Wow. The Montano training concerning academic competence across the curriculum was fantastic. Altona's team included myself, Laurie, MaryEllen, Jenay, Jake (our new AP), Victor, and Josh. A great part of the week was learning new classroom instructional strategies (well, some new, some not so new). In short, the course was devoted to understanding and working with students that do not have Academic Language Skills. Those students may be ELLs, but they are also a large number of students that have moved through they system without learning that their Public Voice and Private Voice are different modalities of linguistics. We can argue about why students do not have either Academic Language or a Public Voice, or concentrate on what we are going to do about it. This PST is one part of the solution - identifying strategies that you will use on a routine basis to close the achievement gap, and how will Academic Labs function. In short - Academic Labs must be about ensuring Academic Competence. Think about that and we'll discuss on Tuesday's meeting. By the end of the week, you should have completed Instruction that Works for English Language Learners.
Comment away. For those of you that attended the Montano training, you may want to reflect during this round of posting as well.
A place to gather and discuss education in general and Altona Middle School in particular!
Subscribe via email
About Me
Altona's Staff Development Reading List
Books I Wish I Read Before Sending My Daughter To Middle School
What I'm watching
- Outsourced
- The Walking Dead
- Justified
- Parks and Recreation
- The Mentalist
- Fringe
What I'm playing
- Black Ops (Way Too Much!!!)
- Halo Reach
- Modern Warfare 2 (Too Much!!)
Latest additions to my MP3 player
- Arcade Fire
- Florence and the Machine
- Miranda Lambert
- Queen - Flash Gordon Sdtrk!
- Waylon Jennings
What's on my Kindle
Latest iPhone Apps
- Words Free (Scrabble)
- Supervision 2.0
- iheartradio
- Midomi
- Air Sharing
- Magic Pad
What's on my nightstand
- The Beekeeper's Handbook
- The Hunger Games Trilogy!
- The Templar Trilogy
17 comments:
Chapter 10- One strategy that struck me as a good strategy to use with ELL students as they are commenting is to give them feedback and also say what they just said, only with proper grammar/usage. Chitra mentioned this in one of her previous comments. Do not overemphasize what they said incorrectly; say it ordinarily but correctly.
Also, having a student draw pictures to show their findings, and having you (or another reliable student, perhaps?) write in the words to go with the pictures seems like it would really help with an inductive reasoning task.
A Deductive reasoning task seems like it would be much more difficult to pull off with an ELL student- simply because there is so much language involved. The text mentions reducing the task of the student- to perhaps a more hands-on task, which it seems would apply more to an inductive reasoning task.
Deductive reasoning (like Sherlock Holmes) would be taking a series of events and trying to piece them together to solve the puzzle or obtain the discovery. Inductive reasoning- which would make more sense to ELL students, would involve experiencing an activity and then trying to make a conclusion based on experiences.
For Deductive reasoning, graphics and pictures are once again a great way to have the student simultaneously learn English. The author suggests verbalizing whenever possible, so it would take an ELL student more time to accomplish a deductive reasoning task- especially if they needed to look up words/draw pictures, but I can see where it would be very beneficial.
I like the idea of involving parents in their childrens' education in the perfect world. I question however, if the child is in fact an ELL student does it stand to reason his parent is also not English proficient. Would/could it create aggravation to have the non English speaking parent involved in the English speaking school? I think having a translator available along with additional resources is again wonderful in the perfect world. Wouldn't a translatorbe teetering on the edge of confidentiality laws?
In the era of financial constraints is this really possible? I believe that the author has unrealistic ideas in chapter 12, but wonderful in the perfect world. Just my thoughts....
I am glad I was able to attend the Montaño class while I was reading the 1st book. While there are many useful explanations and strategies in the book, the Montaño class helped me better understand the difficulties ELL students often have in school. She had many examples to share and provided hands-on work with different methods we can use with all students, ELL in particular.
I imagine we will be sharing several of the activities with the staff, and I believe they can be adapted for all content areas. We worked with flip charts, vocabulary organizers, t-graphs, and cognitive mapping, just to name a few. Not only did she have student examples, but we made some of our own. These activities allow students to interact with their content information in creative ways which can increase their comprehension and retention.
