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Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Leif Williams: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I hope you had a good stretch break there for the final push today. So yes, we are here today to present on our final report on our two-year DLAC experience. Our DLAC members include our director, Suzanne Murphy, who I believe is joining us today online. So welcome, Suzanne. I am our ESL program coordinator, and also an ESL instructor. I teach an intermediate-low ESL class and also a multi-level intermediate-to-advanced class.

Suzanne is also an ESL instructor. She teaches also a multi-level class for intermediate-low to advanced, and she coordinates our ESL distance learning program. She also teaches ESL at our neighboring school district, Mount Diablo Adult Education in Concord.

A few of our other contributors to our DLAC project is Aimee Wallace. She was actually our ESL program assistant last year in our first year and has since been promoted to our office manager. And you'll hear more about her contributions later on. We have Bruno Sablan, our CTE coordinator who is also an ESL instructor at a neighboring community college, and Patty Pacheco, who is our current ESL program assistant.

And we would also, again, like to show our appreciation to Blair Roy, our DLAC coach. And also our co-team from Placer School for Adults. A shout-out to them. We work together on numerous DLAC assignments together.

So a little bit about our school. Martinez Adult School is located about 20 miles East of San Francisco. We're a small but mighty school. We have about 1,200 students, 120 ESL students currently, five ESL teachers, and we have two CTE ESL teachers that help us with our computer skills classes. And on the right, you can see, we do offer a variety of programs at our school.

So we would like, again, to show our appreciation to Destiny Simpson, our expert facilitator for our DLAC Ideal 101 and 102 classes. The course helped us to develop a framework for our DLAC site plan project, helped us stay on focus and on target with developing our action plan. And also, we discovered lots of new exciting teaching tools and strategies through this course.

So with the help of our Ideal 101 course and also with the assistance of our DLAC coach, Blair Roy, we have developed our project goal that I'll read as follows. So by the end of 2021, we wanted that 75% of our ESL students in our blended learning classes would have access to software in our Canvas LMS, videoconferencing, such as Zoom, and other extension activities these that would increase their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills as verified by increased CASAS test scores, EL civics assessments, and improved retention.

So we'd like to happily report that we came near to our goal. After analyzing the data, we have about 67% of our students enrolled in our blended ESL classes had improved CASAS test scores. And 84% of our students passed their EL civics assessments. So we're very pleased with that result, and obviously it's a work in progress.

So I'd like to now turn it over to my co-team member, Susan Rausch.

Susan Rausch: Thank you. In the fall of 2021, we resumed in-class, in-person instruction, and these are pictures of our-- we have a lab, as well as students in the classroom. If you could-- next slide, please.

This is an example of how we used Ideal 102. As a result of returning to in-person instruction, we realized that we needed to restart our distance learning program for those who could not return. We decided to offer two limited programs with only two levels and a maximum of eight students. We chose to use Burlington Core. Next.

I built the course on our school campus platform. While Burlington English is an awesome-- has awesome content, it is not fully-- it did not fully meet our rubric expectations. First of all, the program is not fully integrated with Canvas. So we enrolled our students in both Burlington English and Canvas.

Second, Burlington Core doesn't meet our rubric standards for detailed grammar instruction. So I added YouTube videos to Canvas. In addition, Burlington test and additional practice materials are not accessible to students. However, I easily added them through Canvas. Finally, we wanted our distance learning students to complete EL civics objectives as well. Canvas easily allowed me to add additional Burlington English EL civics materials to our distance learning program, and that allowed us to accomplish our goal. Next.

Just like the rest of you, we have encountered our challenges. And to solve low student enrollment programs, our director hired full capacity marketing to handle social media campaigns and student recruitment. Next. To solve our student resistance to use computers and complete homework, we took a multi-step approach.

First, we set out to normalize computer usage by providing additional courses. This spring, we started a Spanish speakers computer course, and last spring, we started the basic skills computer course featured here on the slide. Just recently, we purchased 60 laptops which will be in our ESL classrooms for daily use. We trust that continuous access and practice with that, our students will become more familiar and at ease navigating through our Canvas courses. With this, we trust that completing homework online will no longer become a barrier. Thank you. Next.

