Best Practices for Serving English Language Learners and Their Families

11,000,000 children under age nine are Dual Language Learners 

    I chose this webinar because I want to be prepared and educated on how I can best serve English Language Learners in my classroom. This webinar provided a variety of ways in which you can be supportive in the classroom and I will talk about some of those ideas below.

Make the curriculum relevant→ embedding stories, reading, and perspectives that focus on history and immigrations in the units that are taught. You want to include your students in the curriculum.

Use a variety of teaching modalities→ Call and response, using movement, graphic organizers, visual representations in order to make the curriculum more understandable for all the students.

Familiarize yourself with cultural norms→ Respect looks different in different parts of the world. What a student does might be respectful to them, but you do not read it as respect. Get to know their culture and the different ways they may send messages.

Get to know your students’ contextual skills and educational backgrounds→ Can the students write on lined paper? Can they use scissors? Do not embarrass them if they do not know this. Rather, figure out what they do and do not know and teach them the things they should learn to be successful in the classroom.

Distinguish between academic English and conversational/home English→ Create the bridge between home and academic english. Some may be less familiar with academic English but this should not be seen as a deficit. It takes 5-7 years to become proficient in English and 7-11 years to become proficient in academic English.

Honor your students’ first languages→ find ways to bring it into the classroom and celebrate the language. Have students bring in artifacts of that language or tell stories about their language that they know.


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In the classroom….

    

Limit pulling ELL students out of the classroom for separate instruction time because this puts them at a disadvantage of working with peers and forming relationships. Give the ELL students the same curriculum as everyone else while being aware that they may need scaffolding. Use texts that show mirrors for the students so using texts from their culture s o they can see themselves. Allow the students to teach us about their language (teacher and other students) in the classroom. Finally, go beyond the classroom and allow ELL students to work alongside their peers and allow them to feel comfortable working with others.


Regarding family engagement…

    Being clear about the purpose of meetings means that you are setting goals and making sure that all parties are on the same page with realistic expectations. Be mindful of the power differences between parents and teachers. They may be uncomfortable because they do not speak english or because they are immigrants so be mindful of this and eliminate any power difference that may be present. Another important part of meeting with families is to have a translator in order to be able to communicate effectively (hint: the student is NOT the translator here, that is too uncomfortable for them and they should not be put in this position).


    I recently just had a guest speaker come to my MLED class to discuss teaching English Language Learners (Rachel Toncelli) and so I learned a lot of information from her and now through this webinar, I learned even more! I feel a bit more prepared for English Language Learners in my class and I still want to do more work on this. I want to be educated and informed so I can provide the best education to all my students in the classroom. What is worse than a teacher not being educated on this for an ELL student? It is already a scary time for them and I cannot imagine them feeling uncomfortable in the classroom because of their teacher. I want to avoid this at all costs!

Classroom Management

I want to start this post with a quote that was shared during this webinar on reframing classroom management. It really stuck out to me and I think it shows what is wrong using great examples. The quote reads:

If a child doesn’t know how to read, we teach. 

If a student doesn't know how to swim, we teach. 

If a student doesn’t know how to multiply, we teach. 

If a student doesn’t know how to drive, we teach. 

If a child doesn’t know how to behave, we punish? (Tom Herner)

Why do we punish instead of teach? Is it easier to just punish and send the student to the office? What does that do for the student and why can’t the teacher try to fix this within the classroom walls? This is what I wonder and this webinar has helped me answer this and learn how to handle my classroom.

There are four steps in responding to student behavior with the goal of keeping learning on track

- The first is to understand and distinguish the behavior and figure out why are they doing this and how are they acting out? An example of the most common misbehavior is disrespect and disregard. An example that may be seen in the classroom is a student distracting others by making unnecessary noise during silent reading time. Why does the student do this and how should we look at it? You need to look at the entire environment and look at what the student is getting by doing this behavior. That student may be looking for attention. How can you help this student? The effective intervention would be to maybe allow the student to tell jokes to his friends at the end of class because this is an easy way to meet that need. Another example is a student not listening and not following directions. Maybe that student is trying to escape a task. So, to help that student, you could offer more incentives for engaging in the text or maybe offer them a break because this is hard work. These small fixes can really go a long way instead of sending the student to the office immediately and not giving them a chance to improve in the classroom.

