Principles to Promote Equity

Every child has the fundamental right to learn and to succeed. What educator doesn’t want to see all students have an equal opportunity for success? While we all understand the importance of educational equity—especially in linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse societies—defining what it means may sometimes be a little fuzzy. Then there is the question of application: How would we go about achieving equity in our classrooms? Let’s take a closer look at what we mean by equity and some principles we can use in planning for equity in our classrooms.

What Do We Mean by Equity?

A frequent assumption is that equity and equality are the same, and that to be equitable means to treat everyone the same.

Both equality and equity are key concepts of social justice, but they don’t mean the same thing. Consider this: The following images are of an iris and a cactus. These are both plants. Ask yourself: What does each plant need to grow and thrive? How are these needs different? What happens if we treat each plant the same?

Images from www.publicdomainpictures.net

Clearly, the plants thrive in different environments and if treated exactly the same, one or both may deteriorate. To help them flourish, we need to provide the essentials of light, water, soil, and air in quantities and ways that are appropriate to the needs of each plant.

In an educational context, there are many factors that could hold a student back from achieving their potential. These factors could include:

• Race
• Culture
• Language
• Gender
• Religion
• Ethnicity
• Immigration status
• Individual experiences
• Socioeconomic status

As teachers, we need to be aware of these factors and how they could be barriers to success in a particular context, unless an equitable environment was created. If all children were given the same resources and opportunities, some would have an advantage over others. Equity means making sure that every student has the resources and support they need to learn, thrive, and succeed.

How Can We Enact Equity?

Enacting equity is an ongoing journey that needs commitment and collaboration. Here are four principles to follow when planning to make our teaching spaces more equitable.

Offer Options and Choice

Though structure is important and necessary for effective classroom management, being flexible by providing students with options and choice throughout a lesson can make a huge difference. Students are more likely to be enthusiastic about learning if they feel like they have some control over the execution of the lesson. Some ways in which you could provide students with options and choice include the following:

• Personalising content and materials. Provide options in terms of reading materials, vocabulary lists, or writing topics, and allow students to choose.
• Offering a range of ways to participate. Not all students are willing or able to speak up in class discussions. Written responses, small group discussions, artistic responses, and other nonverbal means of measuring understanding must be valued.
• Providing options in presenting student work. Giving students a choice in how they show their learning can boost confidence as it allows them to learn in their own way and show their individual skills and interests.

Model Empathy

Establishing an equitable environment in the classroom requires being a role model and showing students the power of empathy in relationships. Some strategies to build empathy include the following:

• Do something as a class each day to build class cohesion. Setting up ways to work together can promote kindness and understanding.
• Engage in thoughtful discussions about feelings in the classroom. You could use videos and stories as start-off points for these discussions, but often the best examples come from right within the classroom.
• Show love and compassion to all students. Students observe the way you interact with others. Through modelling patience and respectful conversations with everyone, you help to build a community of caring students.

Create Appropriate Challenges

Every student should have access to rigorous learning experiences that meet them where they are and challenge them to grow and excel. Teachers should create classroom environments that hold all students to high expectations and provide each with academically appropriate yet challenging learning experiences. Some strategies for establishing such rigor include the following:

• Set a high bar for achievement for all students. This encourages them to engage with your class and avoids any stereotypes of what they’re capable of accomplishing.
• Connect students with resources that will support their autonomy and discovery. Learners who speak a different home language could be provided bilingual resources to aid their understanding. Similarly, visually impaired students could use text-to-speech technology.
• Allow students to take ownership of their own learning. Rather than rushing to save students who seem to be heading toward frustration, take the time to pause and give students options to forge ahead. For students to persevere, they must learn to navigate struggle.

Accommodate Differences

To promote equity in your classroom, it is important to understand your students and how they learn best. Getting to know your learners well and connecting with them on an individual level are essential to building trust, identifying their strengths, and understanding their needs. To address and accommodate the differences among your learners, you could try the following:

• Use a range of instructional materials to teach and reinforce learning. Having new concepts introduced and reinforced through multimodal resources would ensure that differences in learning styles are accounted for.
• Use individual, paired, and group activities. When students learn together, they become aware of how they learn best, develop cooperative learning strategies, and learn respect for each other.
• Activate cultural schema. Culture helps us make sense of the world. By inviting learners to relate what they are learning to what they already know helps to show them that their differences are valued.

Ensuring that all students are enabled to reach their full potential is a complex and continuous task. But through creativity, dedication, and persistence, we can work toward empowering all learners to meet and surpass expectations.

Consider the four principles above and ask yourself: What can I do today to start making my classroom more equitable? Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/principles-to-promote-equity/

Back to School with English Language Learners!

