Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 7

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Chapter 7

Reminder: This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. I'm reflecting on them here. The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"Discuss ways that you are encouraging students and teachers to become self-determining learners and why that matters."

Most of my lessons begin with some tiny speech about how "we're going to do hard things, you're going to make mistakes, and that's GREAT because it's the only way to grow your brain." Growth mindset fostering is my number two goal. My number one goal is to love my kiddos and make sure they know it.

With that comes the expectation that things are going to hurt in order for them to grow. It will get worse before it gets better, and if that happens, you're on the right track. My goal in doing this is to allow my kiddos to see struggle as a signpost for motivation, perpetuating their self-determination.

In general, I don't engage in gossip or complaining in my school environment. I try to encourage as much positive thinking as possible and often reword a teacher's complaint to focus on the silver-lining. Hopefully I don't come off as a judgemental Pollyanna....

I've also decided to create a bulletin board in the office hallway called "Overheard." The goal is for teachers to write and post quotes from their teammates that shows their passion for this art form we call teaching!

Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 6

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Chapter 6

Reminder: This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. I'm reflecting on them here. The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"When the culture shifted to kids first, the finger pointing which put everyone on the defensive stopped."

I want this at my school! It often feels like teachers of all positions are constantly looking for a way to prove that they work harder, work longer, teach better, and complain more accurately than everyone else. We need to focus on the kids and how to help them as a team, rather than spending so much energy talking behind other teachers' backs. This culture brings all to a defensive position: hardly the best vantage point for improving literacy.

Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 5

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Chapter 5

Reminder: This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. I'm reflecting on them here. The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"Self-reflect on the characteristics of leaders. Where are you strongest? What might you choose to work on to increase trust and professional relationships with your colleagues?"

I am strongest at keeping key questions in mind. Gratefully, my parents raised me to constantly ask questions and the skill compounds over a lifetime. My goal as a teacher in my school team is to find solutions to the problems we face as a unit. The course of action to solving those problems is to ask questions from all angles and I find myself constantly asking and trying to answer those questions.

I choose to work on following through with focusing on the big picture of literacy. Many teachers rely on me as an instructional coach for ELL best practices. Often I fall short on that goal and I need to follow through.

Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

Reminder: This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. I'm reflecting on them here. The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"A major problem with such assessments is the misuse of valuable time for teachers and students--time that could go toward actually teaching reading and having students read meaningful texts." and "In the early grades in particular, partner reading is a terrific way to accelerate important aspects of reading progress--fluency, word recognition, comprehension, and enjoyment."

This strikes me because of my current obsession with the latest PD I attended: ExC-ELL. The PD focused on a structure and method for teaching ELs (which would work for all students) and which emphasizes instructing with close reading methods, on grade level texts, with rigorous speaking and writing expectations, and partner reading. 

I realize now that I was putting too much focus on the DRA (our assessment tool), as if it was a method for improving student reading and academic achievement, instead of seeing it for what it is: an assessment. It is not the focus, the kids are the focus. 

And two ways to achieve an academically striving student is through partner reading and learning through writing. I wanted to pull a quote from the chapter about high quality writing instruction as an approach for improved reading skills, but I already chose two quotes out of the one suggested. ( :0) )

Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 3

Checking in with the book study on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead again :) I'd love to hear from you in the comments!

Chapter 3

Reminder: This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. I'm reflecting on them here. The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"Examine the quality of the texts being used at your school. Are they of the highest quality by excellent authors or are they mostly texts from published programs? Why does this matter? Are you providing a healthy balance in your classroom and school libraries of outstanding and relevant fiction and nonfiction texts? How can you ensure a balance?"

No. 

The read-aloud, mentor texts the teachers often pick are typically high quality because many of the teachers know the value of that quality in encouraging joy of reading. 

However, most of the guided reading texts we have are from several structured programs. The older books in our library room focus on a phonemic skill and build a "story" around it. These are helpful for phonemic skill building, but they hardly teach comprehension with quality story-lines and far from inspire joy of reading. Others are "tower books," accompanying the basil program. 