-The second step is to rethink control and power dynamics within a classroom. There are six phrases that disempower students. An example is “If you have been paying attention, then you would know” and this is a problematic statement. How do we know it was a lack of caring or focus? We do not. This is not something to say to a student, rather you could instead say “Start by asking a classmate for help. If you still need clarification, I’m here”. Another mistake that teachers make is to engage in a public battle with a student. There is no reason to engage in something like this in front of other students and this will humiliate the student and will not make them want to think about changing their behavior after you just did this to them.

-The third step is to be proactive instead of reactive. In the classroom this means teaching the classroom behavior and expectations to the students. The most important thing a teacher can do according to the presentation is build relationships and foster engagement to prevent being reactive. Greet your students outside of the class as they walk in, frame discussions in accordance with future success meaning, call your students scientists, researchers, thinkers, etc. And another preventative step to take is to avoid removing the student from the room immediately because in the long run, this does not fix anything for the student or teacher.

-The fourth and final step is to respond to the child, not the behavior. One strategy is to refocus the energy, so ask the student who is misbehaving to answer the question related to the lesson. By doing this, you are giving them attention and if they are seeking attention, this is a way to cater to that in a different way than they wanted, but it is what you as the teacher needs from them. Give them a break if they need it because this responds to the child and their needs. Give the student non-verbal cues- maybe they just need to make eye contact with you once and it will solve the issue. Lastly, another option is to give anonymous reminders. I like the example used in the webinar, “I am just waiting for two scholars to take their seats”. This calls them out but in an indirect way as to not draw attention to them and embarrass them.

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How can we avoid classroom removal?

1. Schedule a one-on-one conversation→ allow students to speak and discuss their frustrations.

2. Call home→ discuss with the family and come up with a solution to change the behavior.

3. Offer time for mindfulness→ almost like a “time out” which gives them time to reflect on their behavior and gather themselves back together to be able to come back to the lesson.



    This was such a beneficial webinar to watch as a future teacher who will be soon stepping into a classroom on my own. I need to be able to handle situations of poor behavior and know how to work with the student to help them fix it. I am not a supporter of removing a child from the room immediately because I saw this happen way too often in my high school years where students were removed from the class and put in the in school suspension room. This did nothing for them- they would come back the next day and do the same thing and get removed again. Reflecting on what I saw and now what I learned from this webinar, I feel that some of these simple strategies would have worked for the students in my classes and they would have been much more successful in high school than they were. I am determined to tackle behavior issues using these techniques and avoid just calling the office for help with a student. 

                                                

Digital Literacy- What Skills do Students Need?

I chose to listen to this webinar on digital literacy because to be honest, the internet scares me. The things that happen on the internet with kids is scary and I want to make it a point to really educate myself on this so that when I do use the internet in my classroom, it is beneficial to the students and that they are staying informed. It is important that they know the difference between real and fake news and this webinar helped me learn about this.

More than 60% of Americans now rely on social media for the information about political controversies. 

This is scary because social media is filled with fake news and people fighting over voicing their views on social media platforms. I would like to talk about a statement that the speaker made during the presentation. Kate Shuster states, “So, a lot of what we’re trying to teach our students to do is to switch domains and be able to transfer knowledge from one domain to another domain and to be able to make connections across what seem like unrelated fields” (Shuster). Since our brains are wired to look for connections, students will look for connections and in the classroom, that is great. We want them to bridge previous knowledge to new content but for internet purposes, this can hurt them. This is because they are reading conspiracy theories on the internet and trying to make connections in areas where there aren’t any. On top of this, they are reading the same false theory over and over again on the internet and therefore, our brains start to adapt to it and believe it and think we know it as the “correct” answer.

I want to focus now on how I can work in the classroom to combat these issues of perusing on the internet and believing everything we see to be true. So, how can we teach our students to think critically when they are using the media. They need to think about what they are reading and question whether it is true or not. So to do this, I can become familiar with the digital literacy framework that is presented in this webinar. This is a framework for the students to follow and so it is one I need to study before presenting to the class. There are seven layers to the framework and I will list them below.

Students…

1. Can locate and verify reliable sources of information.
2. Should understand how digital information comes to them.
3. Can constructively engage in digital communities. 
4. Understand how online communication affects privacy and security. 
5. Understand that they are producers of information. 
6. Understand their role as customers in an online marketplace. 
7. Can evaluate the value of the internet as a mechanism of civic action. 

These are skills that students need to be able to do. These skills are ones I want to take into my classroom and show my students how to do. Students should know how to locate sources that are reliable and not fake news. There are many sources and activities that can be found to do with students to teach this. They should understand how the digital information is presented and be able to engage civilly online. That is, to not say bashful comments over the internet. The online marketplace wants to draw people in and this can sometimes be scary because they will do anything to lure people in. How do we sort through the information and evaluate it? This is what students need to know and be able to do in order to use the internet successfully and safely.