Will you have English learners in your classroom this year?

It can be a bit unnerving for teachers when they first have English learners (ELs) in your classroom.

The following simple ideas will help pave the way to a fun year of learning with your English learners.

The number one thing to know is: 

do what you already do… establish a warm, and supportive learning environment for all students including second language learners.    

As teachers, we know that creating a safe and secure classroom environment includes such things as:

    •Arrange the classroom in a way to maximize interaction with clear     walkways and designated work areas

    •Post student work   

    •Display classroom rules and procedures

    •Model kindness, patience, and respect

    •Smile often, laughing with our students and giving explicit positive     reinforcement

Click here to read

13 ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR 

CLASSROOM TEACHERS WITH 

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Establish a sense of belonging: 

by seating ELs in the middle of the room toward the front-facing the teacher to create a sense of belonging in your English learners.  Make regular eye contact.  Some teachers think they should not put second language students on the spot and don’t interact with them.  I feel this allows an ELL to slip to the edges of a classroom, never participating, speaking, or learning. Offer support by asking ELLs to repeat a simple statement from another student.  That keeps the student engaged while lowering the affective filter!

  

Integrate Ells’ first language and culture: 

incorporate all students into the classroom by putting up posters, books, songs, and pictures of different cultures.

Use Word Walls:

ensure a sheltered and supportive classroom for your English language learners by including labels for your room and classroom objects that include words clearly printed.  This builds vocabulary.  Help limited or non-speakers comprehend by having them draw pictures on the word wall cards so they know where things go and what they are called.

 

Don’t forget to put up your word walls!

Word walls draw attention to the words you are teaching and are used in whole class or small group activities.  Word walls provide a systematic visual vocabulary organizer that aids children in seeing and remembering connections between words and the characteristics that help them form categories and schemas to remember how to use them.

Click here to get this great freebie!  

Predictable procedures, schedules and routines

Remember to develop and maintain predictable procedures, schedules and routines.  I model and practice these often during the first weeks of school and adhere to them throughout the year.  Posting a schedule, content and language objectives, rules, lunch menus, and bus schedules gives a sense of security to students.  Try to always include pictures and simple wording.

Further that sense of belonging by designing classroom jobs appropriate for ELL students.  There are many classroom jobs that a limited speaker can do such as:  Handing out papers, posting lunch numbers, etc.

Have fun this year! 

   

Happy Teaching!

Here is another great product to start out your year! 

 Check it out today!

💕

 

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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2021/07/Back to School with English Language Learners.html

From New Member to TESOL President via the LMP Award

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” So begins The Odyssey, the most famous of the Ancient Greek epics poems, thought to have been written nearly 3,000 years ago and assumed to have been written by Hómēros (Homer in English). The 12,000-line poem tells the tale of the Greek hero, Odysseus, and his 10-year journey.

In 2018, a poll conducted by the BBC found that Homer’s Odyssey topped their poll of “100 Stories that Shaped the World.” However, Hómēros might be surprised to know that it is not his epic male hero, Odysseus, but the goddess Athena’s character that is most often referred to today, as she disguised herself as Odysseus’ guide, called simply “Mentor.”

Since then, interest in professional mentoring has grown exponentially, as shown by a recent (July 2021) search of amazon.ca, which found more than 10,000 published  titles using the phrase “leadership mentoring.”

And interest on the academic side has grown too, with two journals dedicated to this area, Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning (since 1993) and the International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education (since 2012). However, in the 500-plus articles published in those two journals over the last 30 years, very few have been about leadership mentoring in language education. That is where TESOL International Association comes into the picture.

According to the association’s records, their Leadership Mentoring Program (LMP) Award was initiated in 2000, making this year the 21st anniversary of the LMP, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was one of first people to ever receive the LMP Award—just after becoming a new member. Fortunately for me, Kathi Bailey (TESOL International Association President, 1998–1999) was my LMP mentor, as she was for many early LMP awardees, including Desma Johnson and Fernando Fleurquin in 2001. Fernando, originally from Uruguay, is now—20 years later—coteaching the association’s ELT Leadership Management Certificate Program. As my dear, departed Mum used to say: “What goes around, comes around”: in this case, as a positive cycle, from mentee to mentor.

And to show just how long these LMP relationships can last, more than two decades later, Kathi and I are still working together. Seven years after receiving the LMP Award, I joined the association’s Board of Directors, on which I served from 2007–2010. And 5 years after that, in 2015, I served as the association’s 50th president. The second future-president of the association received her LMP Award in 2003—Deena Boraie, who is currently vice president for student life at the American University in Cairo. Deena, who served as TESOL president from 2013–2014, was the first Egyptian president of the association.

