--training. So I'm excited to share those with you. Here's all our presenters. Looking at this, I feel like I'm on CNN, and we have a panel of experts here that are each going to be sharing with you their experience and their-- something that they do with their students that involves teamwork and helps their students persist. So one of you, Li said you have a lot of turnover of students, I guess you mean, and you'd like to learn how to keep that from happening. And that's exactly what we're focused on today. So thanks for being here.

So here's the definition of persistence. This is from John Comings from the research. This is from a while ago. But their definition in their research project was adults staying in programs for as long as they can, engaging in self-directed study when they must drop out, and returning to their programs when their lives allow. So all of our students have many roles-- parents, workers, community members, all kinds of things, caregivers. So sometimes it's hard for them to come to school consistently.

But we want them to persist and to meet their own personal, educational, and employment goals. So that's why persistence is important to our students. It's also important to us in terms of retention because we want to have students stay in our classes from the beginning to the end and make gains. So that's what we're focused on. Just a definition as far as how do we count persistence in California-- we do that through CASAS data. And all of you, I think, are doing CASAS or some form of that, of assessment.

And so persistence just means that the student was there long enough to have a pre and a post. So I don't know if that's, in some cases, a hundred hours of instruction, in some cases less. But you can see here that this is older data from '17, '18. But you can see the average persistence-- percent of students that persist. And it's not anywhere near a hundred, as you can see. So we're always working on that.

It's really important for learners to have goals. And the point of the goal is for them to reach their own personal goal, whether it's about education or career or something else. And we know that students with specific goals persist more than those without goals. So persistence is good for students and also good for our programs.

So I'm just going to ask you for a minute to think about, what is your experience with persistence in your program? Some of you already started to share that. But here's a big chat box down here under the slide, if you could just respond to any or all of these questions. Is persistence a problem in your program? Do your students come in at the beginning of the semester or the term and stay until the end, or do you wish they would stay longer, some of them?

Is there a particular time when more students drop out, and how do you know? Do you just know from your personal observation, or have you seen any data? And try to type over here in the big chat box, if you can. Maggie, thank you. Anderson Valley-- great. I see a lot of you typing. I'll give you a minute, try to be quiet so you can actually think and type at the same time.

Many students leave because they've gotten jobs, Li We also have students that come to orientation, tested but never show up. I have a lot that come for a bit and leave. It's hard to find out. It's hard to get that data about what happens. But there are some strategies based on research that we can do in our classrooms. We have to actually get them in the classroom for the focus of this webinar, because these are classroom strategies. But once we get them there, there's things we can do to help our students persist.

Maggie, we've had issues with persistence in ESL during the grape harvest, of course, and they're willing to think outside the box. OK, thank you. Persistence is a problem. Yes, they drop off before holiday breaks, and it takes a long time for them to come back. Holiday drop-off as well is on our mind right now, isn't it? We're needing to work on persistence. We start full at the end of the semester, but some leave the country. Some get a job. It's difficult to track students because their location and their contact information is constantly changing. That's true.

OK, so I will just note that nobody said, persistence isn't a problem for my program. I'm just attending this so I can see what you guys are having problems with. It's pretty pervasive. It's for all of us. Let me go back to my bigger slides. So this diagram shows nine strategies-- classroom strategies, this is-- for helping students persist. There's a lot of these. And for those of you who have WIOA funding, you can request a community of practice training with two face-to-face sessions on this topic. It covers all of these.

But for today, we're just going to focus on this one, encouraging collaboration and cooperation, in other words, teamwork in the classroom, so doing activities that engage our students in teamwork with each other and that helps people persist. It's also an employability skill. So I don't know how many of you have seen the employability skills framework. If you haven't, just google those three words, and you'll find it.

And it lists the skills, personal skills, workplace skills, and basic skills that people need to be successful on the job. And one of them, of course, is understands teamwork and works with others. So we know that a lot of work is done in teams. Most jobs, you aren't just sitting by yourself. Maybe if you're a toll taker on the freeway, you don't have to do a lot of teamwork. But even then, I'm sure there's times when you communicate with your colleagues. So it's an important skill for our students.

