Knowing the immediate and long-term impact of my instruction on my teacher candidates is of critical importance to my teaching and to my scholarship.
I also consider it to be the ethical duty of teacher education to take responsibility for the welfare both of the teachers it credentials and the learners who will be their students.
For these reasons, I attempt to maintain my relationships with program graduates and to assess their needs and celebrate their achievements. Graduates move on to become colleagues, collaborators, host and mentor teachers, and the future leadership of our field.
Being able to maintain relationships with former MA TESOL students is essential for the quality of my scholarship and teaching, as I am able to assess the impact of my teaching on their practice and make adjustments to my course content and activities in response. Many of the students I have worked with closely have gone on to tremendous achievements, which is a joy to witness.
Below is a select overview of the professional contributions of several alumni from the MA TESOL program:
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- Erin is in her 6th year teaching 9th/10th grade ESL/Global History at Brooklyn International High School. She is involved in a three year collaboration with Hibakusha Stories and Youth Arts New York to teach about the atomic bomb (see village voice article about their visit to her class). She is the recipient of a 2010 Fund for Teachers Grant which funded travel to Nepal to volunteer in the schools in the UNHCR refugee camps where her Bhutanese refugee students studied before coming to BIHS. After my trip I wrote a guide to the school system that has been used as a reference by teachers and professionals who work with Bhutanese refugees in California, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire, Illinois, Georgia, and North Carolina. Her blog and interview are a source for the Bhutanese refugee section of the upcoming edition of Understanding Your English Language Learners edited by Dr. Jeffra Flaitz. The photo shows her with Bhutanese refugee students whose families and school she visited when she was in Nepal.
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- Ryan is currently an English Language Fellow (ELF), based at the Bi-National Center in Tarapoto, Peru. As a Fellow, Ryan has worked with public and private school EFL teachers and university pedagogical faculty to improve upon their 2nd language methodological and teaching practices. Ryan is also the National Coordinator for the U.S. Embassy-sponsored Microscholarship ACCESS programs, a program that provides 2 years of English to bright public school students of low socioeconomic background. His interests include vocabulary acquisition, developing authentic speaking curriculum, and project-based learning. Prior to becoming a Fellow, Ryan served as lead teacher at the POLY schools in Changwon, South Korea (2010-2012) and was an ESL teacher in the New York City Public Schools (2007-2010).
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- She has taught three years of self-contained ESL 1st grade in the Bronx. Last year, she moved to a school in East Harlem and is now the ESL Coordinator serving 50 K-5 ELLs. She has applied for and received several Donors Choose grants, most recently an iPad for her students! She recently received funding through the Office of ELLs for VocabularySpellingCity.com (a really great vocabulary website for ELLs!) subscriptions for her grade 3-5 ELLs. She has hosted three student teachers in the last five years and has facilitated ESL technology and literacy workshops for her colleagues. She is now pursuing a second Masters degree in Nonprofit Management.
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- Wei-ee is the recipient of the Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching and is currently in Singapore to complete a capstone project on developing Mathematics problem solving skills in primary schools. She has served as a Common Core Curriculum Alignment Developer and as a Workshop Facilitator for school-wide professional development activities on ESL methodologies and SMART Board technology. She has worked with ELL as an After School Parent ESL and AIS Teacher, and as ESL coordinator and trainer for ELL placement and data collection. She has also presented at the 2009 New York State TESOL Conference. Below she is pictured celebrating the final days of school with her students at P.S. 290-Juan Morel Campos.
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- Jessica teaches ESL and writing at a New York City public high school which focuses on GED readiness in lower Manhattan. She is committed to project-based learning and can be found sprouting, planting, growing beans as students read “Seedfolks” by Paul Fleischman, with visits to community gardens. With her students, she researches the DREAM Act and gun control. Her students’ feature news stories (how quality of water has changed in your country over the lifetime of someone in your family) was published on website of Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting (Student Reporting) with a Pulitzer Center journalist visiting her classroom. She publishes a school-wide literary magazine of student writing and art, a school website (www.tenzerworld.com) and a school newspaper (Word!). She is a member of GED Plus Graduation Expectations committee which is working to develop Common Core-based curriculum and rubrics for our College and Career and a member of school-based Interdisciplinary Committee of teachers which develops curriculum and organizes events around interdisciplinary themes.
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- Marcus teaches ESL at Pershing Intermediate School in Brooklyn, New York, and received the Senator Martin J. Golden, Teacher of the Year Award in 2011. In the summer of 2012 he received the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad Grant, Beyond the Headlines: Mexico and Colombia. He received the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Certification, in English as a New Language, Early Adolescence Through Adult Certification in 2011. Currently, he is an Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter College: Courses Include: Student Teaching Practicum and Seminar for NYC Teaching Fellows and TESOL graduate students, and has co-taught the K-12 Curriculum and Materials in the Content Areas for NYC Teaching Fellows. He has served as a mentor teacher, and as a Measures of Effective Teaching (MET Project) participant, 2009–present. Marcus has made multiple presentations at the state and national level.
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- Debbie is teaching at PS 160, a Title I school with a 70% ESL population. She has the highest NYSESLAT pass rate in the ESL department and has helped her school achieve their goal of a 14% NYSESLAT pass rate–her average is 20%. She runs two multicultural festivals a year for the community which feature multicultural music, dancers, games, food and opportunities for families to learn together. She has created and run several before and afterschool Title III programs for ELLs including the ESL cheerleading squad, ESL homework helpers club, afterschool literacy for ELLs and ESL morning book club. The photo below is her ESL cheerleading squad at PS 160 in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
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- Sarah Rorimer is currently in her second year teaching first grade self-contained ESL in the NYC Department of Education. She began her career in Russia, where she taught English as a Foreign Language for two years. Later, she became a NYC Teaching Fellow and taught ESL at the high school level. Most recently, Sarah taught a TESOL Practicum course for teachers in training at Hunter College. Sarah has co-authored two journal articles, and she initiated an arts partnership with the Noguchi Museum. She is passionate about the use of content-based instruction, the arts, and technology in teaching.
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- David Patterson has taught ESL, ELA, and social studies to sixth, seventh, and eighth-graders for the last five years at Middle School 256 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He is currently the instructional lead teacher at his school. For the past two years, he has taught Methods to graduate students in the TESOL program at Hunter College, where he is also receiving his degree in administration and supervision. He also serves as the director of curriculum and instruction for GO Summer, the city’s oldest program dedicated to combating the summer slide among K-8 public-school students, located in downtown Manhattan. He is a 2008 TESOL NYC Teaching Fellow.