Student Mental Health MATTERS!

“1 in 5 children between ages 3 and 17 have a mental, emotional, or behavioral difficulty” (Teaching Tolerance)

I listened to a Teaching Tolerance webinar on student health in which the presenters share why discussing this is important and how to handle mental health in the classroom as a teacher. The most common mental health challenges amongst students are:

1. Anxiety
2. Depression
3. Suicide Ideation
4. ADHD
5. Eating disorders 
6. Overlapping conditions (mental health overlapped with physical disorders,ie. Substance abuse) 

Black Mental health matters→ Suicide rate is twice as high than their white counterparts (Teaching Tolerance)

What can I do as a teacher? As a future educator, I need to know how to handle mental health in the classroom because I need to do everything I can for my students. 

• Educate myself on mental health- spend time reading and researching so I know how to act, and how to help in the classroom relating to mental health.

• Educate the families of students- provide them with support systems that can help them. The school nurse, counselors, school psychologist are all people who can be of aid to the family. 

• Work to remove stigma surrounding mental health, especially in Black communities- breaking down barriers to discuss mental health and promote mental health awareness in the schools.

• Involve community groups in this work

The alarming statistic above on suicide rates leads me to my next point that was discussed in this webinar: Systematic racism in curriculum, culture, and policies. The ways in which I can do this are: 

• Decolonizing curriculum- decolonize the ideologies and dismantle the curriculum to make it relevant to all students of all cultures.

• Know and be mindful of the communities that I am serving- What community am I serving? What do I know about it? What do I know about the people?
  

• Be aware of students who may be at risk of harm because of how they identify- know when to step in and be supportive, watch for injustices in terms of identity in the classroom.

    
I also learned what I should NOT do and this is just as important as learning what I should do. I do not in any way want to harm my students more by acting poorly because I did not do the work on my part to know what I should and should not do. The first thing that I should never do is to try and diagnose my students. This is not my space to do so, that is for people who are educated in that field to give a medical diagnosis. I should also not do this because if I make an assumption as to what the student has, I could be wrong and it is a totally different disorder. So, in conclusion, never diagnose a student in your classroom. Another important thing not to do is to generalize one student's problem and apply that assumption to other students. Each student is different and nobody should be compared to another person.


    In conclusion, I want to touch on a couple things I should do in a bit more detail. I should be checking my bias, that is, to not push any beliefs that I hold or that the school system holds onto the family. I should be there to help them move forward in helping the child and being another support system along with the parents. We should work alongside each other, not against each other.


    I should also be working to create a safe environment for my students that is a place for them to feel that they are trusted and that confidentiality is present. I should never share a student's health complications with another student or to anyone else who is not involved in the matter.

Talk, Read, Talk, Write- A Literacy Routine by Nancy Motley

    I attended a one hour webinar with Nancy Motley, author of Talk, Read, Talk, Write also known as “TRTW”. TRTW is an alternative approach to lecture in the classroom. It gives students the opportunity to build academic language while still learning the content. In summary, it is a way for students to deepen their understanding of the content through reading academic text and conversing on it. Part of this webinar was also learning how to do TRTW virtually with students which is extremely relevant right now. Motley shares how educators can do this in the classroom as well as online. It was important for me to understand each step of TRTW so I will summarize each layer below.

Talk→ A way to engage everyone in the activity. Brief conversations between students and the teacher to activate prior knowledge and to become familiar with the content. 

Read→ Students read an academic text. The key here that Motley stresses is that it is active reading. This means that the students should also be writing in the form of a graphic organizer or asking questions. There are many ways to do this, those are just two examples. 

Talk→ Students converse with each other to discuss what they have read. This is to help them process the reading as well as to prepare them for the next and last step. 

Write→ This is the last step where students write about the reading, sharing their thoughts and understanding. 

    This literacy routine is very flexible according to Motley. Teachers can use this method and change specific parts of it to fit their students and the lesson they are using TRTW for. Motley discussed in the webinar how to differentiate TRTW and I think this was one of the most important takeaways because differentiation in the classroom is crucial for student success. So, how can we differentiate TRTW? Motley tells us that the reading choice can be differentiated to cater to the needs of each student. Some students may have grade level articles and others may have a simplified version of the text. A few other ways to differentiate in bullet points (adopted from Nancy Motley):

• The purpose for reading the text (some students may have different tasks depending on what they need to be successful.

