Podcasts as PD for Tired Teachers

As we settle into our post-holiday haze this year, many of us are tired. Dog-tired. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for taking their precious vacation for themselves and telling the little devil on their shoulder shouting to get more work done, “Not today.” Others of us are open to learning a bit, but aren’t quite ready to jump into online courses or conferences, or deep-diving into pedagogy books at the moment. That’s okay! As much as we tout the benefits of active learning, we also understand that maybe—just maybe—“sit & get” professional development (PD) can have its place, too.

Today, in the spirit of keeping things light, I’ll do a surface level look at the very deep world of podcasts, and share a few shows that are aimed directly at English language teachers to get you started.

Ears Up!

While there’s wonderful PD out there through YouTube, conferences, social media, in-person trainings, and more, the true beauty of podcasts is that they can be listened to while otherwise occupied: morning walks, working out, daily commutes, shoveling snow, doing the dishes, or just about any other light (or depending on the snowfall, hard) activity. Many shows also include show-notes, so if you hear about something you really want to pursue, you can just click through and check it out when you’ve got time.

How to Listen

Most shows have a website that you can listen at, but the true beauty of a podcast is the ability to put it in your pocket. If you have an iPhone, I recommend you start by using your already installed Apple Podcasts app. For Android users, you can use the Google Podcasts app. Later, if you feel you want more control over your experience, you can use more sophisticated apps, like PocketCasts or Stitcher. Once you’re in, all you have to do is find a show you like, tap play, and start listening.

Are There TESOL-Related Podcasts?

Yes! There are teachers across the globe jumping behind microphones to share their enthusiasm, ideas, and learning for teaching ESOL! One of my favorite things is to listen to speakers with different perspectives, student demographics, or special interests giving their takes on what works in the classroom. Here I’ll share a few. You will undoubtedly find more as you begin exploring, and I hope you’ll share your discoveries with me, later, in return.

TEFL Training Institute Podcast

TTI is a great place to start as the shows are short and sweet: 15 minutes each, and to the point. They cover a wide variety of topics, such as whether we should teach grammar, understanding motivation, having students work in groups, and much more.

Facebook: TTI
Twitter: @Ross_Thorburn

The TEFLology Podcast

The TEFLology Podcast has an academic focus on TEFL, if the name didn’t give enough of a hint. The show is run by three TEFL professors in Japan and covers all sorts of topics across the field, including timely topics, like racism, labor unions, and queer inclusion, among the more traditional points, like pronunciation, vocabulary, and more. Cohosts Matthew, Matthew, and Robert also do a lot of work on the value of podcasting and PD, so if you find yourself into this very topic, this is a great place to go.

Facebook: TEFLology Podcast
Twitter: @TEFLology

All Things ESL

All Things ESL is probably the most professionally produced ESL podcast out there. If you’re a fan of public radio, this will feel like the show you’ve always been waiting for NPR to put out. Hannah Benson takes you on a well polished journey through the field of ESL, often focusing on the bigger picture experience of what it is to be an English learner or an English language teacher. Hannah has recently decided to put the show to the side, but there’s still a great backlog to explore.

Facebook: All Things ESL
Instagram: @AllThingsESL

The Boosting Achievement Podcast

Carol Salva is a powerhouse when it comes to supporting students and looking for ways to better empower them for success. In her podcast, she brings in all sorts of experts to talk about growth, learning, and student achievement. There’s always something to walk away with after each episode.

Facebook: SalvaBlog
Twitter: @MsSalvaC

Teaching MLs

Tan Huynh is another teacher who gets so much done, I often wonder when he has time to sleep. His student-first approach is inspiring, and he’s always looking for ways to help teachers improve, or to make their lives easier.

Twitter: @TanKHuynh

The DIESOL Podcast

My cohost would kill me if I didn’t mention our own show, focused specifically on the crossroads of edtech and ESOL. We focus on research-based practices, then explore tools and techniques that teachers can use to implement those practices in their classrooms. Alternating episodes are interview shows with people doing fun stuff with tech in the classroom. We keep things fairly casual so that the occasionally dry academic side doesn’t get in the way of the joy of teaching and working with students.

