Dear TEIS Colleagues,

Greetings to all of you. I am honored to be serving as your chair-elect, and I am looking forward to connecting with you at the convention in Seattle. I hope that many of you will be able to attend the conference and enjoy an invigorating professional development experience in the company of good friends. I hope that you are as excited as I am about spending time with colleagues who understand us and get what we are grappling with daily. It can be isolating to be the only TESOL faculty member or one of just a few. I always find it uplifting to connect with teachers who wonder about the same issues, focus on similar priorities, love languages and cultures, and advocate passionately for bilingual learners.

I would like to invite you specifically to several events TEIS has planned for the convention. Our academic session will address the role of teachers’ TESOL expertise on learner outcomes. We are interested in evaluating whether TESOL training has measurable effects on what matters most to educators: students’ academic achievement. An amazing panel of experts will share their research findings from studies conducted in California and New York, USA, and Qatar. The presenters will demonstrate methodologies of bona fide program evaluation and highlight caveats in studying lasting outcomes of teacher training.

For the 2017 convention, TEIS has partnered with the Refugee Concerns Interest Section to bring you an invaluable session on preparing teachers for the special needs of refugee students. The panel will unite researchers, practitioners, and advocates to bring into focus a group of essential topics. They will approach from the perspective of cultural diversity and the recognition of students’ strengths and contributions before they investigate specific challenges for unaccompanied minors and students with limited formal schooling. Presenters will explore issues related to overcoming trauma, accessing resources, integrating support, and designing suitable curricula. Finally, they will outline successful, evidence-based training programs for teacher professional development. Presenters represent some of the leading resources in refugee education.

I would also like to highlight for you another much-anticipated session, which is the result of our partnership with the Second Language Writing IS. The panel will explore various approaches to the preparation of preservice candidates to become writing teachers as well as better writers. Presenters will reflect on instructional units and assignments they have tested and developed for this purpose.

TESOL is offering an additional forum for networking at the Seattle conference. We invite anyone with responsibility or interest in developing online teacher education courses for in-service teachers in U.S. public schools. These can range from short-term programs in TESOL to prepare all content teachers or in-service or preservice teachers, or they can be specialized coursework for teachers who are pursuing a full ELL certificate or endorsement. The purpose is to introduce educators who are presently working on similar tasks in order to exchange resources and materials, and perhaps even form an ongoing support group. Eventually, this group can share expertise with others in the form of future conference presentations and TEIS webinars.

Please mark your calendar for the annual open business meeting. This is the most important idea forum of the interest section. We launch activities and initiatives based on the issues raised by members. Think of current trends in your community and advocacy concerns that TEIS should act on. One specific proposal on which we are gathering feedback is TESOL’s reconfiguring of interest sections with a two-tiered system of professional knowledge communities: informal groups (professional learning networks) and formal groups (professional knowledge sections; PKSs). Formal groups, PKSs, would be renewed annually and would have a leadership succession plan. They would operate year-round, define their own activities, and be able to organize one 1-hour 45-minute session at the annual convention; however, they would not be evaluating convention proposals. As you know, a key role of interest sections has been to invite reviewers, review proposals, and fill a proportionately allocated number of convention sessions with quality presentations. Although this proposal does not specify how future convention proposals would be reviewed, it removes that decision-making from the PKSs. Anyone interested in a town hall discussion of this proposal by interest section leaders can access the transcript. We are interested in hearing everyone’s comments on this prospective organizational change. You can also contact Dudley Reynolds, TESOL’s president, directly to voice your opinion.

Finally, I am inviting volunteers for our IS booth during the convention. This is a good opportunity to guide novice attendees, who may not know about activities available to TEIS members, such as serving as a reviewer, participating in our TEIS webinars, or joining our TEIS online community on myTESOL. You may remember how grateful you were when someone reached out to you at your first TESOL convention. If you are ready to give someone else a warm welcome, please let me know.

I am delighted about seeing you in Seattle and serving as your TEIS chair in 2017–18.

Best regards,

Andrea Hellman

TEIS Chair-Elect

TEIS Convention Sessions and Meetings

TEIS Academic Session
Gauging the Effect of TESOL Expertise on Learner Outcomes
Friday, 24 March 3 pm–4:45 pm
WSCC, 3B
Presenters: Donald Freeman, Dudley Reynolds, Andrea Honigsfeld, Maria Dove, Joshua Lawrence, Susana Dutro, Donna Smith, Tyler Watts
Facilitator: Andrea Hellman

TEIS–Refugee Concerns InterSection
Preparing TESOL Educators to Address the Needs of Refugee Students
Wednesday, 22 March, 1 pm–2:45 pm
WSCC, 310
Presenters: Brenda Custodio, Debbie Zacarian, Judy Haynes, Stacy Brown, Julie Kasper, Laura Baecher, Jennifer Ballard-Kang, Josephine Kennedy, Lois Scott-Conley, Allene Grognet
Organizer: Andrea Hellman

Second Language Writing–TEIS InterSection
Teaching Teachers to Write: Assignments and Approaches in Preservice Programs
Friday, 24 March, 9:30 am–11:15 pm
WSCC, 304
Presenters: Cathryn Crosby, Lynn Goldstein, Kate Reynolds, Brian Morgan, Nigel Caplan, Ditlev Larsen

TEIS Networking Event
Online Program Developer Network
Thursday, 23 March, 9:30 am–10:15 am
Sheraton Grand Ballroom B 

TEIS Open Business Meeting
Wednesday, 22 March, 5 pm–6:30 pm
WSCC, 614

Volunteer for the IS Booth