As we work through our DLAC program, we realize we needed lots of pieces to get everything online. With our guidance, Aimee created many useful tools for our students and our staff, including, but not limited to the online testing-- the CASAS Testing Procedures, the Martinez Adult Education Google site website, student tutorials for registration and orientation, Canvas orientation, and she and I collaborated to work on the Student Support Services Canvas course-- it's called a course because I didn't know what else to call it. And a technology and digital skills survey so we may better meet our students' needs. Next.

Transition takes time. Not only are we converting all our classes to Canvas, but we are moving from book-based to web-based instruction. Now that we have 60 new laptops, we plan to use them daily. We need to identify web-based programs which provide opportunities for our students to build ESL skills and digital literacy skills simultaneously. We are currently evaluating materials at this time. Finally, we plan to strengthen our collaboration between programs and schools. Next.

As a school, we frequently collaborate with other departments on a regular basis. This is one of the strengths of our small school. Part of our DLAC proposal was to increase collaboration between departments. Our current hope is to build a laptop onboarding mini-course with our CTE Department focusing on best practices for laptop use and navigation. We will continue to collaborate with other departments on a regular basis.

So far, we have had two EIT courses team taught by ESL and CTE instructors twice yearly. We have ESL-- our ESL students attend the CTE open house. Just recently, our ESL students, CTE, and HSC attended a professionalism in the workplace workshop. And at the beginning of May, these students in the picture attended the Diablo Valley College tour. Next.

Collaborating is a natural fit for me because I work for two schools. And I-- at Mount Diablo, I work with Maren Anton, who was a DLACer from Cohort 2. So we collaborate frequently. This is a tweak on her idea of the Teacher Share Desk, and I just built ours on Canvas. Next.

In addition, Maren and I shared other EL civics-related materials. Maren created a 14-week community resource newsletter that has-- that highlights resources in Central Contra Costa County. These have been added to our student support services courses. Last year, my communications course attended a nine-week lunch-and-learn series hosted by our library system and taught by community emergency response team trainers. Each week, my students created a PowerPoint presentation on the materials covered, and I shared this with Maren. Next.

We have greatly benefited from Dr. Porter and his training sessions. Thank you so much. Next. Perhaps the most beneficial session included the Gallup strengths and weaknesses utilization-- assessment and utilization. This was extremely helpful because Dr. Porter showed us how to effectively utilize our resources and enhance the work we do as a team. Next. Oh. Leif, back to you.

Leif Williams: OK. So again, Susan and I would like to thank our school director, Suzanne Murphy, for setting a culture of change at our school. Under her leadership, we've made Canvas our school-wide LMS and has provided professional development training for our instructors. She encourages all instructors to explore online learning materials as we move away from paper texts. And also, adapting new technology tools and strategies to enhance our classroom instruction. So thank you, Suzanne.

Our next steps. We are planning, again, part of our action plan towards our site plan was to develop a teacher-student class expectations agreement so that-- a contract, so to speak, where students would sign it and the teacher as well just to make sure that the student and-- students understand the expectations of the class.

And as Susan mentioned about the laptop orientation, so we're going to be developing an orientation for both students and staff on using the laptops in the classrooms. And finally, we will continue working with our instructors to develop their Canvas courses. And one of our ideas is to develop-- as a department, develop a support group to help each other with ideas and help with developing their courses and implementing them with their classes.

So in summary, we want to, of course, thank the OTAN team. We feel good about what we've done during our two years and what we've accomplished. We have our action plan and the next steps that we'll follow, and we'll certainly use our skills that we've taken away from our experience to apply to our professional lives as we go forward, and also sharing, of course, what we have learned with others at our adult school and other colleagues as well and encourage them to participate in DLAC.

So a final thank you to Blair again for helping us with our team-building skills and also improving our technology know-how, so we appreciate that. And thank you to everyone. It's been a great ride.

Speaker 2: All right. Great job. Thank you.