By Rita MaAlthough our Boston TESOL Convention was months ago now, the excitement engendered by a few presentations continues to infuse my work with teachers in local schools, most notably the presentation by Andrea Honigsfeld and Maria Dove on co-teaching, based on their article ESL Coteaching and Collaboration: Opportunities to Develop Teacher Leadership and Enhance Student Learning in the March 2010 issue of TESOL Journal. In both their article and their presentation, Honigsfeld and Dove make clear the disadvantages of the pull-out model of ESL instruction and advocate a move toward selective coteaching and collaboration in the gen ed classroom. They make clear that the fragmentation in content lessons and the relative disengagement between the ELL and the classroom teacher cost ELLs dearly and slow their learning at a time when they need to be learning at twice the rate of their English-speaking peers. In response to the often-heard objection from administrators (“We can’t afford enough ESL teachers to have one in every classroom.”), they provide examples of staffing patterns that, through selective placement of students and ESL teachers, maximize the benefit of ESL teacher knowledge and skill for colleagues and students without increasing ESL teacher time or teaching load.

 

The topic of coteaching seems to be gaining interest, and I’m so glad! We have known for many years that the pull-out model is the least effective approach to ESL instruction, yet many ESL teachers and school administrators have not had the opportunity to explore alternative models. In schools where the ESL population has reached ‘the tipping point’ and everyone has had ample opportunity to experience the high cost of the pullout model (monetary cost, teacher isolation and blurred lines of responsibility, fragmentation of student learning), faculty are experimenting successfully with various models of coteaching. Rather than the “ESL teacher in every classroom’ model feared by those responsible for the school budget, we see an ESL teacher coteaching social studies in the fifth grade classroom, math in the third grade classroom, and science in the fourth grade classroom, while doing explicit instruction for low-level ELLs in a newcomers classroom. This is very different from what some have called the ‘push-in’ model, where the ESL teacher gathers the ELLs into a corner and, in whispered tones, teaches something parallel to the ongoing lesson. Instead, as coteachers, the ESL and gen ed teacher plan the lesson together, mix ELLs and others into different small groups, and share responsibility for all the students in the room throughout the lesson. This way, gen ed teachers learn the scaffolding strategies needed to make lessons comprehensible and effective for ELLs, ESL teachers are able to identify and teach the necessary academic language of that content area, and all students in the room benefit from the explicit focus on language development.

 

In each setting in which I’ve coached and observed coteaching teams, teachers remark that all of their students benefitted, and both teachers express their pleasure in having learned from one another. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend Honigsfeld and Dove’s book, Collaboration and Co-Teaching: Strategies for English Learners, to be released in August from Corwin Press. I’ll bet you’ll be as excited as I am about the new possibilities!

 

--Rita MacDonald,

Vermont State Rep.

I retired in June of 2009 as the ESL teacher of the Wells-Ogunquit CSD.  It’s been a good year with a first visit to Italy and lots of grandparent time.

Last month, one of our most giving and steadfast members, Ruth Dater, asked me to substitute for her for the last three weeks of school because she was scheduled for a knee operation in late May. 

“You’ll love my little kids,” she said.  Not needing any more persuasion than that one statement, I took the job. 

Now I knew that Ruth teaches in the Berwicks and also in Lebanon.  What I didn’t know is how spread out these southern Maine towns are.

Last Monday and Tuesday I job-shadowed Ruth.  We drove to Lebanon on Monday, which is very close to the Maine/New Hampshire border.  After spending the day with her students there, we did the Berwicks on Tuesday.  I quickly saw that Ruth puts in long, arduous days just getting to her students and then spending quality time with each one of them.  All together she sees students in five different schools in three separate towns.

“How am I ever going to find all these schools?”  I thought to myself.  Not to worry!  Ruth was methodical about giving me directions, using the “show and tell” method.  She even drew me a map, which I resorted to on one occasion later in the week when I was on my own.

As far as teaching her ESOL students goes, I’m having a wonderful experience with her K through 8 “little kids.”  Of course, some aren’t so little, but they’re all dear, I’m finding out.  I don’t need to make up lesson plans because Ruth has been meticulous in her planning.  Her kids are self-motivating learners, by and large.

Ruth takes advantage of a variety of teaching settings in these rural communities.

She “pushes in” with some of her students and utilizes a combination of “pull out” and RTI with other students.  This requires a lot of collaborating between her and many classroom teachers.  When she’s not arranging a summer tutor for an 8^th grader, she’s talking about language and grammar transfer issues with a 4^th grade teacher.

For your information, Ruth is doing well after she had her new knee put in this week. 

“Next September I’ll be running up and down these stairs with you,” she told her students.  Meanwhile I’m having fun running around for another two weeks. 