We also looked at some interesting information about discourse patterns that explained how people from different cultural backgrounds speak and express their ideas. I think we all had specific people in mind when we heard some of this. Another topic we discussed concerned public and private voice. As an adult who interacts with other adults and kids on a daily basis, I received some good reminders from this.
If I sound a bit vague or too general, it is because I am finding it hard to describe some of this in words. I think it will be easier for me, and the other people who attended the class, to share this with the staff when we are at school and can show you concrete examples. I also got to make some new organizers!
Chapter 11: I use similarities and differences when students learn definitions. I find this is very useful for tapping into a student’s prior knowledge and helps grow deeper roots of understanding. Much of this chapter made a lot of sense to me- and was a recycling of what we read earlier.
One concept that is still new to me is the concept of breaking a lesson down into the different stages of second language acquisition. This is certainly one of the strategies I would like to take from this book, but it is going to take practice to master this art. I think it would be really beneficial to have faculty members bring a lesson or lessons to a PLC day and have grade level or core articulation on how lessons could be adapted for the stages of language acquisition.
I thought Chapter 12 had some great ideas- one of which, the Epstein Model of Parent and Community Involvement. As read the model, I notice that many of the types of parent/community involvement we already implement here at Altona, but I also notice many types of involvement that we could discuss and consider implementing. Parent education and other courses for parent training would be great ideas for communicating our vision and expectations- for everyone involved in education, but is it a realistic avenue to pursue? This would surely help ELL students and their families.
I also like the regular schedule of notices, memos, phone calls, etc. I think that one practice at Altona that has not been fairly implemented is communication. I think that teacher to parent communication is important regardless what a teacher teaches. We should have policies for every teacher to communicate with the parents of the students they are teaching. I do not think communication should be split up depending on who teaches what or how many students a teacher has. It is every teacher’s professional duty to communicate with parents. I also think this would help regarding the miscommunication with k12planet.com.
With ELL students, in a perfect world- as Wendy has mentioned- it would be great to pay bilingual teachers who serve as translators, since they are doing more work.
Chapter 9 touched on the subjects of generating and testing hypothesis, a skill that I agree with the author’s position on that helps build inductive and deductive reasoning. I think that this is a skill that our students at Altona get a good deal of exposure to, but we all may go about it differently depending on the subject matter we teach. In Tech class, I refer to it as Critical Thinking and Analysis skills. I thought that the strategy of using different methods with ELL students to identify similarities and differences outlined in Chapter 11 will really benefit all of my students and is a great classroom recommendation. Chapter 12 touched on something that is a core issue to every teacher, and that is parental involvement with their child’s education. Partnering with parents for support and the academic success of their child is key to the success of some of the ELL students, and the book makes a good point about the cultural differences about the fact that teachers and ELL parents need to work together to have a common understanding of what it is that their students are expected to learn so that they can help them with their school work at home more effectively.
While chapters 10 and 11 had excellent strategies to use with our students and nice scaffolding suggestions for our ELLs, chapter 12 was the one for me that I feel needs the most school-wide attention. It may be perfect-world reaching, but why not? :) My class-end reflection for this PST will include this: If I was still in the classroom, one of my goals coming out of this would be a much more concerted effort to reach out to ELL parents. I know it is more difficult with those not of Spanish-speaking backgrounds, but there are resources available through Student Services to help out with the Spanish-speaking population in particular. These include a translator who can contact parents, set up parent conferences and attend those conferences to provide Spanish-English translation. And who knows? If we were to contact Student Services for help with our non-Spanish students, maybe they would begin to realize there is a need for more help with other languages. I also believe that as our diversity increases, more cultural training will be necessary... but I suppose we shall cross that bridge when we come to it.
Things that stood out to me from the other two chapters--
--The idea that scaffolding down the content objective for precedence on the language objective does not mean the ELL students are not engaged in inductive reasoning. Just trying to figure out what's going on when everyone is speaking a foreign language is inductive reasoning!
--Cognitively undemanding and context embedded communication vs. cognitively demanding and context reduced communication is key for working with ELL students. They will come along better academically when they are helped through the stages of language acquisition appropriately.
