Eight a.m. came pretty
early this morning, but I started out my day with a Dr. Pepper Ten and a hope
that I would increase my knowledge about reaching our high population of
former-bilingual students. Even though most of our kiddos receive no
bilingual or ELL services, I knew that attending a session dedicated to ELLs
would arm me with even more strategies and philosophies to take back to the
staff and use immediately with our kiddos. Boy, was I right!
We attended our first
session by Amanda Schacht & Gabriela Carbajal from Crystal Lake School
District 47. The ladies started out their session by explaining that
their strategies would be presented in three main categories, headed up with
an essential question - which seems to be a hot topic the last
few years in the education world. Their three stages were the preview stage, focused
literacy stage, and the application stage.
Unfortunately, most of the sessions here are sixty-minute sessions, so we
ran out of time before we could go through each stage thoroughly, but the handouts
contained explanations of every strategy. This made it worth attending,
in itself, because I could go back to my room and collect more information
afterwards (which is what I am doing currently).
We spent most of our
time on the preview stage, trying out out some of the
strategies and learning about different language frames. One point that
these ladies made was that working with students who are still developing
English language, the preview stage should probably be done orally rather than
weighing down activities with written language. The term language
frames was new to me, but when I took a look in the packet, I realized
that they were similar to Project CRISS's sentence frames.
Over the last few weeks I've been working in an eighth grade US History
class. While supporting students or delivering instruction, I try to
interject sentence frames whenever I can. We have so many students who
still grapple with the English language, that sometimes they struggle with the
act of even starting out sentences. By giving students a frame into which
to place ideas, they can use the English language properly and focus more in
their ideas than formulating language. Here's how it works.
When you are asking
students who are still developing English language to perform a specific task
that requires language (ie. answering a question or responding to media),
supply them with several choices in language frames.
- To make a prediction, start out your sentences with
phrases such as "I predict that . . . " "I bet that . . .
" or "I wonder if . . . "
- To ask a question, think about using starters such as
"What would happen if . . . " "Why did . . . " or
"Do you think that . . . "
- To clarify something, supply your students with
phrases such as "At first I thought _____, but now I think . . .
" "Oh, I get it . . . " or "This part is really saying
. . . "
- To encourage students to make a connection, supply them
with a things like "This reminds me of . . . " "This part
is like . . . " or "This makes me think of . . . "
- If students are expected to answer a question, support
them by giving them the beginning of what you would expect them to supply
as the answer, and then let them continue on with their answer.
The above examples are
just a small sampling of what Schacht and Carbajal included in their packet of
resources, but I'm guessing you get the idea. One question that a
colleague asked me just today was, "At what point do you stop supplying
students with these frames?" I had to really put some thought into
that question because at first glance, I can see how a student would use the
frames as a crutch, but then I went back to the presentation that I gave later
in the day today. If our kiddos are armed with one hundred percent of the
tools they need to perform a task, they will. If they rely on what we
give them as a crutch, there are still skills that they lack. It is our
job to figure out what those skills are, and one of them may very well be
dealing with the fear of failure - a skill that many of our reluctant learners
have (making them look unmotivated because they refuse to even try).
Perhaps if we made our efforts two-fold and provided students with
academic as well as social-emotional support, we might find them moving forward
at a much quicker pace and we might see them taking healthy academic risks more often.
The remainder of the presentation included a
whole slew of preview, focused literacy, and application strategies
such as Word Sorts, Think-Pair-Share (which they termed Think-Partner-Share),
TPR (Total Physical Response), Video Jigsaw (see graphic to the right), Pane It
/ Retain It, Connect 2, THIEVES, Anticipation Guides, Say Something /Write
Something, Narrow Reading, Numbered Brains (like Numbered Heads), Jigsaw,
Combination Notes, Question / It Says / I Say / And So, GIST, Magnet Summaries
(another CRISS strategy), Sketch to Stretch, LEA (Language
Experience Approach), Side-By-Side Translations, and Metalinguistic Focus. So
you can see that they supplied their participants with a wide variety of
strategies to take back to their buildings and use immediately.
 |
| THIEVES example |
Late in the presentation, Schacht and Carbajal
discussed the THIEVES strategy, which is an in-depth previewing strategy.
During this part of the talk, the ladies showed us a beautiful bookmark
that was color coded, and then they unfolded a color coded copy of a chapter from a
text book to demonstrate to students which parts of the bookmark coincided with
the parts of the chapter. It was beautifully done, and I could see this
being something that could be adapted to a content area to support our students
who are still developing English or for any of our students struggling to grapple with the complicated text in their text books.
All in all, this
presentation was a great way to begin my conference, and I am thrilled to bring
back some of this information to start using in supporting our content area
teachers and students. With over forty percent of our student population
being native Spanish speakers, each content area classroom contains groups of students who might benefit from any number of the strategies presented today during this first session.
No comments:
Post a Comment