• The writing layer does not need to be the same for each student. The teacher can differentiate that assignment.

    Motley also states that, “Lastly, the structure of this approach ‘frees up’ the teachers time. While students are talking, reading, and writing, the teacher can determine who needs individualized support and provide it” (Motley). Since this is not a way of lecturing, the teacher will not be standing at the front of the class the entire time. They will be able to help students and spend time with those who need the support.

    I think it is also important to discuss how this can be used virtually because of the times we are currently in. The first layer (talk) can be done over facetime between two students or any video platform available. The teacher could also host a group zoom meeting and use the breakout room feature to allow students to have conversations. The second layer (read) can be done by the teacher sending the students a link to the reading for the assignment. The third layer (talk) can be done over a video platform as well. The last layer (write) would mean that the students submit their work via email or an online platform such as google classroom. This way may be a bit more difficult than the classroom but it can still be implemented with minor changes. 

    There are many ways to use TRTW in the classroom and not just an ELA classroom, it can be used for other subject areas as well. TRTW could be used for a mini lesson as well as for a novel that is being read in the class. Since it is flexible, teachers can adapt it to an array of lessons they are teaching. Nancy Motley gave a brief example of using TRTW in a mini lesson and I will share that. She starts off with the talk layer by engaging everyone in conversation on a certain topic. The students then read an article on the chosen topic and find one sentence that they find interesting to bring to a discussion. The third layer (talk #2) is when the students will provide their response to the mentimeter group and have a brief discussion with a peer. The final layer will be a writing task where the students will write a short paragraph discussing the importance of their chosen sentence. An alternative way to carry out a lesson while avoiding direct instruction that will lose the attention of students.

    The webinar was beneficial to me and I will definitely be implementing TRTW in my classroom. There are many ways to do it and it does not have to be for a certain activity, it can be used for whatever the teacher thinks is best in their classroom and that is something I really like about this literacy routine. 

"I Am Not Your Negro" -A Documentary

“Black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years” (I Am Not Your Negro)

“White people don’t think I’m human based on their conduct, they’ve become moral monsters” (I Am Not Your Negro)

    The quotes above stood out to me and were the ones I felt I needed to write down and think about. The quotes above are sickening, they are a result of the mistreatment of blacks in America. What I mean by sickening is that people of color should not feel that they aren't humans and black people in this country should not be "the victims of violence at the hands of the white men". Viewing this video made me really think about what people of color go through on a daily basis for years now. It leads me to the question of how I can help when I have not had to endure what they go through just because of the difference in skin color. This is what I work on and continue to work on as a future ELA educator who needs to educate children on this.

    As I watched the documentary, I told myself to view it as an ELA educator. I wanted to view the situations occurring as if I were to take them back to my classroom and teach my students how to stand up to racism, to use their voice and feel comfortable doing so. While I stopped the video multiple times to take in what I was hearing, I am choosing to speak on the woman going to pick up her child at school (44:41 in the video). The teacher is certain that the mother has the wrong room because in her own words, “I have no little colored children in my class”. The mother then sees her daughter who is white and the rest of the students immediately start to speak about Peola saying they did not know that “she was colored”. The girl is mortified that she is being seen with her mother and runs out of the room. My heart hurts that this is how Peola felt because of the fact that she is white and her mother is not.

    So what does this mean as a future educator? EVERYONE in my classroom will be treated equally and will treat others with respect. We will celebrate our different identities and my students will know that just because someone is white, that does not mean the parent needs to be white. People of color can also have children who are white and students should know this. Peola clearly does not feel safe in the classroom and that is a problem. Watching this scene made my heart hurt and opened my eyes to what I do not want to see happening in my classroom, especially something like this where the students are judging their peer based on skin color. How can we do better? In the classroom, we need to make it know that black lives matter. How do we do this? Well, some ways are the ones we as a class came up with and put into the chat in a previous class meeting. The curriculum plays a large role, identity work, classroom environment (the classroom walls for example), the list goes on. We have a lot of work to do and as future ELA educators and we must make our classrooms a space for everyone by tackling the above areas of curriculum, identity, and classroom environment.

Historically Responsive Literacy

The education system is failing by not reaching many students, “especially black students,             because the curricula and standards are lacking” (Muhammad). 

This is Muhammad’s critique of the education system in a one sentence answer. Let’s dig deeper into the reasoning for this and what her framework looks like in the classroom. The dress analogy she shares during the interview is a great way to explain the issue at hand.