At stated before, we are supposed to avoid overt corrections (p.96). We need to hear what the students are saying, even if they do not say it using standard academic discourse patterns. A fellow teacher in my second year of teaching accused me of not hearing what was being said as I was so focused on how it was said. I actually heard both, but if the students perceive that we only hear how it is said, we are going to lose them. Today Dr. Montaño discussed that we need to be careful HOW we say things (I’m in her second class this week). It’s not always what we say, but how we say it. By modeling the correct academic patterns, we can acknowledge that we understood what they were saying, and also model the academic standard. We can never model enough (p. 102).
At this point, I only know of one new student for the fall that should be at the beginning stage, but keep in mind what it states on p. 112, “A student’s language could be very limited – even for a student who was born in the United States – if the family speaks only its native language at home and in the neighborhood.” As was stated in the original post for the week, we need to be ensuring academic competence. Without telling them that their home language or dialect is WRONG, they need to understand that it is not what is expected in school or on CSAP type tests.
Ok, I have posted, now, I will read and comment… What the students need is DEDUCTIVE as that is what is used for the CSAP, etc. Dr. Montaño commented today how some of the writing prompts set them up for failure by asking them to write to a friend, then grading them with a deductive writing rubric where they need a main idea, support, support, support, and a conclusion.
Wendy, one other thing I had heard before, but was reiterated in today’s class with Montaño, is that it is not only using the words of the other language, but the discourse pattern as well. I have trouble with that – adding the extra chit-chat that leads up to the point. It was stated today that if the Spanish translation is not at least twice as long as the
English, it is going to be perceived as very pushy…
Michelle commented on translations for other languages. Last year I used the computer to translate a letter then asked the student to check it out for me. Here at Heritage (where I am taking the Montaño class and where I did my ELL practicum), there were occasions where students translated for the parents during conferences. Dr. Montaño also spent time today on body language and how different actions can have VERY different meanings in different cultures. We will definitely need more training as diversity increases.
The book leaves no doubt that there are numerous strategies to help ELL’s more effectively learn English and succeed in school, and that the challenge is to determine what level our ELL’s are at and implement strategies that will help them best. One proposal that I think would be so simple and so easy and not time consuming or requiring additional planning is detailed again in Chapter 10 – simply repeating what they said using correct English pronunciations and grammar without fanfare. How easy is that?!? I do think that it is important, as the book details, that it be done in a non-confrontational manner, or the process could backfire. No one, ELL’s included, wants to be corrected in front of others on their speech, which could be an embarrassing if not devastating experience, but simply repeating what they said, confirming their statement but tweaking it so it is correct is less like a correction and more like an affirmation of their contribution.
I also found the section on involving parents and the community in Chapter 12 to validate what we all know – that the school is only one part of the process in learning the English language, and that what happens outside the school parameters is a HUGE component of that learning process. Knowing the student’s background, previous educational experiences, parental involvement and what language is spoken at home is all important information that helps gauge the processes offered at school, and the more we know the better we can adjust. But Wendy pointed out some relevant concerns around parental inclusion: the language barriers they hold, their perceptions of the school and what it is all about, the financial reality of having translators involved and resulting possible confidentiality issues. What the school wants to do and what it can do may not always be the same thing, and there may be more obstacles in the path of having non-English speaking parents involved than first meets the eye.
The biggest challenge that I see in using these strategies is the additional planning it will take for all of us. Even just using the specific ones that each of us will pick out to use next year will take time to implement. I do think that the more we use them the easier it will become to differentiate for all students.
The team that attended the Mantano training has a lot of manipulates that can be used for all students. We will hopefully be sharing them with you in the fall. They are all pretty easy to put together and I think the students will really gain from using them. The skeleton outline for science and social studies classes can help the special ed. students as well. We learned the importance of teaching the students the difference between the public and private voice. Many of our students don’t know the difference. They speak to us just like they speak to their friends. They don’t know how to speak in different situations and always use their private voice.