Linda Lucas,

NNETESOL Secretary

 

Hey, everybody.

Bing (new Microsoft search engine) has a new site that lets you remember a teacher and put him/her on the map:
http://discoverbing.com/education/teacherappreciation/?fbid=RXn_UYZxiy7&wom=false

(Mine is in Goodland, Kansas, if you want to read an example...) Once you do this, you will get a code to give $5 to a worthy DonorsChoose project, say, for example, mine:

http://www.donorschoose.org/bethevans

DonorsChoose, for those of you who don't know, is an organization that lets teachers write grants for things they want for their classrooms. Last year, I wrote a grant for digital recorders and biographies. This year, I wrote grants that have been funded for tiny Body Sox and for a steel cage for an LCD projector in the gym. I will be writing another one soon for a ceiling mount for said LCD projector, and then we will be all set for professional presentations!

I encourage you to check out my teacher page, possibly to fund my project to get some netbooks to help differentiate instruction, or to write your own grants.

Thanks so much!

Beth

In Vermont, we take our time about things. And I'm wondering if we should.

We just finished giving our ACCESS tests in Februrary/March. We don't get the scores back until July... Who does this help?

I realized, more than three-quarters of the way through the year, that my children, all of them, couldn't write. This shouldn't be a surprise, because they couldn't write last year either. But despite moving ahead a year, we didn't focus on those scores that could have/should have helped us.

We get our scores in July. And if we choose, we can give up some time of our private lives to study the data and decide on possible service models. 

Would it do us better service to test earlier? To get the scores back so we could make placement assessments, as our colleagues in Maine do? I wonder. To get our scores back in July seems a little pointless. No one seems driven to look at the scores then, and there is such a flurry of activity at the beginning of the year that we can't really slow down enough to focus on what is important for these students.

So, because I can't by myself effect change across my state, my course of action (to respond to what I know will be dreadfully low writing scores) this year was to start a math blog.

I was teaching math this year to a multi-age, multi-language, multi-classroom group of students with less than two years in the country, which I mentioned once before in this blog. It was a whole lot of fun, and drove me to collaborate with math experts at our school, which I've not, honestly, been driven much to do. I learned about how intrinsic language is with math, about how our students, when they learn math, are learning a third language, and how I, as an ESL teacher, really need to see math as one more content area that should be getting a whole lot more of my attention. 

To get my students into this language a little more, we created oral word problems, which I still need to put into a digital story or power point. We acted out word problems and created a rubric for grading my students on acting and math in concert. It has been so great.

I stand here on my soapbox here today to encourage you to get writing into the curriculum. It is such an ignored area. In so many ways. 

But I still wish we would have had those ACCESS tests a little earlier. I know it would have shaped my curriculum even more. 

TESOL was great!!! I particularly enjoyed Jim Cummins’ speech during the K-12 Dream Day.  A talk that mixed despair and inspiration, he pushed teachers to become more politically active in support of students.  His frustration with No Child Left Behind, standardized testing and the questionable direction the reauthorization of NCLB is taking us was obvious, leading me to think about my experience with the NECAPs this year. 

 

Being a newer teacher, my first intense encounter with the NECAPs was this past fall when I proctored the exams for 3^rd – 5^th graders.  Giving math tests with complicated language to newcomers who had been in the country for less than 8 weeks was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do.  Even students who had the math skills were hopelessly lost when confronted by the complicated English imbedded in every question.  “Welcome to America!”  By the end of the first day, most kids were despondent and although they did not have enough English to verbalize it, I knew they felt bad about themselves and their new country and school.  Then there was the 4^th grader reading at a kindergarten level, who having been in the country just over a year, had to take the reading test.  Her teacher had taught her to take the words from the question and turn them into a stem for writing, but since she couldn’t read the words in the question she rewrote them arbitrarily, resulting in sentences that made no sense.  Hey, at least she has a strategy…  As I looked at her paper, I questioned whether I would even try that hard if I were in her shoes. 

 

As you can tell, I sympathized with Cummins’ frustration. 

 

But, although he was discouraged by the recent political climate, he still had enough hope and courage to ask us this all important question:

 

“If standardized testing doesn’t make sense for our kids, what are we going to do about it?”                  

 

Well, my answer to him is to write my congressmen and my senators and anyone else I can think of who might listen, and I ask all of you to do the same.  You can even invite them to your school, as my school district in Vermont recently did (for more on that click this link http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20104010319).  Just open the lines of communication, that’s the important thing right now.  As their teachers we are a voice for our students and their families and as NCLB comes up for reauthorization this year I encourage all of you to speak out!

 

Kirsten Kollgaard

Vermont State Rep

NNETESOL

Winooski, VT