Working on Labor Day

Labor Day was a professional development day, and both Widi and I volunteered to be presenters. I used my old trick of finding an wonderfully talented teacher to co-facilitate with me. While she could not match Wilma's effervescence, Becky, pictured here, provided a great shock language experience, helped me navigate the international school culture, and put together an image-strong PowerPoint. Our topic was ESL Inclusion: Making Team Teaching Work. I'm learning a lot about the difficulties of inclusion, wherein the ESL teacher works inside another teacher's classroom, and never having taught ESL in that situation, it's a delicate situation teaching other people how to do it. I think of it working ideally like co-facilitating, and in the session someone brought out the point that team teaching should look like what Becky and I had demonstrated, where all the students see both teachers as "their" teacher.

Widi had even more participants sign up for his session on differentiation, and teachers have been asking him for a copies of his handout this week, so I take that as a signal that participants are talking about it.

I think our two workshops were the only participant-centered sessions the whole day. I went to four others that were all pretty much lecture style. For me personally, not much learning takes place in that situation. I don't think it works that well for kids either. I like to see teachers and students energized in creating their own understanding.