I think one of the most important ideas that I gleaned from the training was that it is not just the ELL students that have trouble with the language, but other students that do not have their academic language in place. Their pattern is very similar to the ELL student in that they only use the private language/social language, low vocabulary, low reading and comprehension skills, and the use on the non standard dialect. The strategies that we will use will help everyone.
Reading though everyone’s comments I think we all agree that parent involvement/communication is very important, and in general, I think we do a good job keeping parents informed about what we all do on a daily basis through TeacherWeb and K12Planet. That being said, I think that often times the parents of our ELL kids are not able to use these tools at the same level as other parents are using them (if at all). If a parent is having difficulty reading in English, what use is TeacherWeb? The same goes with parent conferences, I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down with a student and their parents only to have the student do all of the translating him/herself. I often wonder in these instances, how much of what is REALLY being said is getting translated and how much is the student paraphrasing or generalizing in order to be able to accomplish this task.
Obviously with a district our size, it is impossible to generate resources for all of the different languages represented in our student population, but I often am frustrated that parents who speak another language other than Spanish are left out of the communication loop. How can we begin to build our own community of resources to help facilitate communication in multiple languages?
In this section of reading, I particularly liked the chapter 11 on identifying similarities and differences. This strategy promotes higher level thinking and lends itself easily to any content area. This is a strategy I use a lot in my classroom and have found that students not only pick it up fairly quickly, but they really enjoy it.
I like the focus the authors put on modeling and gradually lessening support. Generally when I am teaching a new skill, we start and work together as a class. Once they have mastered it collectively, students get a chance to apply that skill in a group. Then, I will ask them to apply it independently. This gradual release is very effective.
Regarding the last chapter, I appreciated that the authors highlighted the fact that there can be (and usually are) differing academic expectations based on culture. This was something I experienced when I did my ESL practicum in Greeley. Parents were completely hands off. School and home were completely separate.
Additionally, I kept thinking about something Montono said last week. She focused on the importance of quality verbal interactions for students with adults. Many parents of ELLs do not have the time to put in to volunteering at a school or explicitly teaching in the home as chapter 12 encouraged. If however, these parents will simply make the time and effort to SPEAK with their children, in either the native language or the second language, it is one of the best things linguistically (and probably for healthy socialization, too) that the parents can do for the child. It can be on any topic really- the day’s happenings, a movie- it’s not the quality of the topic, so much as the quality of the language exchange. It is simply interacting with adults that helps kids develop linguistically.
Other thoughts on Montono…the most important information that I took away from the week was the explanation of and contributing factors in the use of non-standard dialects, for not only ELL students, but many native English speakers as well. At bottom, it is a literacy issue. Understanding and focusing on this by applying the research based and experience proven strategies she shared helps promotes academic competency. And none of these strategies are difficult; essentially, they are simple ways to help students engage the content with one another and through multiple modalities. I’m excited to apply this information, because I believe it will help all of my students.
I find linguistics fascinating, so I really enjoyed the week.
On page 111, the book says, "Students who arrive in the US schools with appropriate grade-level achievement in their native language will make the transition to learning in English more easily." We've discussed this many times in the blog and in our groups, but what bothers me is this. It makes sense that high- and average-achieving students in Mexico, Korea, France, etc. would be high to average achievers in American schools. I'm sure then, that there are also special education students in those countries. There really needs to be a better way to identify these students to get them services. I know from experience what a tedious, lengthy process it is to try and get an English language learner referred to special education. I don't know how we could make this process more efficient, but I wonder if ELL teachers could use special education support for those students who truly need it.
On another topic, I know I could do a much better job communicating to parents of ALL my students, not just ELLs, how they can best help their child with learning. It seems especially important for teachers to learn to communicate this well to parents whose "cultures view their role in their children's education differently than US parents." (page 115) I realize that on average, 80% of all ELLs in America speak Spanish at home. However, in all of my experiences as a teacher (only six years), less than 10% of my ELLs have been Spanish-speakers, so how can school districts provide support for the other 400+ languages students speak at home?
