Building Bridges is committed to serving as a major vehicle of professional development among English, ESL, and Reading faculty. Current participants include faculty from Bakersfield College, CSU Bakersfield, Cerro Coso, Porterville College, Taft College, the American Language Institute at CSUB, and Kern High School District.
This presentation focuses on a reading/presentation assignment adaptable for nearly all levels and texts. The assignment reinforces accountability for reading and ownership for interpretations as well as facilitates class engagement with academic discourses and collaborative knowledge building.
It has become common to hear about the "crisis in the humanities"; students today are being attracted to other disciplines for various reasons. Nonetheless, they all still need to learn how to write and, as such, must take introductory writing courses. How can we, as instructors teaching writing to students who generally dislike writing, convince our classes to invest in writing as and important and worthy skill? This presentation will attempt to show that one way to achieve this is to show students how the skills that come with writing can be used in their social and personal lives as well as in their professional and academic careers.
CSU Bakersfield has reinvented its General Education program, using cross-disciplinary themes and foundational skills as its organizing principles. The new program, called Achieving Integration and Mastering Skills (AIMS), has been over three years in the making and will be implemented in the Fall Semester of 2016. In this session, the new CSUB Director of General Education, will present the guiding principles and key practices of AIMS.
Participants will see several resources that allow them to "flip" the English classroom by using more direct online instruction strategies while providing differentiated instruction during class time to provide. The presenter will show how to plan the blended English classroom using free and reduced-fee online tools. Many of these resources can be used by all teachers who just want to integrate a little technology, leave something for the sub, or add a little zest to their lesson plans.
This session will provide attendees concrete tools to learn how to teach critical thinking skills while covering content. By the end of the session, participants can expect to be able to create actual lesson plans based on content from any discipline in the Humanities or Social Sciences that will enhance critical thinking skills. Participants will also learn how these skills can be measured easily and accurately.
This presentation from the writing center leads at CSUB and BC will outline the similarities and differences between the two centers in their efforts to serve writers at all levels in any discipline. Additionally, we will discuss qualitative and quantitative data related to student success and retention.
This particular session will suggest motivational techniques that are based on business practices. These will have a mutually reinforcing relationship with students' future career goals.
"The Tree" is a simple graphic representation of effective instructional design that integrates the key ideas of thinkers ranging from Paulo Freire to Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, as well as effective programs like AVID, ERWC, and RIAP. Participants will explore why these ideas are more relevant than ever and how this simple tool can empower them to design thematic, inquiry-driven units or instruction across several disciplines with ease.
I am presenting the 4 Foundations that our team decided on when we created ELA/ELD curriculum (Between Two Worlds). I have personally seen students ranging from ESL to At-Risk to Academically High become highly interested and motivated to analyze literature and apply critical thinking and normative ethics to the relevant topics of today.
A team of English teachers from across the Kern High School District has worked throughout the past year to develop and disseminate a series of instructional units for English 9, 10, and 11. Not a mandatory curriculum, but rather a springboard to dialogue between colleagues, these "Anchor Units" are offered as examples of how to "deepen" the teaching and learning process and build college readiness through use of the "Tree"model of instructional design. Participants in this workshop will receive insights into one such Anchor Unit for English 9, 10, and 11, respectively.
This session is a step-by-step guide to help teachers understand and set up quickmarks for responding to students when using Turnitin. Quickmarks can be completely customized and create a way to provide consistent, thorough, and directed feedback to students while reducing the stress and time of writing responses by hand. Presentation will also touch on grammar review and prefabricated quickmarks that are already part of the Turnitin system.
"Graphic novels are taking flight and showing up on syllabi across the country. How do these novels work as teaching tools? How do they cater to ELL and LD students? Finally, how do the authors and literary critics feel about a graphic novel's place in the literary community?"
This panel discussion will provide perspectives on what skills college English professors expect first-year students to have. With audience participation, the speakers will explore how to bridge the gaps that students often encounter as they move from high school to college. Representatives from the BC English and EMLS departments, along with student participants, will focus on ways high school teachers and college instructors can better equip students to become successful writers.
Many of us want or are required to use Turnitin.com to check students’ papers for plagiarism, but the program can do so much more. I will go over how to use the program for citation checking, peer review, and grading. You can allow the students to see it as more than a watchdog and help lighten your work load.
This session addresses the different essay structures written by students whose first languages may be Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese or Arabic. It will also discuss typical impressions that ESL students have about the essay structure of English. The awareness of how students of multiple languages write should help instructors become more effective in teaching writing skills.
