English Language Learner Institute 2011

Wednesday I attended an English Language Learner Institute at Region XIII. I love the location of the building; high on a hill overlooking Texas's hill country. A lot of growth has sprung up on the other side of the hills since I was here 3 years ago. This building has a wonderful positive energy and everyone is very friendly. (Noted: The Statesman says that Region XIII is one of the top ten places to work in Austin)

The Keynote speaker was Kathleen Kenfield who walked around to meet the attendees. My table mate and I both noted our surprise at this, as we had never seen the keynote personally introduce herself. Maybe it was the informal atmosphere at Region XIII that facilitated this. I looked around for other teachers I might recognize, but none where there except a parent of a student I had at NYOS. My table mates included two elementary teachers from Liberty Hill, one of which was also the part time ELL coordinator; a middle school teacher from AISD; and an ELL coordinator for Harmony Charter School in San Antonio.

Kathleen began speaking about Sheltered Instruction, which I had some training on from Capital City Public Charter School. I have studied the Sheltered Instruction book Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model by Echevarria, Vogt and Short and have learned wonderful strategies to help students learning English as a second language. The Sheltered Instruction Model, or SI model literally helps do exactly what its name says: It is designed as a way to ensure that students at various levels of English acquisition understand a lecture, in short, to shelter them and support them with differentiated lessons to help them comprehend and learn as much as possible, but at their own level. Kathleen called this their "i+1". "i" stands for their individual level as assessed by the TELPAS or what ever assessment you have used to determine their level of listening, speaking, writing and reading in English. Then the "1" is "plus a little stretch." Kathleen stressed, "You only aquire language that is within your reach." She scolded teachers that stretch students to a "+20" which leads, among other things, to wasted instructional time and frustrated students. I would believe that this also leads to frustrated teachers, "Why aren't they getting it?" or "I wish they would just take them out of my class." This develops a sense of lack in confidence as a teacher and spirals out of control. On the other hand, teachers who are confidently applying SI have success with their lessons and this creates a happy, but exhausted teacher ready for summer break! The strategies are common best practice strategies that all teachers should use since the levels vary among all students, even those not learning a new language: Visuals, graphic organizers, gestures, repeated vocabulary, cognates, and modeling. Kathleen gave us a lesson on Hawaii in Spanish, which she is fluent in, and afterwards had us analyze the strategies used to get us to understand what she was saying. It was awesome! But, yes...good teaching does take a lot of energy. I like to compare a good teacher to a masseuse: I always want to be the first massage of the day so that my masseuse isn't tired from giving 4 hour long massages all day, but when I asked about using all her energy up in one session, one reminded me that they know how to spread the wealth and manage. Balance is key.

As I looked around the room, I was surprised by how many attendees there were. At nearly 230, districts from all over Texas had sent teams of teachers to learn about how to use SI. I wondered who was already using these strategies, and who was already exhausted by other pressures in the schools, such as new assessment systems like STARR and an increasing number of schools that have less staff support. I spoke to a middle school teacher who teachers ELL and she was irate at the new expectations of ELL newcomers to take the STARR assessment on their grade-level even though they would likely be too frustrated to complete the test. Who cares that they get to use a dictionary...they will be translating the entire test! I was reminded about the level of work that goes into being a teacher. I looked around and hoped that these teachers were thinking about their students and not about these other pressures. There were breakout sessions for the second half of the day: I learned about some IPad applications that could be fun to use someday, but it wasn't very realistic as most teachers don't have this technology in their classrooms due to district funding; and the strategy called MAP and VOCAB, which I could use in my small groups.

In the end I hope that all of us forget about that one day when our students will be forced to take the STARR (which doesn't "count" this year, but, my peer reminded me that she will most likely will be judged as competent or incompetent based on the scores) and they will forge ahead and use at least three new strategies to teach with better success and less frustration for all.

NYC small schools in the news again

Ed Week has a new article this week on small schools in New York City. NYCSB is giving $45,000 for two years to hire a special education teacher.

Lyons Community School in NYC will open this year. It is one school that will receive funds to support 8 students with special support needs and 10 who require self-contained or inclusion support in the regular education classroom. I am so curious how they will staff this person in a 6-9 school.

"The Department of Education announced on Feb. 20, 2007, that Lyons is one of 10 new small schools to receive special funds to allow them to accomodate special education students in their first two years. The funds require that the school enroll at least eight students who require special education teacher support services (SETSS) and at least 10 who require a self-contained or collaborative team-teaching class."

New York’s Citywide Council on High Schools (CCHS) is involved and has filed a lawsuit with the Department of Education Civil Rights office.

