Blog 3 - Best Practices for Serving English Language Learners
This week I was reading a blog and it was talking about how there is much more that goes into being a teacher of L2 students than just that of the classroom (well no kidding). There are many ways in which being educator goes past in the classroom, but this was referring to being a strong advocate for your students. It goes on to give guidelines to help best educate these L2 students so they are not being held back.
These guidelines go on to express best practices for instruction, classroom culture, and family and community engagement. As being a teacher who is not primarily in the ESL setting, there were many things between these 3 categories that I had not even really considered. I know it is very common at my school to be pulling the ESL students during our cycle/special classes. Some of the main points it addresses were limiting pull out time to ensure ESL students are not missing contact time with their peers to build those connections with them, go beyond the classroom for giving ESL and non-ESL students opportunities to interact and help to build their self worth, and also celebrating multilingualism. Celebrating all the different languages and cultures that are present in your school will help to build acceptance and tolerance within a schools building and culture. This can help to ensure students are being accepted and feeling welcome to their school.
As I mentioned before, I just found this to be eye opening. As many things so far in our course, nothing has been rocket science but following these steps and guidelines can make a world of a difference for those L2 students and the educators. Meeting these can help to ensure the student gets every opportunity to learn and excel.
Thanks for this post. I found those things to be extremely eye opening as well. I never considered some of those things as well. This past year I was placed into the ESL section for PSSAs. I never knew the advocacy it took to be a ESL teacher before this experience. Our teacher for ESL covers 5th-8th graders, and she did the same for the PSSA testing this year and their accommodations. She was amazing during the process, and I was just there to assist. This teacher was in learning support for her previous job and was moved to gifted & ESL for our middle school this year. The obstacle for our PSSA testing was to get the accurate tests for the Spanish speaking students. This accommodation was offered by PSSA testing for the PA students. This allowed for the test to be in Spanish for those students that speak that as their first language. I thought this was a great option for our students, but it was halted by our guidance department delaying that arrival. It was managed and fixed only because of the advocacy our ESL teacher had for those students. Otherwise, we wouldn't have received that updated version of the test on time. That goes to show you, they really do have to be a step above on their classrooms, policies, and accommodations per their student's needs.
ReplyDeletePeter you make some great points. I love celebrating my students and sharing that they do speak Spanish, but they also speak English too! They are able to speak two languages! Isn't that amazing! It is so sweet to see their faces. They often had never looked at it that way. They carry it sometimes like a burden that they are working to learn and speak two languages. As 6 and 7 year olds they do not understand what a benefit it is for them!
ReplyDeleteYour point about the students being pulled and making sure all teachers are aware of best practice strategies for teaching English learners ties perfectly to my blog post this week. I feel this needs to be discussed more in our schools. I read this article https://ctmirror.org/2017/06/13/education-commissioner-wentzell-our-english-learners-need-more-support/
It states that there is a 24 point gap in reading (in PA) between hispanic and white students. We need to do something to help close this gap!