The dress analogy as told by Gholdy Muhammad→ If you're a size ten and only size two dresses are available, you are not going to be able to fit. In the education system it means that you can try to fit the students into the curriculum, but it was not defined for them so it is simply not going to work and be successful, it's not going to “fit” them.

The system needs to be dismantled because it favors whiteness and shows no room for students of color. We keep trying to put a band-aid over the problem as a quick and easy fix but what really needs to be done is dismantling the system and reworking it from the bare bones. Part of the process of creating assessment, curriculum, standards should be that all students are included and represented and this is not happening for black and brown students in the education system. Muhammad tells us that there is great justice centered work but the problem is that, "They're doing it around a jacked-up system, you know? So what happens is that you have social justice not deeply intricate and threaded throughout the fabric of the United States or the district school system" (Muhammad).

The justification for the framework→ Muhammad did research on what the black folks were writing about, what they defined literacy as, what their goals for learning were, and so on. By doing this, she came up with the 4 layers of her framework. Muhammad discovered that the black folks gathered together to write in an effort to improve life for themselves as well as the entire society. In response to this, Gholdy states that, “When you improve the society within blackness, you can improve the society for all” (Muhammad).


                                    

4 layers: The layers should be treated equally!

Identity- Students need to see themselves within the curriculum, to relate to it. Identity is who you are and what you desire to be. It’s important to find yourself as well as interact with people who are different from you. Identity is important in the classroom because the literature that we often work with does not represent people of color well enough. Therefore, in the classroom we must work on identity with our students so that they feel valued and that they are an equal part of society. I had overall good experiences with being comfortable with my identity other than my family dynamic of coming from a divorced family and having a step mother/father. I sometimes felt like the odd one out when my peers told me it was weird. The many different family dynamics need to be normalized in the classroom because it certainly does not define someone.

Skills- An example of skills is the common core. In ELA as Gholdy states, it can be citing textual evidence. Tools that we need in order to further ourselves. Skills are embedded everywhere but it does not always have to be just about skills. We do not define someone based on a specific skill that they can or cannot do. I’ve struggled with math my entire life and I have always felt that I failed in this aspect of grade school. Gholdy says that it is not all about the skill and she is so right here. This is what teachers have been conditioned to do, drill the skill into the student to prepare them for the test. I had to learn how to do fractions so I could pass the test. What about applying it to a real-life situation? I never had the opportunity to do that in school.

Intellect- Knowledge! Applying your knowledge to something. Knowing your content and seeing it everywhere you go, making connections, seeking ways to create intellectual students in the classroom. Always being a model for your students so it will rub off onto them. I had a teacher in high school that I was immediately reminded of because she would always come in with a connection to the book we were reading and the topics we were discussing in class. Whether it was an experience she had herself or something she read, I could tell she knew her content.


                                          

Criticality-Helping students actively read, write and think. Teaching students to question what they hear and what they see. We do not want students to just take what they see and say “okay that is it”. We want them to question it, to think about it. We want our students to question what they see in terms of oppression and racism, to act on it, to speak on it. When I was listening to the podcast and this particular conversation about criticality, I thought about what is going on around the world right now with racism and the notion that being quiet is not the best option. People think because they are quiet that they are not racist and this has something that I have seen people talking about on social media.

Teaching ELA using Muhammad’s Framework

-As educators, we can teach our students criticality by showing them how to question what they see and what they are reading. We want students to have those conversations on oppression that they see around them. A good example of this in the classroom is taking time each week to discuss any current events that are happening and questioning them. Having those conversations with the students to help them learn how to speak on issues in the world and not simply take one answer as the right one without any discussion.

-Identity work in the classroom should be happening every day. It is important that at the beginning of the year, the teacher makes the classroom a welcoming environment where all identities are safe. The curriculum should reflect the students and their identities. Allowing the students at certain times to choose their own topic to write about is an adequate way of showing them that you as their teacher care who they are and what their hobbies/interests are.

                                      

-Creating an intellectual culture in the classroom is important. Allowing students to critique your ideas as Muhammad states in the interview. I want my students to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts on my teaching. I want my classroom walls to inspire them and I want us to feel like we are all learning together as a community.

-Students need skills in the classroom but what you then do with those skills is the important part. We should not just be testing students on the skills but having them put the skills to use using their knowledge. Perhaps after teaching students about a concept, we actually have them put it to use rather than take a test to see how much they can cram into their brain and remember so that they can then forget it after they take the test.

I’ll leave off with a quote that I took from the podcast that stuck with me as I listened:)

“This is humanizing work we are doing”- Gholdy Muhammad