Success Stories: How ESL Students Achieve Their Goals with Community Support

About This Session

Description

Join us for a session filled with real-life stories from students in Dallas, Texas. You’ll hear about their journeys to milestones like jobs, education, and citizenship, as well as other types of successes. We’ll dive into what helped these students persist and succeed: integrating workplace skills, forming community partnerships, and the steady encouragement from teachers, coaches, and peers. We will write our own success stories and reflect upon best practices.

What we'll cover:

It’s easy to focus on the challenges, but success stories remind us why we teach—and what literacy really looks like in the lives of our adult learners. In this interactive session designed for ESL and ABE teachers, participants will explore real examples of learners achieving goals like employment, education, citizenship, and homeownership—and other types of “success” – highlighting how literacy skills open doors to life-changing opportunities.

Grounded in the presenter’s experience teaching ESL in community-based, nonprofit, and faith-based settings, this session will offer practical strategies and tools for integrating life and workplace skills, fostering learner persistence, and building strong community partnerships. Themes and best practices will be gleaned from the presenter’s experience as a teacher, tutor, mentor, and resource connector. Participants will reflect on their own student success stories, engage in small group discussions, and walk away with a framework for identifying and sharing successes in their programs.

The session connects directly to the 2025 conference theme, “Literacy Looks Like This,” by illustrating the diverse ways literacy transforms lives—inside and outside the classroom—and offering approaches that strengthen both instruction and learner outcomes.

Objectives:

Identify factors that contribute to student success and persistence in adult ESL and literacy programs.
Explore strategies for integrating life and workplace literacy skills into instruction.
Reflect on the role of teachers and community partnerships in supporting learner success.
Create a personalized action plan or success story template to use in participants’ own programs.
Recognize the complexities and challenges our students face and acknowledge that “success” looks different for each person.

I will share a number of students’ success stories, from across a range of interactions and levels of “success.” Most of these students I have met as an ESL teacher at a community center in Dallas. Others, I know from living in the same neighborhood as my students, passing them while walking my children to school or going to the park. Some of these success stories were friends who I then tutored. Others are students who then became friends of mine, or who moved on to bigger and better things! Most are still in the midst of their success story, so it’s messy, but exciting to play a small part.