The list of LMP awardees includes many past and present—and maybe even future—presidents and board members, not only of TESOL International Association, but also of other language education organizations. One of the 2005 LMP awardees was Luciana de Oliveira, who went on to become the first Latina president of the association in 2018. The list even includes the current association president, Gabriela Kleckova, based in the Czech Republic, who received her LMP Award in 2006, as well as current association board member, Ayanna Cooper, who was a 2008 LMP awardee and who joined the board in 2020.

To be clear, the LMP is not designed solely to prepare future board members and presidents of TESOL International Association, or of any other association. There are many ways to lead and many pathways to leadership. But there is a clear pattern of LMP mentees eventually taking on major leadership positions in language teaching organizations around the world. Eligibility for the LMP Award is extremely broad, as stated on the website: “TESOL members who are interested in becoming more involved in the work of TESOL International Association.” In other words, anyone who is a member of the association can apply.

A key aspect of the program is the fact that “Preference is given to individuals from underrepresented groups within TESOL” and that the program “pairs selected individuals with TESOL leaders who mentor recipients throughout the year.” It is possible that the phrase “underrepresented groups within TESOL”—which is the original wording from 21 years ago—may need to be revisited. For example, all four members of the current executive committee of the association are women, and of the 12 members of the current board of directors, nine are women and three are men, making a 3:1 female to male ratio. What, then, it means to be “underrepresented” in an association like ours is a question worth considering for the future.

At the present time, the four criteria for evaluating applications to the LMP are as follows:

• Membership in an underrepresented group in TESOL
• Organizational experience, such as involvement in an affiliate of TESOL International Association
• Service to the profession
• Potential for TESOL International Association involvement and leadership

A one-page statement of interest, an account of your education/professional history, and one letter of support are all that is required. Applications opened on 1 July and will close on 30 October—so you have lots of time! And in return, successful applicants receive the following:

• Basic registration to the annual TESOL International Convention & English Language Expo
• A mentoring relationship with a TESOL leader
• A waived registration fee for participation in TESOL’s Leadership Development Certificate Program.

But, I will conclude with a couple of caveats. Applications for the LMP Award are far greater than the number of places in the program, so you if you need help with your application, allow time for that. Also, if your initial application is not successful (as mine was not), then keep applying—as I did. You never know where it may lead…

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/from-new-member-to-tesol-president-via-the-lmp-award/

9 Approaches to Rebooting the Educator Résumé

 Link to podcast of this blog.

When was the last time you updated your résumé? At whatever stage of career we are in the TESOL field, reviewing and reflecting on our résumé can be incredibly helpful. As we recollect past accomplishments, we can renew our confidence in our contributions, and as we notice gaps we can determine our future priorities and begin to take action steps to move our careers in new directions.

Throughout the pandemic, our work as educators has dramatically changed and dramatically digitized. We might also have had time to reflect on our careers, our goals, and how we want to move ahead professionally in the years to come. We also have likely gained many advocacy, leadership, technology, and curriculum design skills we could capture on our résumés.

“Resume – Glasses” by flazingo_photos is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the most effective ways to invest in our professional journey is by setting aside time to reconceptualize our résumés. Here are nine approaches that can turn a cursory editing activity into a meaningful process in our career journeys.

1. Look at Ads for Desired Jobs

Unless you are currently job-hunting, it might not seem necessary to review job advertisements. However, reading the qualifications sought in job posts for the types of positions you would love to have can give you the language stems to use to describe your own work. It can also give you a sense of what you should highlight or what needs enhancing in your own profile.

2. Analyze Profiles of Professionals in the Field

Using websites, LinkedIn profiles of English language teaching professionals, and bios found online, you can get a good sense of the backgrounds of those who hold the types of positions you too would like to have. Can you extract some of the language they use to describe themselves or the action verbs they employ in your own résumé?

3. Determine the Type of Résumé You Need

There are résumés, which are usually only one to two pages, and curriculum vitae (CVs), which can run much longer. What is the standard for your context? Look for sample résumés or CVs for educators as many found online are for business or fields outside of education. Check for examples of TESOL/TEFL-specific résumés, as many can be found on Pinterest and other websites.

4. Reconsider Your Sections

Make sure that you conform to the expectations of employers, while also using your résumé sections as a vehicle to communicate all of your skills. Go beyond the expected—teaching and lesson planning—and think about your communication skills, conflict resolution abilities, community outreach, leadership, coaching, data analysis, technology, microcredentials, and presentation skills.

5. Use Data

Increasingly, accountability and statistics drive a message home. How can you make an accomplishment statement more evidence based? For instance, stating “Taught ESP courses” could be converted to “Taught 15 sections of ESP in the area of aviation over 5 years, reaching more than 300 learners.”

