Meet our presenters

The CoT Conference consists of one keynote speaker and several presenters. Get to know our speakers below!

heather tatton-harris

Keynote Speaker

Heather is the Curriculum & Assessment Manager at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School in Washington DC, proudly serving adult immigrants learning English, workforce skills, and realizing the American dream. She supervises the Curriculum Development and Assessment departments. She is passionate about leading teams with a focus on solutions and strengths.

Heather has 15 years of experience with curriculum, assessment, and materials development. She has led large curriculum revisions as well as new course design projects. Heather has trained teachers at international conferences on topics including curriculum development best practices, processes, and systems. She believes in the value of design thinking, backwards design and an iterative process with feedback cycles.

Most recently, Heather worked with Ukrainian teachers as a Department of State English Language Specialist to develop a curriculum for their English Access program. As part of that project, she gave a keynote at the International Caucasus Conference in Tbilisi, Georgia on the topic of taking risks in the ELT classroom. She connected research to practice leveraging work of prominent psychologists in the areas of empathy, vulnerability, connection, forgiveness, and encouragement. Leaning more toward psychology than pedagogy, the talk was designed to inspire teachers to allow these important human elements to come alive in their classrooms.

Heather lives in Washington DC with her husband, two kids, a dog, and a cat. She enjoys reading, exercising, and watching her kids play ice hockey.

Presenters

Meet the teachers giving live demo lessons for our conference this year

Emily Kutz

Emily is the head teacher of the 3/4s class at Hollingworth Preschool at TC and and a MA Applied Linguistics student. At Hollingworth and previous teaching positions at American International schools, Emily has focused on how play based learning experiences can enhance language development for bilingual learners.

Inspired by a unit on the water cycle, this lesson seeks to answer the question of “how do floods occur?” Through an immersive experience of play-based process art, learners have the opportunity to learn about this process first hand with visual and tactile supports.

Emmalee Mills

Originally hailing from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Emmalee Mills has lived and worked as a French teacher at a public middle school in New York City for four years. She teaches both World Language French classes as well as Dual Language. She is also a 2nd year M.A. in A.L. student who is interested in second language acquisition in the secondary school classroom.

Emmalee will be presenting Question Formulation Technique (QFT) as a way to get students using higher order thinking to create questions in the target language about an image or text.

Virginia Peck-Phillips

Virginia is a third-year graduate student at Teachers College studying English Education and TESOL in her last semester. She currently teaches Humanities at a public middle school in Manhattan. She hopes to soon have a job teaching middle or high school students in ELA or TESOL.

Total Participation as an Introduction to Argument Essays

Students will learn the main components of an argument essay and will then play a short game in which they have to reveal their opinions about various subjects by going to one or another side of the room.

Roca-Lisa Kartzmer

Roca-Lisa is a pre-service teacher studying English Education and TESOL at Teacher's College. She currently teaches eight grade Humanities at a public middle school in Manhattan and aims to teach High School and adults internationally. She speaks English, French, and German and is interested in all aspects of language.

This demo lesson will focus on Total Participation as an avenue for the appreciation of connotation and tone. Students will evaluate the effectiveness of different language to express tone and genre by acting out the vocabulary choices of an excerpt in a volunteer group, then (in two or more groups) rewriting a line with provided alternate vocabulary, and acting out the modified excerpt. They will finish by sorting the versions into styles/genres.

Belen Berrios-Droguett

Belen is a current EdM student in the Curriculum and Teaching program at Teachers College. Originally from a small country town in Chile, she moved to the capital to start her studies in English language, literature, and linguistics. Since 2008 she has been teaching English as a foreign language to a variety of students: children, teenagers, young adults, university students, etc. For the last three years, she has been teaching English in the academic setting for postgraduate students. During this teaching experience, she has learned more about peer review and the importance of learning it as a useful skill.

Meaningful Peer Review

This demo lesson will feature an activity that can be done repeatedly throughout the school year. It is divided into stages: sharing, highlighting, and improving. Students learn to give and receive feedback by working in pairs with guidance till they get used to the format. The objective is to make the exercise of feedback a safe-learning space.

Violet He Yong

Violet is a prospective ESL teacher and a first-year Applied Linguistics MA student at Teachers College, Columbia University. She enjoyed interacting with students from diverse backgrounds and making meaningful connections with them while working as a part-time Intermediate Microeconomics tutor at Smith College. Though she is not from a traditional TESOL or Applied Linguistics undergrad background, she is on her way to exploring the unlimited possibilities of being a trainee ESL teacher. She looks forward to meeting new people.

In this short demo class about how to make a proper self-introduction, she wishes to emphasize the importance of implementing multimedia in an ESL class.

Angie Jung

Angie is an ESL/KFL instructor whose teaching journey began after receiving her master's degree in TESOL at NYU in 2004. She had taught at New York University, LIBI College, and SUNY WCC. She presented at the Citywide World Language Conferences, “Engaging All Learners in Your World Language Classroom” by the New York City Department of Education (Hunter College, June. 2017), and as a CULCON specialist with funding from the U.S. Department of State, she recently presented at Denmark Delegation Visit for Global Engagement, regarding future Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) (Central Piedmont Community College, Feb. 2023).
Angie is currently teaching ESL at Central Piedmont Community College, and pursuing her EdD in education leadership at Northeastern University. Her research focus is to improve student engagement and participation in a post-COVID world.

Using Images to Promote Learner Engagement
“I Can’t Believe I Became Literate in a New Language in 10 minutes!” Participants must be (or pretend to be) anyone who has no prior knowledge of the Korean language, and will come away with strategies and ideas to be used in their own classrooms. The presenter will use images and interactive activities as language instructional strategies to make the participants remember the basic Korean alphabet and some useful Korean vocabulary easily.

Elzbieta (Ela) Klim

Ela is a teacher of English as a Foreign Language including general and business English as well as EAP with over twenty years of experience. After finishing her Master's Degree in English at the University of Gdansk, Poland in 2000, she began to teach general and business English to adult learners in companies. Having moved to the UK, Ela completed her CELTA and DELTA courses at International House London. During this time, she also became an IELTS Examiner and worked at language schools such as Stafford House International and Eurocentres in London. After seven years spent in the higher education environment, she moved to New York and completed her Post-Master's Advanced Certificate in TESOL. For the past couple of months she has been working as an English Instructor and Teacher Trainer at Manhattan Language as well as the Polish Instructor at ABC Languages.

In her demo lesson, Ela would like to share a few ideas about how to engage adult language learners and cater to their needs, encouraging the use of technology, including mobile phones, rather than shy away from it. She would also like to look at how the curriculum can be negotiated with students with the use of authentic materials. Last but not least, she will focus on various revision techniques that can be used in and outside of the classroom.

teachingcelebration@gmail.com