I want to ensure a balance through selecting classics, like Routman's grandmother, and constantly rotate genres and styles. High quality literature is the path to students excitement about reading. I want these kids to desire to wrap themselves in a book like their favorite quilt.

Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 2

This book study on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead has been helpful, but I wish I could spend more time drinking in the tips and anecdotes!

Chapter 2

Reminder: This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. I'm reflecting on them here. The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"If we ask ourselves questions focused first on the learner and second on the content ..., we are more likely to reach in on students' needs and interests -- all of which will enable us to accelerate learning and teach with urgency, enthusiasm, and authentic purpose." Page 39

This is the thesis for what I gleaned from chapter two . Every point Routman makes from this point on ties back to the concept of the self-assessing teacher. We need to ask ourselves if our task is authentic and would be found outside of school.

Are we planning with the Virginia SOLs (Standards of Learning) in mind or are they our starting point? 

If not the first, then we'll find we're not reaching the students nor meeting "them with urgency, enthusiasm, and authentic purpose." Our small group interactions will be more meaningful and potent if we're constantly reflecting on data and student progress, rather than simply worrying about pacing. Additionally, the choices we give our students, so long as they're fitting within structure, will both provide data and lead to student progress.

Furthermore, the only way the Optimal Learning Model (OLM) becomes effective is if you know your students' progress enough to know how much responsibility to release. Self-reflection is directly linked to learning, both for the teacher and his or her students.

Read, Write, Lead: Chapter 1

Literacy should be a topic of giddy gossip in every teacher's lounge. We should be delighted to show our students the way to learning. Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead can give us tips to readjust our school culture to bring this to reality.

This year I'm in a book study focusing on Regie Routman's Read, Write, Lead with literacy specialists. That's right! I'm sneaking in there and poking my ESOL head into the literacy specialist's camp. I want to throw open that door and connect our departments!

The ASCD created a study guide with thought-provoking questions. We were encouraged either to choose one question from guide and react, or to choose a resonating quote and explain why it struck us. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

"Examine the infrastructure and the culture at your school. What is already in place to support a school-wide focus on instruction and learning? What's missing? What's the priority for improving your school's infrastructure and culture?"

Our principal has made it clear that he values high-quality instruction, which seems to communicate that teaching is an art form. This impacts teacher morale and, at least for me, makes teachers want to improve. There is already a habit of writing high quality, detailed lesson plans because of prior years of being on warning, impacting the culture of instruction across grade levels. Right now, teachers are not required to turn in plans regularly, but I suspect the culture of high-quality preparation has survived. Part of what is missing is an ongoing conversation and passion for sharing how to plan high quality instruction and learning. I rarely overhear conversations about that, but perhaps they are happening in team meetings when I'm not there. The priority is to integrate memorable structure into instruction (hooks, multi-sensory, peer interaction, and more).

How to Introduce Yourself to SLA

Hello again.

I'm back for another wonderful ESOL class. I hope to integrate some reflections on my student teaching semester as I had the most lovely ELL student in the world! For now, a reading reflection:

The readings for this week weave together in  way that calls to mind what it felt like to be a classroom teacher with a single ELL student.

[caption id="attachment_132" align="aligncenter" width="290"] Don't forget the ELLs.[/caption]

I took a gander at the ACCESS tests, with their well-intentioned and mass-market approach to assessing. These are used to appease the 30k-foot level of viewers – the state or other entity that wants to see the students’ data as a reflection on the state of the school.

The WIDA can-do list breaks down the behaviors of an ELL student to its observable forms in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These logically show an SLA teacher of any experience level what they can look for in a student and what level those characteristics reflect.

This gives such a teacher a starting point to begin implementing what they can learn from the surface level, nutshell version Van Patten provides in his epilogue of From Input to Output. The implications he summarizes in the epilogue give inexperienced teachers of ELL some basic guidelines (such as making sure that all interactions, assessments, and focus on form are authentic), which are solid reminders for more experienced teachers of ELLs.

Finally, when a teacher becomes aware of the need to focus on how their instruction can impact their ELL student(s), they can become further aware of how it is actually also impacting the ELL’s sense of self through Sumaryono and Ortiz's "Preserving the Cultural Identity of ELLs." Many teachers are ignorant about the depth of potential hurt that can be felt by an ELL student if they feel their being led away from their cultural roots or if they feel out of place in their classroom.

