In October 20012 I taught two short courses for foreign EFL teachers in Thailand enrolled in a BA TESOL program at Thongsook College. I also twice facilitated a term-long online ‘Reflective Practice Seminar’ course in which teacher-learners engaged in reflective practice through journal writing, cooperative development and small-scale action research projects. 
I recently completed this amazing online course with the fantastic John F. Fanselow:
http://itdi.pro/breakRules.php
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Mid-October 2012: I’m now a member of the System for Adult Basic Education Support (SABES) Northeastern Massachusetts region’s FY2013 Advisory Board. It’s gonna be interesting!
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As of last week (first week of September, 2012)I am a member of COABE: Commission on Adult Basic Education (http://coabe.org/)
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The Commission on Adult Basic Education is organized to advance national and international adult education and literacy opportunities for all persons. The purposes of COABE are:
• To promote adult education and literacy programs, including Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, English for Speakers of Other Languages, Family Literacy, Skills Development, Workforce Development, and other state, federal, and private programs which assist undereducated and/or disadvantaged adults to function effectively
• To provide leadership in advancing the education of adults in the lifelong learning process by unifying the profession, developing human resources, encouraging and using research, communicating with the members and the public, offering other member services, and otherwise advancing adult education, and literacy
• To advocate the development and dissemination of publications, research, methods, and materials, resources, and programs in adult education and literacy
• To conduct and/or sponsor professional development conferences and activities that provide a forum to provide staff development and advance adult education and literacy
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I’m the Education & Career Advisor & DESE Program Coordinator at an ESOL/ABE Program in Salem, MA. I also work online as the instructor for a ‘Reflective Journaling’ course on a BA TESOL program based in Thailand.
I am also a private teacher, tutor, and friendly helper to LEP (Low English Proficiency) immigrants to the USA in Massachusetts. This activity is completely separate from the work I do at my ESOL/ABE program.
My tutoring website is: http://www.learnusaenglish.com/
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Over a year old now, but this interview has a place here: http:
www.ajarn.com/ajarn-street/hot-seat/matthew-noble/
NEWSFLASH — *AUGUST 1st, 2012*
Just been accepted to take this online course:
Helping Students Stay: Exploring Program and Classroom Persistence Strategies:
When we focus on helping students stay in programs, we address all the ingredients of program quality and effective instruction. Student persistence is, in fact, an indicator of program strength. In this six-week course, we’ll use the six core “drivers” of persistence, identified in the New England Learner Persistence Project, to organize and review a wide range of successful persistence strategies, and to prioritize the ones that might have the most impact in our own programs.
Course overview is here:
http://professionalstudiesae.worlded.org/pdf/LPOvSept12.pdf
Really looking forward to this…
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My former Grade 6 student posted this on Facebook on July 11th, 2012:
^ That was my farewell note to her class.
Find my WizIQ Profile here: http://www.wiziq.com/esolmatthew
Received a new recommendation letter this morning. Since the main purpose of this site is professional self-promotion, I’m (sort of sheepishly, but I’m beginning to get used to it) posting the text here as well as putting the PDF on the Recommendations page.
July 2, 2012
To Whom It May Concern:
I have known Matt Noble since January 2012 when he came to work as a counselor for Training Resources of America where I was a first-year teacher of ESL students.
I cannot begin to tell you how helpful Matt was to me. Since his office was just outside my classroom, when my class was over he would sit down with me and critique my lesson as well as my interactions with the students. While he gave me positive feedback and praised my engagement with the students, he also pointed out areas where I could improve. I found his analyses to be invaluable.
When I would work on my lesson plans prior to class, I would enlist Matt’s help. He was always willing to sit down with me and go over my lesson plans. He once spent three hours with me going over one lesson plan pointing out in detail how I should approach it with the students also pointing out how I should work with them on pronunciation and repetition. He further assisted me by introducing me to several excellent ESL teacher Web sites where I found a wealth of worksheets and approaches.
He taught me that the classroom should be 80 percent student-focused and 20 percent directed by the teacher. Consequently, I arranged lessons where the students would be talking to one another employing whatever the concept for the class was (present tense, past tense, comparatives, etc.). The students enjoyed the classes; attendance was good throughout the semester; and I believe they learned a great deal.
Matt will be a superior teacher and counselor. He’s a star. Anyone to get him will be very fortunate.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have further questions.
Sincerely,
Bette Keva
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ATTN: Thongsook TESOL Reflective Journalers!
I hope you’ve all been having a good weekend. Here in the US it’s coming up on the 4th of July and the weather is just about perfect (in the Boston area, at least…surely many Coloradans would beg to differ, through coughing fits from inhaling the smoke of about 6 too many forest fires).
Anyway, I just attempted to stick a PDF attachement to a post on the Reflective Practice Thread on the web board, but it appears that, like smileys, we’re still having a bit of trouble sorting out the attachments ‘upload path’. But no worries, it’ll get fixed up in short order I’m sure.
I quickly realized I could probably ‘host’ my PDF here for you and link you to it, so that’s what I’m doing. Sorry that you have to ‘travel’ over here. I trust it wasn’t too hard on the soles of your cyber-shoes. Here’s the post I wrote on the Thongsook Web Board explaining what I was attempting to attache:
Attached to this post you will find an edited, slightly expanded version of the ‘So, What is a Reflective Journal’ post as seen above.
It’s more of a finished document than a think-as-you-type forum post, and I cleaned up an embarrassing number of typos, mistakes, and just plain confusing writing.
I’ll be writing more, but as of now I refer you to the attached document as a ‘Brief Introduction to Reflective Practice and Journaling’.
Right. So, here it is:
So, what is a Reflective Journal? (Click to view/download)
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My current focus as Education & Career Adviser at an ABE/ESOL Program in Salem, Mass. is working on getting the ESOL curriculum tuned up so that it 1) has a consistent ‘focus on form’ and functions as a challenging language-study program and 2) also functions as an engaging, hands-on, and motivating life-skills training program for our majority Dominican and Haitian immigrant student population at the same time.
This SABES-made curriculum guide (written by Martha Oesch & Carol Bower) has so far been indispensable in approaching this task.
Another one of the central issues I’ve identified as a focus for next term is the lack of experience in/awareness of/know-how about Corrective Feedback among our instructors. I’m developing a short workshop that introduces the critical function of Corrective Feedback in the language classroom and demonstrates various methods of performing it.
Matthew Noble 