6. Modernize the Template

More than ever, we exist in a richly visual digital world. If your résumé is still the same font and style as it was 10 or even 2 years ago, it’s probably in need of a facelift. Make this process easy and fun by modifying freely available templates from platforms like Canva and Piktochart, where you can set up your résumé in modern fonts and with a touch of color.

This image by Laura Baecher is licensed under CC by 4.0 | Created in CANVA

7. Connect Your Résumé to an Online Portfolio

In a recent issue of TESOL Connections, I share an in-depth look at the interactive résumé. The premise is to create hyperlinks within your résumé to video, student work samples, photos, publications, and other media resources that can give a future employer a full sense of who you are while at the same time displaying your tech savvy. Online portfolios are websites that display your work as an educator for the public.

8. Set Up Social Media

Once your résumé is clear, compelling, and modernized, it’s time to get it out to the world. Consider the venues that make sense for you—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles can have a direct connection to your résumé, and then, when you make updates, it will always be ready for employers.

9. Peer Review

Ask a trusted colleague or a mentor to review your résumé and let you know what jumps out to them. Give them only 40 seconds to look it over! Employers spend less than 10 seconds on average reviewing résumés, so it’s important to see what is most prominent to a reader and adjust if necessary.

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When I was first getting started in my career, one of the many sage pieces of advice my mother shared was, “your job security is your résumé.” In other words, find ways to advance yourself, grow your skills, and gain new credentials. Doing so will lead you to your next position or opportunity. We know teachers help students work toward career and college readiness, but we often neglect our own careers in service to others.

In the comments, share a question you have about résumé-writing in our field or post a link to your résumé.

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/9-approaches-to-rebooting-the-educator-resume/

Freebie Time for Back To School

Hello everyone!

I hope you are enjoying the summer!

I have been working in the garden~ ha-ha, that is not new!

I am teaching summer school this year and am really excited.  We are learning English through a variety of science experiments.  My students are loving it and so am I!

Growing Kidney Beans in Paper Towels!

     

Freebie Time!

The Free Back to School Lessons By The Best of Teacher Entrepreneurs MC – 2021 is available as a TpT free download.  This great resource is packed with a variety of freebies that will get your new year off on the right foot!  Click here to get yours now!

Look at all the free resources that are included in this one download:

• Apple Number Puzzles FREEBIE
• School Graphing for Young Learners
• FREEBIE!!! First Day of School Crowns Customizable TK-5th
• Compound Word Activities and Compound Word Puzzles FREE
• Back to School Night Forms and Checklists Freebie in English and Spanish
• Back to School Activity First Grade (100 Chart Mystery Picture Puzzle)
• ESL & ELD K-5 Curriculum Map – a FREE year-long pacing guide!  (That’s me)
• Back to School About Me Craft Activity
• Writing Process Posters Engineering Themed
• Multiplication Matching Game
• 3rd Grade Math Spiral Review Worksheets Free Sample | Digital and Printable
• My College Application
• Back-to-School Guided Limerick Writing About Self Activity – Print or Digital
• Back to School Activities FREEBIE
• Free Coupon-based Classroom Management System
• Using Mental Math to Make Numbers Using Number Tiles FREE
• STEM Daily Discussion Starters, Journal Prompts, and Fillers – Sept.
• Icebreakers Task Cards Getting to Know You Questions for Back-to-School SAMPLER
• PREGO Capitolo 11 Spesa e Spese TOMBOLA
• Choosing a Career for 9-12th Grades and Homeschool **Free Guide**
• A Sampling of Sentence Patterns Grammar Worksheets
• Free Back to School Lessons
• Free Winter Holiday Lessons
• Free Valentine’s Day Lessons
• Free End of the Year Lessons
• 100+ Free Lessons & Teaching Ideas
• TBOTE and TBOTEMC Blogs
• TBOTE Facebook page
• The Best of TpT Pinterest Boards

 Click here to get yours now!

Speaking of freebies!

Check out this great back-to-school Word Wall from Fun To Teach!

If you know of any great freebies, let me know!

Happy Teaching,

Lori 

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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2021/07/Back To School Freebies.html

Create Your Own Leveled Readers

As English language teachers, we often struggle with finding the right articles or reading materials for our classes, and when we finally do find something that matches our content needs, we then realize that the lexile level may be right for some students, but not for others.

Sigh.

Okay then, time to dig in and gloss the heck out of this thing. Truly ambitious teachers might spend hours rewriting the article so they can have it at two different levels. We’ll use it again next semester, right? Right…or maybe not.

There are wonderful programs out there like Newsela that tackle this exact problem, but we don’t all have the funding to make it work. Others may already have the perfect reading for our lesson plan, and something premade just isn’t going to fit.

