TESOL Says Farewell to Associate Executive Director John Segota after 23 Years
by Christopher Powers
I have typically used this space to highlight TESOL activities that support our strategic outcomes. This time, I would like to use this column to honor and recognize a long-time staff member who has dedicated his career to helping us advance our Global Presence and Connectivity, our Knowledge and Expertise, and our Voice and Advocacy.
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John Segota (right) with Diane Staehr Fenner at the 2016 TESOL Advocacy & Policy Summit.
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John Segota, who joined us in 1996 as a project coordinator and rose to become our associate executive director, will be leaving us this month to join the
National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) as their new executive director. I am very happy for John and very pleased with his well-deserved success. While our association will miss John, he already knows that I am looking forward to working with him to find ways to collaborate and serve gifted English learners.
John’s contributions are most readily recognized in helping TESOL raise our collective voice and advocate for English teachers and learners. First as a coordinator for advocacy and public relations and later as director of the department, John spearheaded many of our most significant public policy initiatives, including our Advocacy and Public Policy Summit and our Public Policy Professional Council.
But John’s contributions go far beyond advocacy.
TESOL Board of Directors and staff lunch meeting
As professional relations manager, he strengthened our global presence and connectivity, helping to forge some of our strongest partnerships with organizations such as AFT, NABE, and EnglishUSA and our more than 100 affiliates worldwide.
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John (right) in Seoul, South Korea, during the 2010 TESOL SpellEvent
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John also played a significant role in strengthening our knowledge and expertise. He led our efforts to develop
new standards and revise old ones. He oversaw one of TESOL’s first U.S. federal contracts to provide linguistic expertise on the U.S. naturalization exam. He helped conceptualize and co-convene the Summit on the Future of the TESOL Profession, and he contributed to the Action Agenda for the Future of the TESOL Profession.
A true expert in association governance, John provided significant guidance to our Board of Directors through our first-ever governance review and restructuring.
John has indeed done it all at TESOL. In addition to his deep institutional knowledge, what we will truly miss most is the warm colleague and always friendly coworker.
Please join me in thanking John for his many years of dedicated service to TESOL and congratulating him on his new opportunity.
Christopher Powers
TESOL Executive Director
Email: cpowers@tesol.org
Twitter: @TESOL_Powers
More Photos
John speaking at a National Coalition for Literacy event
John helping present the 2017 Outstanding Advocate Award to Gil Mendoza (right)
John at CATESOL 2015 with Judith O'Loughlin
TESOL Blogs
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Check out some of the most recent TESOL Blogs:
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Linking Writing to ELs’ Lives Using Quickwrites, by Judie Haynes
 Recently, I came across a mention of quickwrites (QWs) on Twitter. I immediately felt that they were a terrific way to support English learners (ELs) as they learn to write. According to Linda Reif, author of The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Reading and Writing (2018), a QW is a short, quick response that students make to a prompt. That prompt can be a short text, a passage from a mentor text, a poem, or a picture. Students write a quick 1–3 minute reaction to the prompt.
Reif’s ideas can easily be adapted for ELs by choosing texts that are at their English language development (ELD) level. Read more. |
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Keeping Up With Issues of Plagiarism, by Betsy Gilliland
 Academic writing involves extensive interaction between writers and texts. Writers develop their arguments out of other writers’ ideas and use published sources to both support and refute perspectives. Examine almost any academic journal article, and you will see references and quotations from other articles and books woven throughout the text. Learning how to integrate those sources in ways appropriate to disciplinary and cultural norms is a core challenge of learning to write academically. Read more.
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TESOL Bookstore
Featured Resources from TESOL Press
Engaging Research: Transforming Practices for the High School Classroom
Mary Amanda Stewart and Holly Hansen-Thomas, Editors
Practice has long been informed by research, but what happens when practitioners and researchers actually work together in a high school classroom setting? Discover the ways teachers and researchers apply up-to-date TESOL research to meet both content and language acquisition criteria while also affirming students’ cultural knowledge, life experiences, and language abilities.
Navigating the Intercultural Classroom
Tuula Lindholm and Johanne Mednick Myles
With a Foreword by Darla K. Deardorff
This book goes beyond theoretical discussions to provide concrete methods for integrating intercultural communicative competence into the language classroom through its inclusion of practical examples, engaging activities, and real-life case studies.
Copublished with NAFSA
Reflection-As- Action in ELT
Thomas S. C. Farrell
Operationalize reflective practice with an approach designed for the field of TESOL. This book offers a new framework using a holistic and comprehensive approach and includes spiritual, moral, and emotional noncognitive aspects. This easy-to-navigate book is organized by the five stages of the reflection framework.
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Greetings everyone, to this month’s TESOL games and learning blog. This month, we will wrap up our long look at gamification by highlighting tools for the classroom. Following is a list of tools to get you started—or to keep you going. 