And also, a frequent reason for getting fired is not being able to work well on a team. So I did some research on what are the most common reasons for people getting fired, and here is a list of them. I'm actually going to go to-- make this a poll. I'm going to make this a little longer, so hopefully you can see all that. Just look at these and check the ones that you think are related to teamwork-- some of them, not so much.

Which ones do you think, if this guy or this person had better teamwork skills, maybe they wouldn't be having this issue? Go ahead and mark the ones you think. OK, nobody thinks teamwork would help drug addiction. Well, somebody does. I agree with you, though. I don't think that's high on the teamwork skills.

But I see not performing the job required-- yes, especially asking too many questions or lacking a sense of urgency or using poor judgment. Those are all things we can develop with teamwork, right? Taking too much time off-- that might be, if you felt a part of a team, you wouldn't do that. Arriving late or leaving early, too much socializing-- OK, maybe.

Well, you guys are voting for everything. Thank you. Thank you for your input. I will go back to my slides and tell you which ones I thought were most related to teamwork, doesn't mean that I'm right. But this one, I definitely thought was true. If you're asking too many questions or not going with the flow and reading the cues of people around you and your supervisor, that's related to teamwork.

I think not cooperating, being obstructive, arguing, or stalling-- those are skills that-- those are things that you wouldn't do if you were a good team member. Having bad relationships at work or inappropriate relationships at work-- I don't know about inappropriate relationships. I don't know if we can solve that one in the classroom. But bad relationships-- hopefully, we can work on that. And gossiping and bad mouthing-- just another social skill that's just not going to work for you in the workplace.

So clearly, teamwork is important. So why does it help students persist, though? Well, we feel accountable to others when we're on a team. So it's not just my teacher that I'm going to disappoint, but it's my teammates. We're more committed if we know others better and feel known. So it helps develop relationships. We want to do a better job if others are relying on us. Commitment to a team goal helps us persist. So the goal of the team is important, too. And there's actually research evidence that shows that this actually works, that teamwork projects do increase persistence.

So there's different kinds of teamwork. So we're going to look at some short-term activities and some longer-term activities. Short-term activities are things that you can do in one class time, one class, or part of a class. They're related to whatever learning objective you're teaching that day. Members of your teams that you have your students divided into have a common goal. They may or may not be competing with each other.

And we're going to talk about grouping strategies a little later, but you'll have to have a bunch of grouping strategies in your bag of tricks for dividing up students into teams. So we're going to start with Sachiko Oates from Santa Barbara City College. She's going to tell you about a teamwork activity she did with her ESL students. Sachi?

Thank you, Marian. Can everyone hear me?

Yes.

OK, great. So I would like to talk about what I did in my ESL class. And what we did was the activity called Lost at Sea. It's a team-building and consensus-building activity. And there are many different versions online, so check them out. I myself simplified and scaffolded this linked activity to fit the needs of my ELL students. The team size should be three to five people. And we do this type of activity a lot.

And I typically group students randomly by numbering off students and making sure that students get teamed up with different students each time. And students choose team roles such as facilitator, note taker, timekeeper, and presenter. And it took about 1.5 hours for our ESL students, because we had to-- I had to pre-teach the vocabulary.

Let me tell you quickly about this activity. Basically, you are on a sinking sailboat. That's great, right? And you have 15 items to take with you on a smaller rubber raft. And the choices include a sextant transistor radio, shaving mirror, shark repellant, box of chocolate, mosquito netting, fishing pole, a bottle of rum, et cetera. And your task is to rank the 15 items in order of importance with your team members.

And each team needs to discuss, negotiate, compromise, and come to a consensus. What do you think are the most important items to have on the raft? Well, at the end, the Coast Guard recommendations will be revealed. Many of the students thought a sextant would be important, but they didn't think a shaving mirror was useful. The Coast Guard's recommendations are quite the opposite, but getting the correct answer is not the point of this exercise.