Facebook: @DIESOLpod
Twitter: @DIESOLpod

Some Closing Thoughts

Podcasts are labors of love, and podcasts made by teachers are usually done after the classroom doors close, the papers are graded, and the next lessons are planned. This makes it a challenge for many teachers to keep going, so you may find shows that are discontinued or irregular. But just because a show is old, doesn’t mean it’s out-of-date. Be free with your explorations of podcasts, and reach out to the hosts on twitter, or wherever they may be! If you’re the type of person who would listen to their show, you’re likely to be friends who just haven’t met yet!

Do you have any other shows you think your fellow English language teachers should check out? I’d love to know about more, so please feel free to share them in the comments below!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/podcasts-as-pd-for-tired-teachers/

🎊 🎊 Happy New Year Sale! 🎉 🎉

Hello friends!

🎊  🎉 Say goodbye to 2021 and welcome 2022 🎊   🎉

 

Start your new year off with money-saving deals on your 

 

favorite Fun To Teach resources!

 

Shop now and save 20%!

Happy Teaching,

Lori

 

Click here to shop!

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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2021/12/happy-new-year-sale.html

Navigating the Reading Wars With English Learners

If you follow literacy issues, you have probably heard of the Reading Wars. If you haven’t, Jill Barshay’s recent article for the Hechinger Report does the best job I’ve seen yet of explaining the nuts and bolts of this disagreement over how to best teach young children to read. As comprehensive as the story was, however, it failed to mention English learners (ELs). This is disappointing but not unique. ELs often suffer collateral damage in the Reading Wars because both sides overlook their specific needs. Let’s address this issue from an EL’s perspective.

One Side – Phonics

People on this side feel phonics has been neglected. They maintain children need explicit, systematic instruction to learn to easily decode words. Everyone seems to agree this is important; the difference lies in how much emphasis people think it should get. Strong proponents of this approach have even lobbied state legislatures to mandate “science of reading” training for elementary teachers. My state of North Carolina recently joined at least 20 other states that have done or are considering doing this. I think teaching children to fluently decode words is a necessary first step in learning to read. I just have doubts about state legislators determining curriculum at such a nuts-and-bolts level. Local education experts are best placed to make these decisions. Phonics has gotten a bad reputation from dreary worksheets and inauthentic language, like these examples from decodable readers:

• “The ham is in the cab.”
• “The hen is in the den.”
• “I hug my pug on the bus.”

As a teacher, I was trying to help ELs understand low utility words like cot or den. Instead, the first word newcomers invariably wanted to know how to read and write was cousin. It wasn’t decodable, but it was a high-utility word for them because they needed it to describe their large extended families. A second grade EL once told me he didn’t truly understand what a dam was until his class studied landforms in science. That’s probably because his exposure to dam during his phonics lessons in kindergarten and first grade was devoid of meaning.

The Other Side – Whole Language

This approach relies on students memorizing sight words and using context and picture clues to figure out unknown words. A familiar feature of this method is predictable texts, the kind where students read sentences like “I have a dog,” and a picture of a dog is next to the text. This isn’t reading by sounding out the words; it’s “reading” using oral language and picture clues. A teaching colleague once asked me to teach a newcomer EL the meaning of t-shirt. Apparently, the newcomer hadn’t done well on an assessment that required her to read predictable text that said, “I have a t-shirt.” The newcomer couldn’t read the page, but it was because she didn’t have the oral vocabulary needed to identify t-shirt. In this case, context clues from pictures didn’t help the newcomer. It didn’t give the teacher an accurate assessment of her reading, either. This hurts ELs.