Luckily, we can have our cake and eat it, too! The wonderful world of artificial intelligence (AI) has sprung up a cottage industry of free tools that you can use to summarize and rewrite articles, essays, and columns. This takes a ton of the leg work off of teachers who want to create differentiated learning experiences for their students, all while ensuring they’re moving forward together with the same content.

Fair warning: This doesn’t mean no work, it means a lot less work.

Let’s take a look at how we can create our own leveled readers.

Getting Started

Your primary source is up to you. There is an endless supply of free blog posts, reviews, opinion columns, essays, short stories, analyses, and more available to you at the tip of your fingers on the internet. While you may choose anything you like, I recommend that you start with the end in mind. The original reading should be the highest lexile level you might expect your students to read at. If you’re a Krashen fan, you might want to consider this your i+1 level. Don’t pick something that will demotivate your readers if they peek at the highest level; make sure it’s still within their grasp.

In other words, don’t select a think piece from the Economist for your low-intermediate composition class.

Once you have found something that you want your students to aspire to, I recommend copying and pasting the text into a Google Doc or a Word Doc. This makes for a clean final document, and if you’re using Google Docs, it’s easy to link the different documents together. Don’t forget to cite your source!

Now it’s time to start crunching the text.

Summarizers

There are a number of summarizers out there that will analyze your text, simplify the vocabulary, remove unnecessary clauses, reorganize sentences by key ideas, and more. The algorithms get more and more sophisticated with each passing day.

Resoomer

Resoomer in Action

Resoomer is a powerful tool that lets you resize the summary of your original text by percentage. If you take a 1,000 word text and reduce it by 70%, you’ll end up with a roughly 700 word summary. In my experience, the more you reduce, the less clear the final output, but it’s a great starting point. You can then click “Rewrite” at the bottom of the new summary and Resoomer will take a crack at changing up the language.

Quillbot

Quillbot Paragraph Summary

Quillbot summarizes your primary text either as a paragraph or as a set of key sentences, both of which you can choose to make longer or shorter depending on your needs. One nice feature here is that once you have the summary, you can click a button to “paraphrase the summary,” ensuring more linguistic variety.

Wordtune

Wordtune Paragraph by Paragraph Comparison

Wordtune is a promising option that summarizes paragraphs alongside the original text, letting you quickly judge how accurate the AI has converted the information. In my tests, I found that it does a pretty good job of dropping the unnecessary information and combining paragraphs to focus on key ideas. It even lets you “thumbs up/down” each paragraph’s summary, training the computer as to whether or not it’s doing a good job.

There are many other summarizers out there to explore and they’re getting stronger all the time, so I encourage you to think of these as primers rather than definitive best choices.

The Clean-Up

To be clear, these summarizers won’t always create exactly what you want. For example, I’ve found instances where they don’t include a clear topic sentence or conclusion, have unclear pronoun references, or other issues. But compared to rewriting the article myself over and over from scratch? I’ll happily take the kickstart from one of these sites any day!

Once you’ve exported the summary, give yourself a few minutes to read through it carefully, make adjustments to anything that’s unclear or unnatural, and tidy it up to include any vocabulary or grammar points you want your students to focus on.

The Final Product

After you’ve made two to three versions of your original text, make sure that you clearly distinguish them. If you’re presenting them online, include links to each at the top of the document. If they’re PDFs, you can choose a naming convention, such as “Original/Intermediate/Simple” so students know where they are.

With a little practice, you can now create multileveled readers of any content in about 20–30 minutes, where it would have taken easily upwards of 3–4 hours without the support of technology. I expect in the coming months and years, that time will go from 20 minutes to 10 to 5 to 0 as the AI behind these services gets stronger and stronger control over the language.

For now, though, have some fun, see what you can come up with, and give your students a real opportunity to explore your classroom content through better differentiated materials!

If you have any other techniques or tools that you’ve found that do a better job of summarizing than others, let me know in the comments!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/create-your-own-leveled-readers/

5 Ways Phonics Is Different for English Learners

Chalkbeat Philadelphia recently published a great article about the difficulties young English learners (ELs) in the Philadelphia School District were facing during the pandemic. What spoke to me in the story was a quote from EL teacher Shuxin Chen. She described the “double burden” young ELs always face during phonics lessons, not just during the pandemic. Phonics is a foundational skill for learning to read. All students need it. ELs, however, need some additional considerations.

I talked with Ms. Chen about what she’d like teachers of ELs to understand about the phonics challenges their students face when learning to read.