Looks like the Gates foundation is also looking at the issue, but not specifically at the special education policy. They are looking at more of the population that has been low-performing or at-risk of receiving weak education. Maybe they should be looking more closely at the graduation rates related to ELL and Special ed students.

ELLs in Small Schools?!

EDweek article

I just entered a submission to the CES Fall Forum, a Principled Stand, which deals with the continuum of services that are or aren't being provided to students with specific learning needs (ELL or students with LDs). I am hoping that addressing the school design aspect will help other students who are lacking a full continuum of services and are stuck with fully including their students into the regular education classroom without appropriate supports because of the lack of budgeting for appropriate staff and/or instructional strategies. I know the issue is big in New York. In fact the article above references the first article that I read about the issue of small schools not allowing ELL students to come to the school for the first 2 years because of budget restraints. I guess the school could build itself up first and then once it was successful and had a core number of student admitted, it could then afford to hire an inclusion teacher.

SIOP vs. UDL

SIOP Sheltered Intervention Observation Protocol vs. UDL Universal Design for Learning

What are the differences and similarities?

Both look as though they are models to help move away from the traditional pedagogical approach of lesson delivery.

Do we have time at CCPCS to delve into this, or do we need to just stick with our ELOB prinicples and let them guide our pedagogy?

I think we need something more focused for the inclusive classroom in which CCPCS philosophically believes.

Breaking up Big Schools

In a recent article in the New York Times, it was brought to my attention that there are programs for ELL and special ed students that are obsolete after large schools with these particular programs are broken up into smaller schools.

It says, ~Then, a few weeks ago, the department announced its plan for restructuring Lafayette, which now has about 2,100 students, beginning in September 2007. It would contain three new schools — one emphasizing sports management, another focusing on film and music, and a third offering “expeditionary learning” under the aegis of Outward Bound. None will offer bilingual instruction, at least at the outset.

“This is an absolutely unacceptable choice,” Mr. Chung said. “These three schools have nothing to do with our community. They’re forcing the immigrant students out of their own neighborhood. New York is an immigrant city, but I think the education policy is not for us.”

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The immigrant city and community should be taken into account. What do they want for their students? Do they want inclusion or do they want special programs? This is definately one of the areas that I feel is taken for granted when we think about breaking up our larger schools, or even when we create new small schools. And furthermore, when we create our small schools, how do we ensure that we are listening to all stakeholders as we create new instructional programs? We must listen to the community. What do they need and how can we meet their needs?

Students and Achievement

My current obsession is about students, of course. But how do we get all students, black, white, special ed, ELL, to connect to the content meaningfully. Yes, cater to their individual strengths. But there is more to that. In a full classroom with 24 students, each with their own background baggage, current identity, strengths and weaknesses, how do we connect topics such as the Civil War to these diverse middle school students trying so hard to connect with their own identity, let alone a story about an actual soldier in the Union army, for example.

Why reinvent the wheel when people have done the research? Attempt a new pedagogical practice and reflect on the results I think that is the research that I am doing now: Do classrooms really need three teachers?I am beginning to understand, through my experince as a "third wheel" in the classroom, that it doesn't take more teachers in the classroom, it takes establishing well researched pedagogical practices and routines into your teaching ___.

How do you connect teaching with activism and social change? Expeditions! CCPCS is an Expeditionary Learning School where this should already be embedded in the teacher's pedagogy.

So, let's examine this relationship: teaching for social change and expeditions. When planning an expedition, the main question one asks after "What content will I need to teach?" is "How will my students have a puposeful audience for their projects that are a result of the expedition?" If my co-teacher's and I had really thought about this, (and we "thought" about it, but didn't really act on it) we should have related the expedition on Slavery and the Civil War on meaningfully connecting the content to current social conditions.

"Our goals for ourselves and for our students are as complex, dynamic, and contested as we hope their goals will be as teachers of children: to learn to see students fully and fairly, as threedimensional creatures much like ourselves; to see ourselves as active agents of change in our schools and in our worlds; and to find practical application in public school classrooms for our commitment to social justice and human freedom." (Ayers, W., Michie, G., Rome, A., "Embers of Hope: In Search of a Meaningful Critical Pedagogy", Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2004, online google article)

CREDE - Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence has 5 Standards that establish another set pf principles that should guide insturction to individuals who are "at risk of educational failure due to cultural, language, racial, geographic, or economic factors." They are:
Teachers and students work together (collaboration between students and teachers)
developing language and literacy across all curriculum (integrated curriculum),
connecting lessons to students lives (meaningful, authentic, relevant connections to curriculum),
engaging students with challenging lessons (complex, higher-order thinking)
emphasizing dialogue over lectures (critical pedagogy, student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach (CES principle))

http://crede.berkeley.edu/standards/standards.html