Anyways, at the end of the exercise, students will reflect on their teamwork. Did everyone get to talk or contribute ideas? Did your team finish on time? Did everyone listen to and respect each other's ideas? And things like that. And this is a great community-building exercise because students are working towards a common goal, they are overcoming something that is challenging together, and they are having fun. And along the way, students are learning about each other. All these are contributing factors for building a sense of community.

And this activity was very successful because this not only helped build a classroom community but also was educational and quite relevant for what we were doing in our ESL class. First of all, we were working on our EL civics emergency co-op, and we talked about making emergency lists and also had just read a shipwreck story. And second, the students were being exposed to and practicing the language for academic discourse. This exercise provided an authentic situation to use expressions for negotiation, persuasion, and reasoning. Academic vocabulary, summarization, and presentation skills are included, too.

And the students had been working with a list of sentence frames for discussion throughout the session, so they were familiar with some of the phrases and sentences. Can you think of any phrases or sentence starters that can help the students in this exercise? To introduce a few, I understand what you are saying, but I think this because of that. Or for summarizing and presenting, they could use, we all concluded that, and also, adding-- and, adding to somebody's ideas based on what we heard, I think this, those kind of things.

And this activity also helps students practice many of the employability skills-- communication, active listening, building on others' ideas, collaboration, of course, critical thinking, decision making, and creativity, leadership, presentation skills, time management, and metacognitive skills by reflecting on their teamwork, evaluating and making improvement plans and things like that. The most difficult element for the students was time management. Everyone was so into this activity, many of the teams had to rush to complete the task.

That's when I had to remind students of the phrase from their sentence frame list. We should move on. We're running out of time. They weren't using that. And then, also, another challenge they faced was to bring in quiet and introverted students into the discussion. And then I, again, had to point out a phrase from the sentence stem list, such as, we haven't heard from you yet. What do you think?

Sachi, one minute.

OK, thank you. And there are so many variables, and it's hard to say how much this particular exercise contributed. But the overall attendance rate for my class went up from 57% to 63%. Compared to the agency average, my class had a higher attendance rate last spring. And also, from student reflections, this activity seemed to have helped students engage in learning and have gotten them motivated. One of the students said he was going to change his soccer practice schedule, as he didn't want to miss any English classes. That was a big deal, my class competing against soccer.

And also, this activity seems to have eased anxiety around learning and fostered a sense of community. And many students said that they felt more comfortable in class after working closely with their teammates. And it also appears to have increased student self-efficacy and changed the general outlook on learning and mindset on their abilities. There were comments like they felt proud, we did it, next time I can do better, et cetera. And that's all I have.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. That was great. And another short-term activity from Kerry Marini at Folsom Cordova Adult School here in Sacramento. Kerry?

Thank you. In our program, we have a lot of different students who come together into this class that we call the English Success Academy. So I have students from the ESL program, HiSET, ABE, high school diploma all in this one course that prepares them for expository reading and writing. And also, it helps students prepare for reading complex and sophisticated text.

So I integrated partners, small groups, which evolved into independent activity. And the activity that we have here was three different videos that had different points of view, and the students first individually responded to the videos as their independent project. They then came together and discussed what their input was, what they felt the videos were trying to describe, the gist of all three videos.

At this point, they're talking together and sharing their information, and they're also harvesting information from other people. So it makes them feel confident that their information is viable and that they can also share with others and take others' ideas to help them. After that, my students got together in small groups. And this is an ongoing activity. We do cooperative learning groups often. Students change groups according to the table that they sit at, and they like to mix it up every once in a while.

We have gone through all of the roles of cooperative learning group, like the facilitator, the time keeper, the recorder. In these groups, the students were synthesizing information. So they discussed their quick write from their videos. They then put together a Venn diagram as a group and put together a presentation for the rest of the class. So after that, then they went back to their groups. And they worked together in a summary guide in order to connect their writing and the videos and their opinion to write a summary of a text.