What English Learners Need

1. Patience
All students need patience, but ELs especially so. We English language teachers must keep reminding our general education colleagues (and ourselves!) that ELs need time. Ms. Chen points out that young ELs have to process phonemes as new sounds if the sounds aren’t in their mother tongue. Then they must process the grapheme associated with the sound and also learn the vocabulary associated with the word. That’s a big cognitive load—the “double burden” she was referring to in the Chalkbeat article. Ms. Chen’s school offers specific small group instruction for young ELs in kindergarten but many schools don’t. At one time. my district didn’t either, claiming kindergarten was a “language-rich environment.” It is—but only if you understand the language.

2. Oral Vocabulary
Ms. Chen noted it’s important to develop oral language because general education teachers often assume oral language development. Native English speakers with large oral vocabularies can more easily make connections. ELs need the opportunity to talk about everything! The rhyming games, the poems, and the singing offered in lower elementary classrooms all help develop phonemic awareness, the auditory part. That helps ELs learn phonics, the visual part where sounds get connected to print.

What Teachers of English Learners Should Do

3. Take a Fresh Look at Teaching Phonics
Ms. Chen, a former EL herself, suggests it might be time to reassess when and for how long to teach phonics. Phonics instruction, including the study of letter patterns and morphology, can be appropriate for older ELs, too. It’s especially useful for students from language backgrounds quite different from English. As a high school newcomer, Ms. Chen diligently set about learning English words “as a whole piece.” In hindsight, she realizes that made things needlessly difficult for her. Lack of specific phonics instruction made her feel as if she were missing out on a “secret.” For your students, “Tell them the secret!”, she advises.

4. Teach to the Need
All students need phonics, but students who have mastered the skills won’t need the same support as students who are beginning. It’s easy for teachers to think something is wrong with ELs just starting out. What ELs need, however, is a bridge from what they know in their language to what they need in English. What if students don’t know the word for apple when the teacher is using it to represent the sound for a? Worse, what if the teacher assumes the student knows the word for apple and misinterprets hesitancy for lack of phonemic awareness? If necessary, gather evidence of progress to convince doubters. That was what I was doing when I filmed this short video of an EL making words with moveable letters. His concerned teacher wanted him to repeat first grade. She thought he lacked phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Watching even thirty seconds of this video shows otherwise.

5. Keep Going
As Ms. Chen points out, “Reading is so much more than just learning the letter sounds and names. It’s learning the language.” Decoding, or learning to sound out words, is an important start, but ELs also need to know the meaning of those words. Teachers of young ELs shouldn’t assume their students are reading well based only on their mastery of phonics skills. We English language teachers have a more holistic view of reading as part of language development. We know learning about phonemic awareness and phonics is important. It’s the foundation for learning to read, but it’s just the first step in our students’ long, fruitful reading journeys!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/5-ways-phonics-is-different-for-english-learners/

Learning Argument and Persuasion With Quandary

Hello and welcome to another edition of the TESOL Games and Learning Blog. This month’s blog post explores far future and the space colony of Braxos in the game Quandary, first featured in my November 2019 blog post. Quandary’s straightforward design, section-based structure, and potential for expansion into classroom activities make it a solid choice for educators new to using games in classroom practice.

The overall premise of Quandary tasks the player with leading a band of settlers as they build a colony on the planet Braxos. As captain of the colony, the player must settle disputes and decide the direction of the colony through the input of other colonists. The game offers players four conflicts to choose from:

• Lost Sheep: Players work to balance the needs of livestock versus Braxos’ wild animals.
• Water War: Players debate private versus public property.
• Fashion Faction: Players have a school uniform debate.
• Mixed Messages: Issues about what should people be permitted to do online.

Each are familiar debate topics set within a futuristic setting.

Conflict abounds in Quandary, and it’s up to the player to resolve it.

Each dispute is presented to the player in the form of a comic that establishes the root of the conflict. Then, players are tasked to get their facts right. In this round of the game, players click on each of the colonists who present either a fact, solution, or opinion, and the colonists’ ideas are presented as text or can be enlarged to show a brief animation while an audio clip plays.

The main sorting mechanic of the game has players decide what is fact, solution, or opinion.

Once players have sorted the positions of all the colonists, they then select the two most optimal solutions. These solutions are then put to the colony, where everyone can contribute their stance on the topic—a stance that can be swayed using facts. These facts are a limited resource that players must use strategically.

Listen to the viewpoints of the colonists and try to sway their position with facts.

The final round of Quandary then asks the player to render a decision and sort through which of the colonists will agree with the decision and which are likely to disagree. This is an interesting twist to the game that reminds players that the goal isn’t to see your side win, but to reach a community consensus.

Quandary adds a unique spin to classroom debate activities used by practically every language educator. Students can play sections of the game and then break into groups to debate the issue in the game. As they progress through the game, students can share how their opinions and ideas have shifted and their position has evolved as more information is revealed.

