Embracing English Language Learners (Online Reflection #2)

Whilst look through the Syngergy information available for my students on my first day in my placement I noted that the icon stipulating a boy or girl as an English Language Learner popped up often.  Feeling both excited about the chance to gain a good deal of experience with diverse students and slightly concerned about not having the resources to be helpful enough, I made a mental note to ensure that learning more about educating ELL students is a priority for the coming year.  A month in, I feel as though I am starting to make significant progress in this area.

    My CT informed me recently that earning his ESL endorsement was one of the most difficult tasks that he has taken on as an educator. It was completely worthwhile for him and I would one day like to do the same but I know that achieving this goal may be quite a ways off.   The reality is that I have already begun to have pretty substantial influence over ELL students and my responsibility will only continue to grow. Thus, I have to start to develop methods of teaching ELL students effectively now and focus on cultivating these skills as time passes.

      Perhaps the most essential technique I have started to utilize in this area is the idea of using more visual tools for ELL students.  Providing models is of paramount importance. Including visual instructions is just one part of the answer however; allowing students to create visual products of their own fairly frequently is also critical. One of my ELL students struggling with writing the required amount of sentences for the class fairly routine exit slips. He is active in class discussions but does not always seem to want to write his thoughts down. It is an area where he is having noticeable trouble but improving; he has shown more interest and days of near mastery as the semester has gone on but there are stillh some hours where he is not motivated. However, when given the chance to complete a project that focused almost exclusively on drawing he excelled. This helped both my CT and I gain a better understanding of him as an individual and, I believe, helped boost his confidence.

    Upon doing further research, I found that my opinion on the use of Spanish, or any other native language, in the classroom was shared.  It should be allowed and encouraged in certain contexts, to be used alongside English. After all, if a student gains literacy skills in their native language, they can transfer the same basic concepts to English. Complete assimilation is not the end goal here. In his article Do's & Don'ts For Teaching English-Language Learners, Larry Ferlazzo states that banning the use of native languages in the classroom altogether “does not promote a positive learning environment where students feel safe to take risks and make mistakes,” (Ferlazzo, 2012). This is clearly not conducive to a quality education. In addition, asking students to teach me a few words in their native language gives them a sense of efficacy and supports the idea of a classroom environment where the teacher is growing as well and benefits greatly from student input.

   I know that I have a great amount of learning and research still to do in terms of creating a toolbox of techniques to use with ELL students. The foundation has been laid however and I feel confident throwing my basic thoughts out into the world as a way of holding myself accountable to my goals. I am going to create a classroom environment that makes ELL comfortable and ready to challenge themselves.

Works Cited

 Larry, F. (2012, March 12). Do's & Don'ts For Teaching English-Language Learners. Retrieved September 21, 2015. 

Questioning My Ability to Question Students: Online Reflection # 1

In the view of our society at large, a teacher must exhibit certain attributes in order to be deemed ‘good’.   There is not exactly an official list of necessary characteristics written in stone, but most of the population seems to adhere to a decent amount of unspoken but agreed upon ideals. Educators must be in full control without turning into a wickedly stern presence in the classroom, we must be meaningfully creative and just plain interesting without allowing chaos to take over, and we should certainly be cultured but not to the point of possible pretentiousness. We must find the perfect line to walk along, it seems. This ideal has proved to be intimidating to me to different degrees at different times.

 Over the course of my own experience with the teacher education program, I have grappled with the issue of finding balance. I have reached the conclusion that it is not an end goal. I am not going to achieve balance one day and then just be able to coast along happily without any real faults for the rest of my career.  I am going to have to adjust for every hour and there will undoubtedly be long stretches of time where I do well, but there will also absolutely be weeks where I will be too relaxed, perhaps only to then become too harsh afterwards to overcompensate. I will have to wear many proverbial hats as an educator: for one kid I might have to be tough to produce the right results, for another I may have to be sweet and more lenient to generate success. My teaching styles will constantly need to evolve in order for my work to be effective, and while I am never going to find the flawless balance that will endure forever, I can consistently improve.

One of the most prevalent areas of concerns for me in regards to balance has to deal with helpfulness; I believe most citizens would say that a teacher should be helpful but not limiting. I struggle in this area; my CT last year noted that I was knowledgeable but could be much too quick to give away answers or step in to redirect a group discussion too early.  Letting the learning process unfold without hindering it with too much intervention is one aspect of teaching that I have a sizeable amount of anxiety over.

I felt like I had reached my victory moment when, at the end of last year, my university supervisor for Core II pointed out that I did well at encouraging students to search for answers themselves, asking them further questions so they could discover facts for themselves rather than just sharing information with them. I felt great and figured I was over one major hurdle.

  I encountered the same issue again, however, working with an English Language Learner. I was given the chance to work with him one-on-one this week for two days. During our first session, he was extremely respectful and attentive after having been quite loud and disruptive in the classroom. I was a little giddy; I had taken a student outside the main classroom for some individual attention and he was responding favorably; clearly all was well. We finished half his project right then and there. However, upon reflection, I realized that I had limited him in a very real way; I had directed his choices too much and he had gotten the work done but I was in no way sure that it was truly meaningful with him. His personality was not shining through in his finished product.  Thus, when given the opportunity to work with him again the next day, I was eager but less gung-ho about exactly how I thought he should complete each task.  I followed the advice of Jessica Fries-Gaither (2008), given in her article “Questioning Techniques: Research-Based Strategies for Teachers”, where she encouraged teachers to probe for further information via questioning when a partial answer is given, rather than elaborate themselves. Fries-Gaither states that “Research… shows that redirection and probing are effective when they are explicitly focused on student responses. Vague or critical feedback (such as “That’s not right, try again”) has been shown to be unrelated to achievement,” (2). Reading this was a wake-up call for me. I needed to cease and desist with the simple answers and insubstantial feedback. Instead, I gave him directions but allowed some long silences. I did not directly answer all his questions but told him to do what he felt would be best, prompting him with further questions to get him to dig deeper into his own ideas rather than molding him into following along with mine. The results, though only from one day so far, were quite amazing. His finished map and passage analysis were far superior to the parts of the assignment we’d worked on earlier and he simply seemed happier at the end of the day. This positive experience has fueled my desire to keep learning good questioning strategies and developing a better method of helping students without putting a damper on their natural abilities by substituting them with my own.

    Moving forward, I would like to research and implement more questioning strategies. It is an area of infinitely possibilities. There may not be one universal, everlasting balance between asking questions and providing facts but I can and will make progress in this area. I will keep you all updated!

References:

 Fries-Gaither, J. (2008.) Questioning Techniques: Research-Based Strategies for Teachers. Retrieved August 31, 2015.