These texts are complicated and sophisticated, so they can be a bit daunting for students. But when they work together as partners and teams, it seems to give them a little more confidence and the ability to take risks. After the students have worked together in partners, small groups, they are finally ready and confident enough to work individually to write their summary of this complex text that they were synthesizing.

I'm a little behind here. Some of the challenges that I find when working with teams are that it's important to always define what their roles are, so that each person has exactly an idea of what they need to do in their group and how that job is important to their group as a whole. And having not practiced that many times, I think that cooperation between the groups and individuals sharing would be a little more difficult.

The successes of our students is always evident. It seems that they're able to use new techniques. They're able to try new learning skills and take risks. For example, the Venn diagram was a new activity for many students, and they felt that this was a great way for them to synthesize information that they hadn't seen before. And it was a discovery within the group, so they talked about how it was helpful to them.

It also encourages the accountability. So each person has their own position within the group, and they feel that they're responsible to fulfill that position. Since our students come from such varied cultural backgrounds, I found that it's really important to work as groups so that everybody is encouraged to participate. Whether they're male or female, whether English is not their first language, everybody has the opportunity to share.

So in all, I think that the best thing about working in groups and partners and integrating this throughout the classroom is that there's a huge sense of community and even family with each other. The students help each other, pick each other up when times are tough, and they're willing to take academic risks where it may have been really difficult on an individual basis. Does anybody have any questions?

Oh, sorry, I was on mute the whole time.

When you [interposing voices] working groups, what are some of the ways you break them into groups?

Oh, I was talking away.

What are different ways that--

So let's talk a little bit about grouping strategies. Yes, in this chat box in the middle, please type a couple of ways that you break your students into groups. Thank you for covering me. I see you typing. I see multiple attendees typing. Vi, Alejandra-- you have them count off, 1, 2, 3, 4. Great. Or you might specifically assign individuals into groups to break up cliques and balance abilities. Yes, good point, have a mixed-ability group. Good point. Another counting off, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Numbering-- Tidon, thank you, and table groups. So you have student sitting at tables, and they just work with the people at their table, right? Couple more. Will, thanks. Is that MiraCosta, MC adult education? You group them by level. Good. Stand in a circle by birth order, then number off. Nice. Yes, there's a lot of different ways you can put people into an order. Birth order is one. When's your birthday? Although somebody said just the date-- the day and the month, not the year.

Or you're saying birth order like first born, second born? Maybe you meant that. That's a good way, too. Or I've seen people do from the shortest hair to the longest hair, by months, pick from a can randomly. Thanks, Kerry. OK, I'm going to cut you off in just a second. So stop typing. By different languages, sticky notes with a question on one sticky, and then they find the correct answer-- somebody else has that. Great. Thank you.

Let me go back to my slides. And I'm just going to give you some suggestions. A lot of these, you will know, and maybe there'll be one or two that you didn't know before. So there's teacher-assigned groups, and that's what a lot of you were talking about. So you can just do a turn-and-talk, talk to your partner next to you, and I think-- or at your table, as Will said. You can have random, or you can have pre-assigned.

Sometimes teachers assign groups, like, you three are going to be in a group for this week. You also mentioned that sometimes you have same level, and sometimes you want them to have mixed-level groups so that the higher levels can help the lower levels. Sometimes you need them to be in their same level because they might be doing a little bit of a differentiated task.

Somebody also mentioned classroom management. If you have certain people that always sit together and talk to each other, not necessarily about the classwork, you might want to break those people up. You might group them according to their interest in a certain task or according to what the task is. You might have a rotation system, like, you're going to-- everybody's going to be at their table, but then, in 15 minutes, three people are going to stand up from each table and move to the next table, something like that.

OK, there's a lot of possibilities there. So those were teacher-assigned groups. You might also let students choose their groups. You might say, we're going to have these three groups doing these three different tasks. Choose your group. Or you might say, choose your group. Here, we're going to have groups one through six. Choose your group, but you have to be in a group of four, and you can't be with anybody that you were in a group with yesterday.