Another great option is to incorporate Quandary into a classroom RAFT activity. RAFT activities have the students assume a Role, address an Audience, in a particular Format, about a particular Topic. With Quandary, students could assume the roles of specific colonists and be asked to role-play that colonist’s position during a classroom debate.

Have you used Quandary in the classroom? If so, share your ideas in the comments below.

Until next time, play more games!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/learning-argument-and-persuasion-with-quandary/

Countering Anti-Black Racism in Ourselves and in Our Classrooms

This month, I have invited a member of the NJTESOL/NJBE Executive Board, Tasha Austin, to be a guest columnist on my TESOL blog. This year, the TESOL International Association Board of Directors decided to study how the association can counter anti-Black racism and help our members examine their own practices and provide support to their Black multilingual learners. Tasha helped spearhead this movement in our organization.

Tasha is a PhD candidate and lecturer in language education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and the representative for the NJTESOL-NJBE Teacher Education Special Interest Group.

Summer Maintenance: Countering Anti-Blackness in Multilingual Classrooms

2020 was marked by global uprisings that highlighted violence against Black people and more than a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous, and Latinx (and in some cases Asian) U.S.-based populations. Additionally, anti-Asian violence and interrupted teaching and learning across the nation pushed our profession as language educators to the brink. Out of pure exhaustion, we may be tempted to join calls for return to a “prepandemic normal” state of affairs.

Still, for Black multilingual populations, normal in schools can be characterized as isolating—and even violent. While the recent spike in media coverage portrays physical violence against the Afro-descended as novel, it is as normalized as the steady beat of Black multilingual erasure in language classrooms. Neither began in 2020, but both will continue into the future without a conscious interruption starting with our commitment to diagnose ourselves as a part of the current condition in which Black multilingual students find themselves.

Teachers of English learners (ELs), like all instruments of change, need to be in top shape to perform in meaningful ways. As you tend to your mental, physical, and emotional well-being this summer, also ensure it is a time of deep reflection and learning in order to increase effectiveness with Black multilingual students.

It’s Not About You, But It Is…

Since the majority of K–12 teachers are White women, turning the lens of racial inquiry toward teachers instead of students can feel aimless when “race” is typically applied to those who are not White. Nationally, performative acknowledgements, like naming Juneteenth a federal holiday or the airing of In the Heights, can make it feel like the push for racial equity is progressing just fine without additional help. Still, as Afro-Latinx backlash against the comments of icon Rita Moreno demonstrates, the right to be recognized as fully human and worthy of acknowledgement both in and out of classrooms is often an invisible struggle for those unaffected, which feeds apathy toward the ongoing violence against Black people. Reflecting upon how this impacts Black multilingual students is urgent—the consequences for those who have always been encouraged to wait longer for justice are dire.

To begin the journey toward racial literacy, consider engaging in the archaeology of the self, which rightfully locates all people as recipients of systemic benefits and/or discrimination while moving through a society that still benefits from the free labor of enslaved Africans. Coming to terms with systems that you may not run, but indeed benefit from, can be a catalyst for awakening to how those positions permeate the teaching of Black multilingual populations whose numbers continue to increase in the United States.

Do Your Work

“Cancel culture” is an often cited reason for avoiding difficult conversations in which one may use the wrong term or express a belief that reflects racist undertones. Still, investigating how we language our realities through words deemed as cancel-worthy may reveal entry points for unpacking beliefs that need to be disrupted. Furthermore, language practices that have been deemed un-American are rooted in anti-Blackness that precedes even the establishment of our public schools and were similarly cited for rationalizing violent boarding school practices for Indigenous populations.

Although joining a system rooted in White supremacy can make one complicit, it doesn’t have to, considering that complicity is more about actions than words. Try reflecting on your actions first, then adding discussion in the form of a reflection with critical conversations in groups of interested language teachers or loved ones who invite growth (in addition to calling in and out where necessary). The risk of interpersonal discomfort in challenging the status quo pales by comparison to Black and particularly Black multilingual students, who have little power in the school context and who face institutional consequences for their words and actions, including higher suspension, expulsion, and dropout rates.

EL Teachers’ Call to Action

The barrage of expectations upon language educators, particularly those who work with multilingual and immigrant populations, seems to mount higher every year. Still, the root of anti-Blackness remains firmly intact as strategies only rearrange surface-level challenges rather than dislodging the racial ideologies we may not consciously acknowledge. Let this summer be one of deep and lasting change that begins with the self and emanates through thoughts, beliefs, and actions.