An inexperienced or non-expert of SLA and ELL research might not realize that they can and should integrate the students’ primary languages into the daily lessons in order to make them feel more comfortable and to put them on the same level as those who only speak English. The four readings for the week funnel the novice ELL teacher toward a profound awareness of what they are getting into as they learn more about teaching students learning another language. It’s not as simple as vocabulary instruction and learning how to fit in.

Dia-Logging

In reflection on David Schwarzer's "Student and Teacher Strategies for Communicating through Dialogue Journals in Hebrew: A Teacher Research Project."

It was interesting to read in the introduction that the objective of this paper was not to prove effectiveness of dialogue journals on acquisition of a foreign language. Instead, the research article looked into the ways in which students and teachers were using dialogue journals to supplement other language learning activities. The practice seemed to help produce a relationship between the student and the teacher, which Schwarzer mentioned. One example of him making the students more comfortable with the written Hebrew language was to use "block letters" until the students became comfortable enough to choose to use script writing in the journals. He let them lead, but also somehow managed to challenge them enough that they expected this higher level of themselves. The students used codeswitching and translation as a way to communicate and to help themselves understand.

Languages and Children: Chapter 10

This chapter is written for people like me! I am a qualitatively minded person, always trying to draw connections between the little nuggets of knowledge I know and encounter. Throughout the time in this class, I have brainstormed some content areas that would be best used for certain activities for effective SLA instruction. I want to make sure to create a respectful culture in my classroom that acknowledges the cultures of all students (and teachers) in the room, while providing an effective forum for teaching language and this chapter shows the need for that. Mathematics and science, of course, are listed among those content areas that most need language-related instruction. It was interesting to dive into the Connections Standards that stated that there are some aspects that students can only fully understand through the foreign language and its cultures.

Languages and Children: Chapter 5

Here in the first page, one of my questions that I asked in class during the KWL is answered determinedly. In the past, introducing the written word to second language learners was seen as a bad practice and a way to confuse the young mind. Now, methods scholars suggest that we should introduce the written word as soon as possible. Like teaching literacy to anyone, there are a few necessities: fostering help with missing schemas, introducing reading and writing as tools for communication (not just filling out a worksheet), building a word wall, teaching the basics of directionality and the physical processes of reading a book, surrounding the students with meaningful written words, and peer teaching (or shared reading). This chapter provides a few great starter activities for the early language learning child.

Making it Happen: Chapter 13

The first thing that was rolling through my mind as I read this chapter on "Ways to Promote Literacy Development" was the motivation factor for ELL students. As Richard-Amato describes, there are a myriad of factors involved with the literary progress of each child and the motivation for ELL students can be affected by many. Beginning the process with the students' prior knowledge is imperative, as she describes, because you get them on the right foot. From my limited classroom experience, I can agree with Richard-Amato about the benefits of starting with reading aloud literature to help students make the connection between phonemes, letters, words, writing, and reading. It seems like a fluid and obvious connection to us, but it is not so for an inexperienced child. This chapter offers many strategies for teachers that I will soon revisit.

Languages and Children: Chapter 4

The entire field of education heralds the positive impact that collaborative/cooperative learning can have on the success of many students. As this chapter discusses, peer interaction learning can help students make an emotional connection to the content, can help students discover the objective on their own, and it can help them develop social and language skills. This is especially important for students learning English because they have a lot of meaningful input experience and are prompted to producing meaning-making output (two essential parts of the SLA equation). One of my favorite activity examples was the "Finding differences: one picture" activity because it was a simple way to have students practice comparing two things. This is a skill they will need for the rest of their academic careers, on a deeper level.

Making it Happen: Chapter 9

I victoriously punched the air when I started reading this chapter. This chapter is rich with ideas for interactive strategies and their foundation in studying "the natural approach." The natural approach plots the progression of students through three stages: comprehension, early speech production, and speech emergence. The comprehension stage is also known as the silent stage, when students absorb what they are acquiring of the language through listening. Next they begin to make meaning through output (or attempt to do so). And finally, they become more proficient with their speech, supplemented by more input. The chapter provides several activities to support students at all stages.

