I always enjoy reading articles in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, as well as his books. He shares great stories, though sometimes I think he stretches his conclusions a bit. I think quite a few of his writings are useful in education, as I’ve shared in previous posts.

He has a new book coming out, and it’s a collection of articles he’s written for The New Yorker. This post at Kottke.org not only shares what will be included, but also includes links to each of those articles so that you can read them all online for free.

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with our school’s Family Literacy Project where we provide computers and home Internet access to immigrant families. This effort, as well as our after-school ESL Computer Lab, has been recognized by the International Reading Association. Students with home computers (who use our website for one hour each day), typically have a three-to-four times greater gain in our cloze and fluency assessments over control group members.

I wrote in June about how this concept is expanding.

The Sacramento Mutual Housing Association (SMHA), one of the most respected affordable housing organizations in California (if not in the United States), began piloting a similar project in one of their developments.

They hired the bilingual aides — Xee Vang and Kou Vang — who help in our school’s project so that they could work with SMHA immigrant residents to lead an on-site computer and English literacy program at the development’s computer lab.   Families attended a three-month,  twice-weekly,  two hour class to learn English and develop computer skills.   The twelve families who graduated from the program are receiving their own computer and will be able to continue to use the wireless network at the site, with similar “homework” expectations.

In our project at Burbank High School, we never really followed-up on parent English language assessments — it was hard enough to find the time to regularly do ones with students.  And we have never really looked at assessing computer skill development, either.  In the SMHA project, however, both were done — in fact, the primary emphasis of the course was on adults, though younger family members also periodically attended, and the results were pretty darn impressive.

Almost all of the participants in the program were Beginning English Language Learner adults — half  of them were Vietnamese and half were Hmong.  The average initial English assessment scores were 69.7% and by the end of three months they stood at 98.8%.    And in the computer skills assessment, the first scores averaged 14.2%, while the final average was 95.6%.

Here are links to some of the projects created by participants:

Group Projects

Individual Projects

SMHA begins a second class later this month at about the same time we’ll be starting-up another year of our school-based effort.  Wish us both luck!

The President’s speech has been released by the White House. Here is what I think is the most useful part:

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

This fits in with a goal sheet I have students use, though it’s not a typical goal sheet focused on doing their homework or behaving better.  Let me explain…

Researchers have identified several characteristics that “good language learners” have.  I think they’re pretty good qualities of any kind of learner.  And, based on my nineteen year career as a community organizer, they’re also similar to what makes a good leader. I have them listed on a big poster on my classroom wall:

GOOD LEARNERS……

• Work well with others.
• Are willing to take risks.
• Are willing to make mistakes and learn from them.
• Have a good sense of humor.
• Teach others.

In my book coming out next year — Organizing To Learn: The Art Of Teaching English Language Learners (Linworth Press) – I go into detail about the different ways I use this list during the year.  But, for purposes of this post, I want to share that I ask students — ELL’s and non-ELL’s alike — to regularly reflect on these qualities, and to pick one of them that they are going to work on and what specifically they are going to do to improve (generally every week or two).  At the same time they pick a new one they reflect on how they did on accomplishing the previous goal.  And they share both their goals and reflections with their peers (in pairs and, if they want to, with the entire class — I also get a copy).

That’s not to say students don’t also get opportunities to set other types of goals — they do.  I’ve just generally found focusing on the qualities of this list seem to fit more into developing the life-long learners our school, and I, want to develop.

Feedback is welcome!

Central America Station has hundreds of ESL-related workshops available for free download and printing.

I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Free ESL/EFL Hand-Outs & Worksheets.