Or choose your group, but a few options-- maybe based on interests. You're going to hear an example of that in a minute. And also, somebody said have a survey question, and group people based on their response to the question. Or it could just be based on the clock. You're going to work with this group for the first hour and this other group for the second hour. That's just a few of the myriad possibilities of grouping.

And then, of course, there's random grouping. And counting off is random grouping. There's other ways to do that. Somebody said draw the names from a hat or from a can. There's an app called Group Sort, where you put all the members of your class in there, and they sort them. You can put in all different fields. So you can sort them by gender. You can sort them by ethnicity. You can sort them by age, or you can sort them randomly. So it takes a little upfront work, but it looks fun. You could have them pick a colored card. Some people use playing cards or vocabulary cards. We already talked about the lineups. So there's a lot of possibilities of how to group your students for group activities.

I want to move on and have you hear about a longer-term activity. Longer-term activities might take a few days or a week, or maybe even the whole term. It might be a research project or a research presentation. In those groups, you definitely want to assign roles. You want to scaffold the processes. Actually, both Sachi and Kerry talked about making sure that people know what they're supposed to do before they get into their groups and start trying to do it.

It can be interdisciplinary, so you might be doing reading and math in the same project. It can be tied to real-world activities, which you're going to hear about in a minute. And again, research supports the skills and learning that come out of these kind of long-term activities. So let's hear from Ingrid Baristow from MiraCosta College on a project that she did with her ESL students. Ingrid? Ingrid, you're-- there you go.

Unmute myself, OK. Yes, so last year and this year, my class did-- I have an intermediate ESL class. We did service learning projects. And I found that when you serve together, you cooperate together. And it goes along with these team-building goals that we have here. Service learning-- I'm not going to talk a lot about what that actually is. But it's basically a real-world activity using the same learning activities that you have in your classroom. So I still did all my SLOs, my grammar, reading, speaking, pronunciation, writing, but you use a real-world activity.

We did a beach cleanup project and then an environmental literacy project this year. So Marian had said that goals are very important for persistence, and we had very specific goals. And I agree with that. But I would also add to that that meaningful real-life projects also is very important for persistence. The students felt really part of something meaningful. So how we did this is we worked in teams, and I'll talk about how I divided them up in a minute. And then this is that organizational cooperation and employability skills that went in with that.

So dividing up into groups-- that was the big thing, because I did it a little bit differently than a regular working on worksheet type grammar skill. We presented the project, and I had the students with me brainstorm on the tasks that needed to be done for the beach cleanup. We did it for both, but I'm going to use the beach cleanup as the example. So we identified tasks that needed to be done. I wrote them on the board.

Part of them was the need to make a brochure. We were going to share with other people in the school to come and join us. We were going to design a t-shirt for the coordinators, which was our class. We were going to be marketing out in the lobby during the break time for sign-up sheets. And then we were also going to go and actually give a presentation about the problem with pollution in the ocean and what we were going to do about it.

So there were several different tasks-- I can't remember off the top my head-- about five different groups. Once we identified the groups and the tasks that needed to be done, I had them think about their own skills. And this is a little bit difficult for ESL students in English, in a different language. But we have all different types. Some are great at computers but can't speak English. Some can speak but are not literate on the computer.

So what I did is I just put on a piece of paper on the board-- picked it up-- the brochure team, design team, advertising, scheduling, and map location team. And I had the students-- I said I needed five in each group, and I had them figure out where to go. They talked amongst themselves, mostly in English. And I gave them about five minutes to choose the group that they wanted to be in, and we called them teams.

So this seems like it was a little chaotic. But actually, it was organized chaos because the students felt the ownership, and they had to discuss, and they were able to find the team that they wanted to be on, which really worked well for the rest of the term because they chose it, and they had that accountability. And it's very much like real life. Sometimes you get assigned to a team at work, but sometimes you also can organize your own team.

