Derek Braun, TESOL/OFLA Liaison
ELL Science Teacher, Columbus City Schools

Ohio TESOL and the Lau Resource Center are proud to present the Ohio TESOL 2019 Conference. With over a hundred sessions, dozens of exhibitors, and approximately 800 attendees, Ohio TESOL is one of the largest TESOL regional affiliate conferences in the Midwest. Ohio TESOL 2019 will be held in Columbus, Ohio at the Greater Columbus Convention Center on October 11th and 12th, 2019.

Keynote Speaker
Dr. Debbie Zacarian is known for her work in advancing student achievement. Her explanations of current research into practical instructional, leadership, family-school engagement, and strength-based teacher evaluation systems are nationally known and widely practiced. With three decades of combined experience as a district administrator, university faculty member, and educational service agency administrator, she founded Zacarian & Associates. She presents and publishes extensively. With support from the Carnegie Foundation, she wrote the user-friendly guide, for Colorín Colorado. She has written many state and district policies including the co-written Guidance for English Learner Parent Advisory Councils and Massachusetts Early Education and Care policies for dual language learners.

Session Description:

According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, half of the nation’s students have experienced serious childhood adversity. While English learners experience the same adversities as their peers, many are also refugees who fled crises in their homelands and/or are undocumented or are citizen-children of at least one undocumented parent and live in chronic fear of being deported. These realities represent a challenge to most educators, especially because so many of us have not had formal training to work with such students and their families. In contrast to looking at what is missing in the lives of these children, we will focus on the assets they bring and how we can create a strengths-based classroom-learning environment that is based on the assets of student-teacher and student-student relationships; promoting students’ voice in shaping their learning; connecting instruction to students’ lives; and providing predictable routines and practices that support students’ strengths.

Featured Speaker
Dr. Leslie C. Moore, Associate Professor of Teaching & Learning and Linguistics at The Ohio State University, is active in the fields of applied linguist and a linguistic anthropologist, with an interest in social and cultural patterns of learning, language development, and learning traditions amongst multilingual communities. She has conducted research in family, community, and formal and informal education settings in both Cameroon, Ohio, and the Netherlands. Her research has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Most recently, Leslie has partnered with COSI and other children’s museums around the country to study informal science learning programs and practices for preschool dual language learners, their families, their community organizations, and the early childhood professionals who serve them.