Andy comments on Epstein's work and I have had to do a lot of study of Epstein the last two months as part of my admin license. I agree that we do some of the things to create school, family, community partnerships very well but we still have some work in some areas. Our strengths include communicating with home and parents and providing a wide variety of volunteering opportunities. Some of the places we need to do more work is actively trying engage all families in the school, making them all feel welcome and part of the school community, not just those that are easy to reach. Other areas we are getting stronger in but could still work on are communicating learning at home objectives of homework to parents and offering more parenting classes and advice, especially reaching out to all families with these and not just those who will come to an evening class or who have internet access.
Chapters 10 and 11 have particular importance in science class because generating and testing hypotheses and comparing and contrasting are the heart of science. What I need to do a better job of is communicating expectations to ELLs, especially when making modifications for them so that they can list observations and use short simple sentences to make conclusions. I also could use more sentence starters for doing comparing and contrasting activities.
In the assigned reading for this week I was drawn more to chapter 12, Involving Parents and the Community. I was impressed with Epstein’s suggestions of ways schools can involve ELL parents and families. Many of those suggestions are used at Altona such as conferencing, translators, information on policies and course work, etc. Even though teachers at Altona are encouraged to contact parents by phone and email and do a good job at succeeding in communicating with parents there are still students who fall through the cracks because they do not have internet access or even a phone that is always available in the home. I know this to be true because of one of my students by the name of Gary. Even though Gary spoke English well his parents did not. Many attempts were made before we actually were able to meet with his mother to discuss his progress in school. There was no computer in the home. Phone numbers seemed to change from time to time. Notes from school seemed to get lost, etc. This was a very frustrating experience. When we actually visited with Gary’s mother luckily we had Mr. Ramsey to translate and help her to understand the problems Gary faced. Gary was a lifetime homework club attendee and is currently in summer school. The reason I tell this story is because I feel Gary and his family could have benefited more from Epstein’s suggestions, especially in providing opportunities for Gary’s mother to come to school and interact with teachers and other staff members and involving the family in more community activities. Would a bilingual parent volunteer or staff member assigned to help the family been a key to a more successful year? Would working more one-on-one with the family to encourage social and academic support make a difference? I feel these are valid points worth looking at.
I love the idea of translators in the school. This makes partent phone calls, conferences and communitcation so much easier. My experice with the Hispanic culture and how they view education is very different from how we do. They feel that the teacher is right and it is not their business to talk to or argue with a teacher. I actually had the unfortuante expercie of calling a parent to tell them what a great job their student was doing in class. To this family a teacher calling for ANY reason was bad. They student was punished for it. We need to reach out to parents and explain WHY we want them involved. How it will help their child and hopfully them as well. Another great resource I have seen used is to have English classes available in the evenings at the school so parents have an oppourtuiny they may not have had to learn English.
I did a lesson last year using pictures. It was very interesting. I ask my students to draw a picture of their voice. How they felt it looked or what presence it took. Many were confused, not knowing how to do something so abstract, but in the end it was a lot of fun and the kids liked it. I can see how this activity can really help ELL students to understand and comprehend what is going on.
Not correcting what students say but repeating it back correctly is such a great idea. I would have benefited from this stragy when I was learning German.
In Chapter 10 I really liked the activity where the kids walk around the school grounds and then are expected to draw at least one conclusion based upon the observations they made (p. 97-8).
I was intrigued by Ch. 11, particularly the part about using real-life examples such as Batman vs. Spiderman to help illustrate the concept of comparing similarities and differences.
On a related note, I loved Jolene Smith's comment on page 105 that she compares characters not just to each other, but also to "ourselves and our culture." This strategy could be easily extended to all subjects; for example the class could discuss different kinds of heroes, ranging from Lewis & Clark or Einstein to Batman or some guy in current events who saved a kid from getting hit by a train. The Comparison Matrix is also a valuable tool that can be used in any subject; I know Kathleen was using a very similar organizer to compare different types of landforms when I covered her class.
Chapter 12 and the comments that ensued were interesting, but perhaps the idea to stuck out most to me was getting parents involved in student goal-setting. I think we already do a pretty decent job of this. I know that last year our kids had to be ready to explain their SSR+ goals with their parents at fall conferences. Perhaps the kids could even take their SSR binders home as they're forming their goals and have a discussion with their parents about it.
Post a Comment