What I've put here is that it allowed for different strengths to be used. Like I said, the artistic students worked on the t-shirt design. Those who were better at speaking out did the outreach. Like some of the other people who presented here, I set guidelines. They weren't very strict guidelines, but I did monitor that every person had to contribute at least one thing to the team. And for service learning, they all have to write a reflection paragraph, which is where I get the qualitative response on how it went at the end.

The challenges are that we are dealing with adult students, and their schedules are difficult to predict. So not everybody was there for every meeting. And so some team leaders didn't end up finishing up the term. But we realized that was real life, and they adjusted. And so this was, again, like a real-life situation, that sometimes you don't get exactly what you organized at the beginning. Like I said, teams were fluid because of attendance. That was probably the biggest challenge.

The second challenge is that, like I said, especially when creating the groups, there's a little bit of controlled chaos. And students are a little bit confused at what to do. They're not sitting at their desks and listening to a lecture, or even in groups and you're giving them something to do. They were deciding what to do with my mentoring, checking in on them.

That's my success story. Let me go to the next slide. The success was the confidence and enthusiasm that followed this initial period of frustration. When they understood that they had the permission to create the project, pretty much with certain guidelines-- they had to show up at a beach cleanup-- how they got there and who they brought was up to them. There's that accountability.

The students blossomed, and they felt like they were part of something meaningful and real, not only contributing to their community but also to the world. Ocean pollution is a big thing. That was a huge success. The natural leaders, natural organizers-- maybe they didn't even know they were leaders or organizers. But as they were working together, you could see who was saying, no, we needed to do it this way, that kind of thing.

One minute, Ingrid.

OK, and I'll finish off with the last success. I will definitely try to cap some more quantitative, real data. I did have increased retention during the term. And their assessment scores-- we do have the CASAS. And I noticed that the scores jump every time I do a service learning project. And I think it must be the competence and working in a meaningful area. So we also did EL Civics. I didn't put that in there. So there's a lot of things going on here that we are able to do just with teamwork. It doesn't have to be sitting in the regular desk.

Thank you so much. That's such a fine example, and an example of a long-term project. OK, we're going to move on now to Integrated Education and Training, IET. So I just want to take a quick poll so that I understand what your familiarity with IET. So would you just vote here? There's 29 of you. Have you ever heard of it before? Are you aware of it, but you don't know too much? You know about it, but you haven't really done it, or you're working in an IET program now or you have in the past.

OK, so we have some people that aren't familiar with IET, and one person who is working in it, and a bunch of people who aren't voting. Where are you guys doing? Are you checking your email? OK, since we have some that aren't familiar, I'm just going to say a little bit about what it is. Integrated education and training is basic skills and the technical skills teacher planning their lessons and working together.

So if you have a career pathway, and you want your students, your lower literacy level students or your lower English level students to be able to be on a health care careers pathway or a heating and air conditioning pathway, you might put a basic skills and the technical skills teacher together. They create a common set of learning objectives, and they teach together, basically, or they alternate.

And maybe they have three hours of basic skills, and one of those hours overlaps with the technical teacher, and then they have technical skills. So we have two examples of teamwork activities in IET where this becomes especially critical because of preparing directly for the workplace. We're going to start with Bill Hrycyna from LAUSD talking about his teamwork project. Bill?

OK, hello, everybody. I am an ESL teacher in general. And the IET program that I was very fortunate to be hooked up with was to be a pharmacy technician. In this kind of IET, the pharmacy technician teacher and the ESL teacher, myself-- we were working with the students together in the same classroom at the same time. So we're constantly working on both the practical skills of the job or career that they're training for in addition to improving their English language skills at the same time.

And this activity that I'm describing here, we called the prescription-filling relay race. My cohort teacher and I-- we tried to make our activities fun. And if it's a little offbeat, all the better. And this one was to both practice filling a prescription, which the students had just learned less than a week prior all of the different steps in addition to vocabulary, new vocabulary involved, et cetera. And we did this as a combination of skill practice, English practice, and team-building practice.

