etc. Let us know what you find especially useful there.

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, AELL CoP

Hi Aimee,

I'm intrigued by the model you've described here. Can you say more about the career sector classes, such as who teaches them? are they career exploration classes or actually VESL classes? 

Thanks, Andy