Volunteer Management Conference

After being kind of disappointed by MinneTESOL, I wasn’t hugely excited about the next conference on my list, the Volunteer Management Conference.

Concrete Bricks by Alesa Dam on Flickr

It seemed unlikely to be valuable because I was feeling pessimistic about conferences in general, and also because volunteer management is kind of a “fluffy” profession, not backed up by much research or data or formal history.

I’m thrilled to report that I was pleasantly surprised.  The sessions I went to did not perpetuate the fluff, but sought to give us concrete ideas and skills for taking our work to the next level.

I gained background in creating a volunteer-led ESL curriculum, setting up focus groups (of students and volunteers), addressing the 80/20 rule of life (that 80% of your effort will go to 20% of your tasks and problems), and creating well-designed flyers and brochures.

I think I actually found the last one to be the most useful.  Making flyers is one of those random parts of my job that I’m expected to just do, and I have never had the slightest bit of training on how to do a good job.  The presenter walked us through the four pieces of the puzzle that we need to consider, and three days later I still remember them: proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast.

Here’s what I think she did right:

1. limited her scope,
2. stayed focused on it, and
3. provided different levels of meaningful practice.

That presentation had no hand-outs.  This was disconcerting at first, but it turned out to be a strength.  Her goal wasn’t to give resources, but to convey four interrelated elements of design.  She didn’t try to make us into designers that afternoon.  The unified design she was teaching us was reflected in her presentation: she taught what she said she was going to teach, and she did it in a way that assured our attention was never split.  She also followed the basic format of a good ESL lesson: I do it, we do it, you do it.  By this I mean she gave us opportunities to practice what we were learning, and that over the course of the session she went from actively guiding our practice to letting us work through examples independently.

I think what made this conference stand out is that all the sessions I went to were taught in this way.  I hope other conferences catch on soon.

MinneTESOL

MinneTESOL was last Friday and Saturday.  Overall I’m glad I went, but I wasn’t quite blown away.

To my mind, the conference’s highlight was when Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Latehomecomer spoke on Friday evening.  It was poetic and moving and beautiful.

The rest of the conference was a let-down except when I went to presentations by Hamline University faculty.  And no, Hamline did not pay me to say that.  The fact is that their presentations were exactly what they sounded like, were well-thought out and easily within their expertise, included hands-on practice of what we were learning, engaged and engaging presentation style, and successfully distributed useful materials that I’ll be able to use and/or alter at the learning center.

There was actually one other worthwhile presentation about a research project in neurolinguistics.  It was just a talk with a PowerPoint but the speaker’s energy and focus on actually communicating with the audience made it work wonderfully.  My colleague also pointed out that the scope was perfect for a short presentation.

The other presentations committed the following (what I consider to be) sins:

• the keynote was plain lecture with a busy, dense PowerPoint for an hour straight.  Also, they didn’t know that PowerPoint has several pointer features and that they didn’t have to point to parts of their graphs with their shadows.
• one woman actually just read her paper to us without pause while her busy PowerPoint went on behind her.  I’m sorry, but I didn’t get up at 6:45AM on a Saturday for your airport voice.  Thank goodness she only wasted 20 minutes of my life.
• the following 20-minute session was at least an attempt to communicate with the audience, but he had not only made too few hand-outs but misplaced some of them and didn’t freely pass his card around for us to contact him later.
• the special interest brainstorm session on Adult Education had potential, but I ended up in a small group that was taken over by a group of three women griping about terrible cooperation between ESL/ABE and the MN State Colleges and Universities.  I wish we could have moved past that phase of the discussion.
• I went to another 20-minute presentation in which the speaker concluded that adopting technology in the classroom was easier than people think and they just need more time.  Clearly he hadn’t seen the keynote in which they thought they knew PowerPoint.

I feel the conference as a whole could have done a better job with:

• making sure there were on-site photocopying resources
• facilitating electronic communication of presentation hand-outs in lieu of paper hand-outs (i.e. a Conference Resources page on their website, or an email directory of the presenters)
• laying down some standards of presentation style

Several people I talked to agreed with me but remarked that these are perennial issues with conferences.  Which begs the question… why?  These are very fixable problems!

I Need More Hours

I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything I want to do in the near future:

• write an amazing two-week curriculum unit on Personal Finance
• mentor my volunteers more closely
• clean my office till it’s sparkly
• devise a better system for collecting and submitting volunteer stats
• have a balanced and from-scratch meal plan that I follow
• completely deep-clean my apartment
• get my TEFL from Hamline
• start another 5 Week Course
• have friends over for dinner
• run/walk everyday
• actually follow a laundry schedule
• read and write more
• continue to spend quality time with my long-distance family and boyfriend
• start a pre-literate class at my learning center
• reach out to the other people in my life more
• start a peer-mentoring project with another coordinator
• learn Somali
• conduct numerous site visits to sites like mine and other sites that work with my students
• roll my newsletter into a new, more professional format

I didn’t think about that list for very long.  That’s what it looks like off the top of my head.

Conventional wisdom says “just pick something and start.”  I have.  And it’s something.  I’m trying a new chili recipe as we speak, and I’ve been working on several other of the above personal and professional goals, as well as others that aren’t really blog material.

The problem isn’t starting (for once); it’s wanting it to all be in line Now.

So I’m going to go see how the chili turned out, and put on my running shoes, throw my laundry in this evening, and ponder curriculum as the machines are going, and remember that I’ll get there inch by inch.

Thoughts and a Question

A few things I’ve been thinking about lately:

• how to not overwhelm others with my ideas and/or suggestions, but welcome them into a discussion
• Susan WB’s blog post about studies on intrinsic/extrinsic motivation
• why is getting started on projects so difficult even though it feels so great to finally be started?
• it’s getting to be time for another 5-week Course
• I don’t do very much to foster conversation on this blog.