In this one, we had a class of, actually, exactly 20 students, which was lovely. So we wanted four teams of five people. This one, we did having people count off, 1, 2 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 4, as other people said. One, it's easy. It could be done spontaneously. And it also immediately gets people that are not necessarily near each other, so it ends up being a randomized group.

To help them build a team identity before we began the activity, after they were put in groups, we had them come up with names. And again, we encouraged them to be a little fun about it. And they ended up being the Funny Pharmacy Techs, the Fancy Pharmacy Techs, the Fantastic Pharmacy Techs, and the First Place Pharmacy Techs. So just even at that little one minute to come up with the name, we felt we were pushing them to do some team building right then and there.

So we explained the task that they had to do is put on-- line up two at a time alongside the table, put on a lab coat, run to the filling station, read and fill the prescription, take it to the out window, and then take off the lab coat and then continue on for the next player. The team's going to help them take on-- or put on and take off the lab coat. Everybody's involved at the same time, not just the student who is filling the prescription.

Everybody is actively engaged by shouting out encouragement such as, you can do it, faster, faster, et cetera; directions-- stand on the pad when handling the medication; or reminders-- don't forget to put the label on the vial, all of these things that we had studied before. And even people who are not filling prescriptions at the time can even have their notes from the class that they had taken during class that week to help them remember what they want them to do. So it was definitely fun.

And looking at the challenges and successes, it was definitely frenetic, as I think you might be able to imagine. Students get very competitive, and then get forgetful when they're trying to do something in a hurry. So that created also, quote unquote, "stressful" conditions of a busy pharmacy setting. But we didn't view that as a negative. We saw that as just energizing, fun. And again, afterward, we can always debrief and talk about what things were most people forgetting, what things were people doing well and easy, et cetera.

One challenge-- the student was not allowed to pass on the lab coat to the next team member until their task was done correctly. So you don't want them to get sent back to say, you forgot to put the label on the vial. Moving into successes-- it was definitely fun and purposeful and learningful, and everyone is simultaneously engaged, which I can't hope for anything better than that in most of my teaching.

One minute, Bill.

OK, everyone's very focused on their actions, they're focused on the actions of the teammate, and they're all vested in people succeeding. And talking about the group pride-- this is so fun. They talk about it and tell the people who were absent. One thing I noticed-- spilling over into other days, people feel closer and more willing to go out of their comfort zone, share personal info, and take risks that way.

And one thing that I really like-- I take pictures and many videos throughout the activity, and I share them with students that afternoon or that evening on Remind, so just to remind them what they did so they can have some memories, and then also show it to their family, especially if they're parents. Look what mommy did in class today-- being role models, also, for their children. And that is one way that they can have a visual reminder of the whole activity and their team, their sense of team teamwork and team building thereafter.

Thank you, Bill. Thank you. That's a great activity. It sounds like a lot of fun and reinforcing a lot of the concepts that they're learning. I really like his idea of texting video snippets to the students. I never heard of that before. And I thought that was probably really motivating.

Win-win.

Yes, a win-win. We're going to go on to Carolyn McGavock from San Diego Community College District continuing education with a different perspective on an IET class. So Carolyn? Carolyn, unmute.

Pardon me. Hello, everybody. Thank you, Marian. I'm going to wrap up today with just a reminder that sometimes teamwork activities can just be another take on routine tasks in your classroom. As Marian mentioned, my example about teamwork is in the context of an integrated education and training model. I was invited to be a basic skills instructor in the automotive technology department.

And our goal was specifically to increase persistence. They found that a lot of the students coming into the program who had tested in with lower basic skills were high risk for dropping out. And so I decided to take homework and turn it into teamwork, because a lot of the students had expressed anxiety about the textbook aspect of the training program.