Languages and Children: Chapter 6

Effective lesson planning has been one of the most challenging and empowering teacher knowledge I have acquired this year. As I read this chapter, C&D kept confirming what I've learned in these last few months: good instruction planning advice is found with the ESL and Exceptional Learning professionals. ESL and Exceptional Learning teachers and researchers have spent the last several decades learning so much about the brain and how it works best (this chapter, obviously, focuses on the advantages of planning units/weeks/days around a central theme or big picture) using the most up-to-date technology and research practices. While other factions of the education world have done a great job of completing their research and have come to the same conclusions (no more lines of desks in a classroom, no more memorizing arbitrary lists of words, etc), the ESL and Exceptional Learning research gives the best practice advice available.

Tech-Out with ELLs

A look at: "The Effects of Multimedia-Enhanced Instruction on the Vocabulary of English-Language Learners and Non-English-Language Learners in Pre-Kindergarten Through Second Grade," by Rebecca Silverman and Sara Hines.

When I initially began reading this article, a red flag flew up. I know the research shows that people cannot learn language from a video, even if that video is interacting with them (like through a video chatting service), so I did not understand why this article would review that research area. Upon further reading, I saw that Silverman and Hines clarified that they were seeking to augment good vocabulary instruction with multimedia, rather than trying to teach language (and the social queues that come with it) through video alone. It appears as if some forms of multimedia vocabulary supplementation can be helpful for today's ELLs, which can be somewhat convenient for some teachers. Watching a Sesame Street segment could be a temporary station in a classroom full of students learning through many means.

To Group Vocab Words or Not...

A look at: "Effects on vocabulary acquisition of presenting new words in semantic sets versus semantically unrelated sets" By Ismail Hakkı Erten and Mustafa Tekin

The conclusion of this article surprised me, but only because it differed with what I remember about the first few years of L2 instruction. The writers conclude that new words should not be presented in semantic sets because it confuses the learner. Rather, they should be presented in unrelated sets of words, so the learner's limited short term memory can concentrate on the new words as individuals instead of trying to remember the differences between them. Again, this was a surprising conclusion, only because I can remember so many vocab lists that contained similar words. I suppose the teacher thought it would be best to show us these similar words together so as not to be confused, but I see now that it was counterproductive.

Languages and Children: Chapter 9

This chapter shows how much cultural emphasis can be a vehicle for implicitly learning a language, as well as the greatest motivation to learn it. I love the idea of starting with a culturally integrative lesson to help teach vocabulary and language. As Curtain and Dahlberg allude, it can help bridge a gap that ELLs might fear crossing: knowing more about the country in which they now live. The Classroom Exchanges idea jumped out as particularly interesting as I suspect it would get the adrenaline pumping in the veins of these young learners: a great recipe for learning success. I also love the ideas that integrate technology and uniting students with other students around the globe.

Languages and Children: Chapter 3

This chapter gives an overview of three kinds of communication: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. I love that it gives concrete examples and suggestions for teachers to use in their classroom, beginning with stepping stone activities. As we have discussed in class, it is most important that we help students build a bank of meaningful and useful vocabulary in order for them to partake in these three kinds of communication. My brain wants me to organize these three in my mind as if they were three steps in a process, though Curtain and Dahlberg emphasize the holistic nature of communication. Again, I will visit this chapter again to sample some of the activities they provide.

ACCESS-ible Testing?

Upon looking at and reflecting on the WIDA ACCESS test, I'm not satisfied with how we choose to assess our students, but I cannot offer a better alternative at the moment. I've witnessed the MAPS testing in the Charlottesville City Schools for a group of WIDA level 2.5 and below students. What I noticed with that testing and with the ACCESS test is that students are given zero scaffolding aid when taking the test. Just like with the reading fluency tests for non-ELLs, the proctors are required to push the students until they reach their frustration level. I suggest that the nature of these tests and the sharp jolt in difference between their daily experience with assessments and how this test assesses them will be the source of more frustration. Therefore, how accurate could the results be? Again, I can only whine about this without presenting an alternative solution to what I know is a necessity.