All posts tagged: ELD

Epiphany: Co-teaching is NOT a Panacea

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Arguing in my head has led to a lot of Aha moments in my life, but I just had one that takes the cake. Often I have seen it argued that we are assuming that our students are dumb because they cannot complete the work because of their language level. However, it’s not that the students are incapable of the higher level thinking, they cannot do the work because we are incapable of teaching those skills at their level. Either we cannot teach the content through the higher level thinking in their home languages, as this would be an incredible stretch to attempt, or we cannot teach thinking skills such as deconstructing an argument or analyzing biases without complex language. Again, this isn’t to say that it is impossible for these students to learn these skills and content, I am simply saying that with our current resources, both human and material, we cannot reach these desired goals. This has and continues to be the biggest problem to be solved in my current position and in …

Success

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Success comes in many forms. At times success comes after a lot of hard work and time dedicated to a particular event or objective. Sometimes success just happens because the right pieces fall together. That was today. Today’s success was a mix of well thought out planning, and great students coming together to make a lesson work in a way that I never could have imagined it to have done. I found out last week that we were planning on doing a jigsaw activity in class where three students would group up and work individually on learning three important areas of progressivism in US history. When I looked at the text load for the students I was immediately daunted by the amount of work it would take to find articles that my lowest ELL students could read. However, after much time thinking and planning, I came up with a different idea. I decided that the jigsaw activity would best be done in groups of 4 and not three. This would allow three non-EL students to work through their …

Comprehensible input

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All the time I hear from teachers the same question over and over again; “How do I teach vocabulary to my EL’s?” And every time I walk into their classroom, check out their materials, methods, and strategies, I notice that it isn’t vocabulary that they are missing. In fact, they usually have that part down fairly well. What they are really missing is comprehensible input. So, just what is Comprehensible Input? In a nutshell comprehensible input is any language that can be understood by the listener. And to better help you understand just what that means, take a look at this short video from one of the greatest children’s shows of all time. Don’t watch the whole thing (unless you want to) but go to the 2 minute mark. What do you notice? What was his rate of speech? Did he have any props? Was he using gestures to guide children toward better understanding of meaning? Looking back, Fred Rogers did such a great job of adding meaning to his communication, so that all children …

VIP Kid 2 Week Update

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As of today, I hit my 14th day with VIP Kid, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. So today I thought I would post an update and share some tips for those who are thinking about joining or have recently joined. 2 Week Update After my first week, I was certified at Level 1, or Pre VIP. These are kids who are categorized not by English proficiency, but by age. The youngest children are 3, while the oldest you can be and still be categorized as Pre VIP is 6. I have heard from a lot of prospective teachers that they could never teach this group. I, however, enjoy this group a lot. For starters it’s mostly interactive materials. The kids get to drag and drop a lot of onscreen images, play music and sounds, and draw all over the board. This keeps the kids engaged and having fun just playing with their tablets and computers. The second thing I really like about this age group is that they are totally into being …

Creative Homework Solutions

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Involving parents in their children’s homework is a great way to build parent participation in both their children’s lives, but also in the school, especially when they are unable to come during scheduled events. However, there are some serious considerations you need to think about before assigning homework that involves family members. In this post I jump into some of the problems, and solutions I have seen work for those problems, that may arise with giving homework to ELL’s as well as students who are low SES. Disclaimer –  I am firmly against homework, so my honest solution to all of these problems is not to assign any. However, there are times when even I find it necessary to have the students study and practice at home. Problem: Parents Schedules Do the parents work overnights and sleep most of the day? Are your students spending more time home alone than with their parents? This comes down to knowing your students and their family schedules. It also means finding alternative options to students who face some …

Individual Learning Plans

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Over the past few weeks we have received many new students. Some from other countries and others are from schools in MN and the greater United States. One of the hardest things to judge as an ELL teacher is how to support students when they first arrive from other schools. MN doesn’t have one reporting or grading system for either academic grades nor EL status. This causes many challenges when planning services for students who have yet to arrive, then causes delays in services that many students need. There is a fix to this problem. In its entirety, it’s a grand undertaking that would absorb many resources that most school districts don’t have; however, just with anything new in education, I believe that implementing this in small segments is completely doable. What I am talking about is individualized learning plans or ILPs. Much like their special education counterpart, the IEP or individualized education program, ILPs focus on creating a plan for each student that helps teachers and support staff focus their teaching to match the …

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To wrap up the year, I thought I would reflect on the things that have impacted my teaching the most. From the strategies learned and tested to the sociopolitical atmosphere currently stressing the foundations of what education is. These are the things that for good or bad I have taken away from the 2017 year. Model EverythingEvery time I model something, I learn something new.  I am finding that this is the most powerful tool for teaching students skills that we expect them use. Even modeling how we expect their names to be placed on the paper is so easily overlooked. We sometimes think that because they’re (insert age here), they should know things that we want them to know. The examples I realized this year are as follows; how to make a bulleted list for note taking, how to use the proper margins on loose leaf and journal page paper and how apply a rule for writing conventions. Each of these things need to be modeled step by step to ensure that the children …

Why the word Rigor irks me.

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This blog wouldn’t be called The Life Argotic without me taking on some buzzwords. So this will be my inaugural buzzword debunking. I’m fairly certain it won’t be my last. Education is full of them. Every time I hear the word rigor, I cringe and brace for whatever is coming next following that word. Why? Because the majority of the time it’s being used, it’s being used as a euphemism to mean weak and not enough. Not enough of what “I” (the person looking in) think is rigorous because “I” (again the person looking on) don’t think it’s hard enough. Let me use an analogy. If I asked you to cycle 100 miles right now, and you weren’t a cyclist, you might say that it’s too rigorous. But to Chris Froome, the 2017 Tour De France winner, he would say the opposite. So if you instead decided to ride 10 miles, would it be fair for me to say that you aren’t being as rigorous as Mr. Froome, even if you are pushing your hardest …

Why you shouldn’t call them the WIDA "Standards"

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One thing that I think EL teachers need to get better at is explaining our profession. However, one of the largest organizations for teaching English, WIDA, doesn’t make it easy when they decided to call their framework of instructional tools, “standards”. What is WIDA?WIDA stands for the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment. It’s a consortium of states who have agreed to adopt the assessments and standards put out by this group, which is based out of Madison, WI. According to the WIDA website, 37 states have adopted these standards. So, what are the standards? Specifically, the WIDA “standards” are 5 broadly defined statements about what language learners are expected to do. 5 WIDA ELD standards from the 2012 ELD Guide (Amplified) Many teachers who hear the word “standards” compare this with their own state standards and say, “HUH?” To be completely honest, at first I did as well. But that was because I also heard the word standards and was only looking at those 5 items while writing lesson plans. Simple enough. Right? Wrong. WIDA …