So I think you could do this with any kind of classroom activity where students are asked to look at some questions and come up with answers. Rather than simply giving them time to do the assignment and then present the answers for self-check, I would encourage you to have students work as teams and build consensus about what they felt the correct answers were before ultimately giving your perspective as the instructor so that the students can take ownership of what they feel was the correct answer to whatever the assignment is.

It encourages active participation, for everyone to put in their idea. Students have to practice respectful disagreement. I thought the answer was A as opposed to B. Students are told that it's OK to be helpful. It's not cheating if you help your partner finish their homework. And people are also encouraged to take roles. You can always let students know, hey, while you're checking your answer, some of you will be learners. Some of you will be teachers. Or in the context of auto tech, I said, some of you will be trainees, and some of you will be trainers.

Everybody had permission to not know or permission to teach. So that's a great outcome of having your students just do typical classwork in groups. It was a great way to address anxiety that students had about textbook work, because ultimately we corrected the answers as teams and not as individuals. So everybody had a chance to work out what they knew, what they didn't know together as a group.

I liked to have students write down the page numbers of evidence that caused them to choose one answer or another. And that was a wonderful tool for them to be able to explain, why did I come up with this answer? One benefit of having the students work in teams and talk about what they think the correct answer is is that one student might have found evidence in a text, one student might have found evidence in an illustration, and another might have found evidence in the glossary, for example.

You can certainly extrapolate this to whatever type of material you're using. But it was helpful for students to be able to be heard, to say, this is why I chose the answer that I chose. And they all picked up strategies from each other. I needed to do mixed-ability groupings because some of the students in this class couldn't read well in English. So that was one of my challenges, to encourage my English language learners to get into the textbook and have an opportunity to hear from others about how they interpreted the textbook.

Other students had a lot of practical life experience. For example, maybe they had experience repairing automobiles, but they didn't have that paper certification. And they didn't necessarily feel like the textbook was connecting to real life. So as we worked in groups, they had a mentoring role of understanding the content, where maybe another person was a strong reader.

And the student with life experience could make the textbook come to life for the strong reader, and vice versa. Student successes are that students became very adept at working together in these mutually beneficial ways. As I said, real-life experience was supported by the textbook and vice versa.

Were you happy with the outcome?

One minute, Carolyn.

Thank you. Yeah, we were happy with the outcomes because we did find that students took this study-buddy, "let's do our assignments together" strategy and approach to their subsequent courses. And we did find that persistence in the program increased after introducing the IET program. I'm going to stop there. But just, ultimately, you can do teamwork with very simple classroom tasks.

Thank you. Thank you, Carolyn. And I love closing with that example because we've-- there are some very elaborate examples. But also, just the simplest, most basic things that you do every day, you can also do in teamwork, in teams, if you wish. So we saw that teamwork strengthens instruction in a number of ways, that it supports learners to persist, that there are so many different creative ways to use it. And I wish you all the best in managing your teams, like this guy is doing. So thank you very much for your attendance. And Veronica, any last words?

Thank you, Marian, and thank you to all of the presenters today as well as the participants who are still on the line with us. In closing, I would like to remind everyone that the PowerPoint for today's webinar is available for download. In addition, I'm going to post the URL of exactly where the recording as well as the PowerPoint will be located on the California Adult Education website. So please be sure to share this information with colleagues who were unable to attend today.

In addition, the CAEP TAP has some more professional development opportunities coming up. Next week on Wednesday, November 6, we will have Margaret Pesce with CASAS. She will be talking about assessments and instruction. So if any of you are interested in using your assessment results to inform your instruction, please be sure to register and attend this webinar. I am posting the URL of our registration page where you can check out this particular webinar that will take place next Wednesday as well as other professional development opportunities we have throughout the end of the year.

Again, thank you all very much for your participation. I'm going to close the webinar room. And when I do, the evaluation will appear. Please be sure to complete this evaluation and let the presenters know what you thought about today's webinar as well as the content and if there are any additional professional development or technical assistance needs you may have at this time. Thank you all very much for your participation, and have a great afternoon.