We teachers, as the most impactful variable affecting student achievement, can only drive change if we are maintained through

1. inspection of our beliefs,
2. replacement of our misunderstandings, and
3. regularly checking our racial filters to ensure we stop the spread of anti-Blackness in our multilingual classrooms.

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NOTE: The opinions expressed in this article reflect those of the individual author, and may or may not reflect the opinions or official positions of TESOL International Association. We respect the rights of our authors to state their personal opinions and we are providing this forum in the spirit of academic freedom.

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from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/countering-anti-black-racism-in-ourselves-and-in-our-classrooms/

STEM in ELT: What’s Your School’s Language Program Model?

The 2020–2021 school year has ended. And what a year it has been. But this is a time to reflect on what was learned from the challenges revealed and created from the COVID-19 outbreak. We need to take this time to really think about the programs that we provide or do not provide our English learners (ELs) and how to improve the programs so that our ELs are truly receiving and engaging in an equitable education in all content areas.

I had the opportunity to read Dr. Ayanna Cooper’s book, And Justice for ELs: A Leader’s Guide to Creating and Sustaining Equitable Schools, and I came across a question she asked: “Can you fully articulate the language support program model in your school?” I start this blog with this question because if the teachers who are to deliver the lessons cannot articulate the language support program model(s) in their school, and the administrators—who are meant to ensure the implementation and validity of it—cannot articulate the model(s), how are we to ensure that the ELs are receiving what they need to be academically, emotionally, and linguistically successful? According to Dr. Cooper, successfully supporting the academic achievement of ELs requires a “whole school” approach.

So, I asked the director of bilingual education from my school district this exact question. We must have talked for at least a half hour as he carefully explained the multiple language models that are available in our district and the criteria and subcategories for each model. (Please note that my school district has only English and Spanish speaking students.) For example:

• the full-time bilingual program has two subcategories:
  • full-time bilingual (Spanish only spoken)
  • dual language (Spanish and English offered)
• The English as a second language (ESL) program model also has two subcategories:
  • high intensity ESL, which has two daily periods of ESL instruction
  • regular ESL, which is one daily period of ESL instruction

These are just two of the four program models that are offered in the district, and each has a proficiency level attached to it. I decided to ask a few ESL, bilingual, and general education teachers and building administrators the same question, and although their responses were not as detailed as the director’s response, they were all able to articulate the programs offered.

This is a major improvement compared to a just 3 years ago, before the new director was hired. As I mentioned earlier, it is imperative that all persons who are responsible for the education of ELs be able to articulate the language support program model in their school.

What Does This Have to Do With ELs?

Pretty much everything. If schools are not offering a variety of English language program models in their schools and/or districts to fit the needs of their ELs at their various levels of language proficiency, then the ELs’ academic and language needs are not being properly met. They end up remaining in perpetual programs that will not provide them the resources and tools to become proficient in English. The same English they will need to successfully take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the American College Testing (ACT) exams (exams that are required for entrance into colleges in the United States).

Why Are These Exams Important for ELs and STEM?

These higher education attainment requirements are gateways to STEM. Yet, according to Dr. Cooper, in 2015–2016 only 2.8% of high school ELs participated in the SAT or the ACT exams compared to 97.2% of non-ELs. How can we expect to increase the number of ELs in STEM careers—a field that the Pew Research Center says has grown 79% since 1990 (with employment increasing from 9.7 million to 17.3 million), with computer jobs experiencing a 338% increase over the same time period, when there is such a low number of ELs participating in the SAT or ACT?

Answer: Begin with an examination of the English language program models your K–12 school or district provides. Ask those hard questions of school leaders about their program models and the levels offered, and if they are evaluating its effectiveness. Ask leaders the question that Dr. Cooper asks in her book: “Can you fully articulate the language support program model in your school?”

And I ask: “Can you fully articulate the language support program model in your school or the school of your child or children?” If they, or you, cannot articulate it, then how can it be supported or evaluated for effectiveness? If we are to truly begin the process of preparing ELs for academic success and STEM pathways, then the inability to answer an easy yes to these questions is a sign that changes need to be made in the curriculum, staff professional development, and language programs being offered to ELs.

All students experienced learning loss due to COVID-19, but the learning loss has been more dramatic for ELs than their peers. Principle 6 of TESOL’s The 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of English Learners says: Engage and collaborate within a community of practice. Start the conversations during staff meetings, at PLCs (professional learning communities), and at team and grade-level meetings. Get the conversations started so that the upcoming school year can not only be effective for native English speakers, but for ELs as well!

Ask Yourself

• What English program models are offered in my school district?
• Can I fully articulate the language support program model(s) in my school?
• How would I go about beginning the process of learning the language support programs in my school or district?
• Who would I speak with first in regard to this matter?

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/stem-in-elt-whats-your-schools-language-program-model/