I wrote the list thinking the points would be random and different, but they’ve turned out to be interestingly related.  Hm.

Anyway, I’d like to take a moment to ask the readers:

Time and commitment barriers aside, what would you do a 5-Week Course in?

Oops! and Skype is Sneaky

I’m at a VISTA supervisor training in Dallas, and I completely forgot to blog.  Sorry!  I’ve met so many fascinating people and have lots to report.

One barrier to reporting this, besides full days of sessions and an evening out in Dallas was that Firefox was running funny, and I couldn’t understand why.  I finally figured out thanks to Felipe that when I installed Skype, it automatically/sneakily included a buggy Firefox add-on.  Shame on Skype for sliding that one under the table, and further shame for doing so with something that hurt my web-browsing.

More soon!

Preaching to the Tech Choir

The blog Dangerously Irrelevant compares the phrases “I’m not good at math” with “I’m not good at computers” and wonders why the second one is so much more acceptable.  I concur.

I’m completely boggled when I meet fiercely intelligent, energetic, involved, interested, and interesting people and then hear them say something like “I don’t do computers.”  Boggled.

boys choir by saikofish on Flickr

When I hear something to the effect of, “I’m over 30, I’m not a computer person,” it translates into two messages:

The first says, “I make excuses,” and it’s disappointing.

The second says “I don’t value anything you say via computer or about computers,” and it’s insulting.

I’m smiling at the irony of posting this on my blog.

Summer Institute: Quick Reflection

Summer Institute is over and I’m back home in the Twin Cities.

Looking back at the conference, I realize just how valuable it was to me in terms of content and networking.

This was largely to do with the conference itself, but also because I did some things right to maximize my experience:
- took obsessive notes
- kept my papers as organized as possible
- slept enough
- wore comfortable shoes
- was open to serendipitous socializing

There are those attitudes, soft skills, and environmental supports we say our students need. We need them too!

I’m looking forward to processing more this weekend. I’ll post more about the conference in some form and also go on to more “normal” posts on Monday.

Summer Institute: Teaching Personal Finance

I’ve got about an hour until dinner, so I’ll take this opportunity to let you know what I’ve been up to at Summer Institute.

I’ve attended three sessions, one “collective-intelligence” gathering, and two plenaries.  This post will be about the first of the three sessions.

Action Plans for Making Dollars Count

My first thought was wow, this is a lot of information in a short amount of time.  This suited my needs well since one of my upcoming projects is to write a 2-week Advanced ESL unit on Personal Finance.  The presentation was a quick, perhaps even rushed overview of a financial literacy curriculum (Dollar Works 2) with tons of examples, teaching plans, activities, forms, and things to consider while teaching in this subject area.  Perfect for me.

I wish we could have gotten farther into cultural concerns, though they did recommend several resources for a more in-depth look at how  cultures that aren’t American majority culture view money:

• Building Awareness of Culture and Resources
• Learning the Language of Money
• Money Smart

That’s it!  Some networking just presented itself, so the blogging will commence later.

Summer Institute – Plenaries

I’ve got about an hour until dinner, so I’ll take this opportunity to let you know what I’ve been up to at Summer Institute.

I’ve attended three sessions, one “collective-intelligence” gathering, and two plenaries.

I’ll start by talking about the plenaries.  They were in the banquet hall and were always scheduled directly after a meal.  As a result, there were always plates, food, and other stuff on them that precluded comfortable (therefore any) note-taking.  So my take-away is not very detailed.  Here it is:

The first plenary presenter was by Dr. Irwin Kirsch from ETS.  He talked about America’s Perfect Storm.  The report is here.  They also have a 9-minute video that didn’t really come up on Google, which I think is an oversight on their part.  The talk was based on that video, which was about how three factors are happening in America at the same time and are leading slowly but surely to a crisis: the changing economy, changing demographics, and the nonresponsive education system.  Interesting.  Some of my questions include how ETS’s interests as a company factor into this and how things are changing as the recession continues.

The second plenary presenter was Barry Shaffer from the Minnesota Department of Education and talked about the economic climate in Minnesota and the amazing accomplishments we’ve all made this year in Adult Basic Education (ABE).  We rock, and he proved it with numbers.  Thanks, Barry.

It was great that these very important people (who I couldn’t help but notice were men talking to a room that was comprised of at least 85% women) came to talk to us about very important issues.  They were effective speakers who had a lot to share.  It struck me as strange that there wasn’t a bigger effort to up the environment so that people’s backs weren’t toward the speaker and there were clean, or at least cleared off tables to write or type on.

It’s funny how much the little things impact the big things.

I’ll talk about the sessions and collective intelligence gathering in near-future posts!

When You Realize How Far You’ve Come

Relatividad de la distancia by Victor_nuno on Flickr

Today was one of those rare days when I was able to not only handle a situation well that would have knocked me flat 8 months ago, but I also realized it.

What was this situation?  Registering six new students and realizing 60 seconds after Advanced class started that I was the only one there to teach it.

It could’ve been easy – we’re watching The Wizard of Oz.  Perfect!  Pop in a movie and focus on the new students finishing their intake exams.  Nope, because the laptop is dead and the library computers refuse to play DVDs.  So I gave some quick instructions to the new students, rescheduled one of them, had one of them test in the Advanced room so I could keep an eye on him, and then taught a pretty successful, high-energy class with zero preparation.

During the class, I realized that this would have been completely overwhelming to me in September, and still a huge challenge in December.  This evening I was definitely kept on my toes, but it was well within what I could handle.  Being able to do it felt good, and noticing that I wouldn’t have been able to do it when I first started felt better.