Project 3: Revamping an Existing Program
The 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summits
Overview
The Emergent Bilingual (EB) Empowerment Summits are an annual event developed and hosted by Spring Independent School District’s Multilingual Department. The EB Empowerment Summits originated as an action step to address areas identified for improvement (derived from Key Performance Indicators KPIs) for EB students within the district. Those KPIs are reducing emerging bilingual student dropout rates and increasing their graduation rates.
During the 2021 – 2022 school year my counterpart, Juliana Vargas, and I were tasked with revamping the 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summits, or 8th Grade EB Summit for short, which impacts close to seven hundred eighth grade students at all nine middle schools in Spring ISD.
Establishing the Purpose
Our goal for the 8th Grade EB Summit was to:
- provide 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual students with relevant, linguistically accommodated information on how to be successful academically and socially in high school.
- develop in students the intrinsic motivation needed to thrive in the face of learning a new language, assimilating to a new culture, among other challenges EB students might face.
The Changes and Improvements Made
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
transformed the existing slide deck, which was text heavy and had an inconsistent color scheme, to a carefully designed and visually engaging presentation with relevant graphics, animations, and sounds.
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
created a complimentary handout that students could refer to during and after the Summit.
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
designed nine different customizable invitations for each respective campus.
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
compiled linguistically accommodated resources for students and parents to refer to at their own leisure.
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
recruited coworkers, family members and friends to purchase raffle prizes for student attendees! Juliana and I also purchase a number of prizes for students as well.
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
wrote a short post-summit survey for student attendees to fill out in Google Forms and (also wrote a summit for campus administrators and EB contacts to complete after all summits were held).
For my contributions to revamping 8th Grade EB Summit, I:
created a Google Sites website to provide information about the EB Empowerment Summits to parents, other school districts and the general public.
*For the 2022 – 2023 8th Grade EB Summit, I also
created nine different Google Meet links and added them to the nine different invitations to allow parents to attend virtually.
Additionally, although this was not my area of focus, it is important to note that among many other contributions, due to the persistent efforts of my counterpart, we went from having one guest speaker in the 2021 – 2022 summit to six diverse speakers in the 2022 – 2023 school year!
Preparation Leading Up to the Event
A month before the event, during an Emergent Bilingual campus contact meeting where campus-based EB specialists, contacts, and administrators were present, my Vargas and I delivered a brief presentation outlining our plans for the 8th Grade EB Summits. Immediately following this meeting, my Vargas and I we sent out a signup spreadsheet where administrators selected a date to hold their campus’ 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summit from a list of four predetermined dates. We also continuously followed up with campus administrators to ensure they selected a summit date for their campus and worked out any kinks during the preparation phase.
Two weeks before the event, I generated a current list of all 8th grade Emergent Bilingual students within the district per campus. I then use Microsoft Word’s mail merge to add each individual students’ name to their respective campus’ invitation for a personalized touch. I then submitted the personalized invitations, ten blank invitations for newly enrolled students, the presentation handout, and the additional resources for printing. Once all the copies came in, and there were thousands, the tedious process of organizing the deliverables began…
During our first year of hosting the event, my amazing counterpart and I spent days folding the nearly seven hundred cardstock printed student invitations
and a separate tri-fold brochure that contained useful tips for being successful on the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS). We also organized the brochure, presentation handout and the other resources in folders which the department purchased. During this time, we also carved out time to deliver the student invitations to each campus’ EB campus contact.
The second year we hosted the event, we recruited other members from the multilingual department to help us fold the invitations and organize the folders. This reduced our overall prep time to 1 day! It also eliminated our fatigued muscles and a lot of paper cuts!
Two weeks before the event, I sent a draft version of the 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summit presentation to the nine middle schools’ counselors who would be delivering the portion of the presentation related to high school.
8th Grade EB Empowerment Summit Presentation
One week (and also one day) before each campus’ 8th Grade EB Summit, I sent out an email with the order of events to all relevant campus representatives. These emails enlisted the support of the campus representatives to ensure that the event runs smoothly.
The Event!
Mrs. Vargas and I hosted the 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summits over the course of four days with two summits held per day. On one of the days two summits, at campuses with smaller numbers of EB students, were held simultaneously/semi-virtually via a Google Meet. On all counts, Vargas and I worked with each schools’ EB administrator, campus contact, 8th grade counselor, EB paraprofessional team, and other staff to coordinate logistics to ensure a glitch free summit.
We kicked-off the first part of the summit by introducing ourselves, setting the purpose of the event and reviewing the tips for TELPAS. I delivered the presentation in English, and Mrs. Vargas provided translation in Spanish (some portions of the presentation were also translated into Vietnamese). Then we passed the torch to the 8th grade counselor who covered everything to do with transitioning to high school. Following this, students were given a healthy dose of invigorating motivation from the motivational speaker.
The summits concluded with a student reflection, a survey, and the raffling of prizes using wheelofnames.com.
Feedback & Takeaways
The 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summits were a tremendous success!
The feedback from students and staff was overwhelmingly positive. Students appreciated the relevant and linguistically accommodated information, as well as the motivational speeches from the guest speakers. Staff members were impressed with the overall organization and execution of the summit.
Based on the results from the student survey, 99.1% of student feedback was positive! 100% of the feedback from campus staff was also positive and constructive! (Results can be found here)
The 8th Grade Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summit is a valuable resource for Emergent Bilingual students. It is an opportunity for students to learn about the resources available to them, to connect with other EB students, and to gain the motivation they need to succeed in high school and beyond.
*This project (Emergent Bilingual Empowerment Summits) was selected to be presented at the 2022 Title III Symposium hosted by the Texas Education Agency in San Antonio, Texas and also at the 2022 Texas Association of Bilingual Educators Hybrid Conference that was held in Houston, Texas! Additionally, this project was presented to the Region 4 Education Service Center’s Bilingual/ESL/Title III Contacts in November 2022 and was presented to multiple campus representatives at the Region 4 Spring Title III Leadership Network Meeting in May 2023! (Region 4 is one of 20 regional education service centers established by the Texas Legislature in 1967 to assist school districts and charter schools in improving efficiencies and student performance.) Lastly, this project was featured in La Prensa de Houston, a Houston-based print and digital newspaper with local, national and international news in Spanish!