Meeting in the Middle

Many school systems attempt to please both sides of the Reading Wars with an approach called balanced literacy. Critics feel this doesn’t give enough attention to the systematic teaching of phonics. A key feature of the balanced literacy method is guided reading groups, where the teacher uses leveled texts with small groups of students at a similar reading level. ELs often end up in low-level groups, missing chances to be exposed to grade-level text. When teachers spend a big part of the literacy block working with guided reading groups, it means most students are not with the teacher. Some “keep busy” activities (computer games, worksheets, etc.) that students are doing instead often don’t benefit ELs much.

Tips

All three approaches I’ve described have pitfalls for ELs. You may not be able to decide which side of the Reading Wars your district takes, but as a teacher of ELs, you can and should be an influencer. Work to ensure your students don’t become collateral damage in these conflicts. Here’s what to do:

1. Encourage meaning-first instruction. Any method of teaching reading will fail ELs if they don’t understand the vocabulary. That means ELs need to understand what a cot is as they’re also learning to sound out the word.
2. Ensure ELs are doing pair and group work in mixed-level groups. This gives them exposure to a wide variety of speaking opportunities and reading materials.
3. Don’t give short shrift to science and social studies. These subjects offer valuable opportunities to work with grade-level text.
4. Explore thematic instruction in the literacy block to build background knowledge. Decoding, increasing fluency, and finding the main idea are important, but they’re only mile markers on the road to reading. The end point of any instructional approach is for students to learn things from their reading. Building background knowledge helps.

Do you know what approach to the Reading Wars your district takes? What about you? How have you ensured your students don’t get caught in the middle?

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/navigating-the-reading-wars-with-english-learners/

Happy Holidays to you!🎄🎄

Wishing everyone love and joy this holiday season! 

 to all of you 
from all of us 
at Fun To Teach!

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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2021/12/happy-holidays-to-you.html

4 Steps to Create a Circle of Mentors

The end of a calendar year is usually just a midpoint pause for us on academic calendars. We feel the hectic rush to the finish line with grading, and yet the lure of a fresh new year tugs at us as well. What has this year meant for us personally and professionally? Where do we see ourselves going next year? This can be a time for renewal and carving out some plans for new directions. Mentors in our place of work play a critical role in this process. Mentoring programs particularly benefit minoritized employees and women.

For instance:

• 71% of employees who believe they have good opportunities to grow in their career have a mentor.
• 94% of employees report that mentoring would keep them from leaving their company.
• Mentoring programs boosted minority representation at the management level from 9% to 24%.

“Mustang Mentoring 2011” by bujiie is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

However, many of us would like to have mentoring from beyond our current workplace. If we don’t already have a healthy circle of mentors, one of the of the most important steps we can take in our career development is to actively seek out the kind of personal development we can only gain from one-to-one conversations with mentors. The term “mentor” has a lot of meanings depending on the context, but here, I use the World Education Services definition of mentorship:

A relationship between two people where the individual with more experience, knowledge, and connections is able to pass along what they have learned to a more junior individual within a certain field. The more senior individual is the mentor, and the more junior individual is the mentee.

The mentor benefits because they are able to lead the future generation in an area they care about and ensure that best practices are passed along; meanwhile, the mentee benefits because they have proven that they are ready to take the next step in their career and can receive the extra help needed to make that advancement.

Over the course of our career, we find ourselves moving in and out of regular contact with our mentors. Some mentors might last our entire career—we turn to them year after year, or perhaps every few years. Other mentors might be part of our lives for an intense, shorter period of time. Some mentoring relationships are highly structured and formal, while others are informal. No matter the duration or intensity, it is important to realize that there is not going to be only one mentor in your professional journey. Ideally, you have had, have, and will have, a circle of mentors who you can turn to for various questions and advice. As you move in a new direction, you will need to seek out new mentors to support you. Here are four points to keep in mind as you enhance the role of mentoring in your professional development:

1. Express Gratitude to Mentors Past

One of the key ways to sustain and nourish the mentoring relationships you have already established is to take some time to look back on the mentors who have helped us along the way. Make a list of all the people who you would consider a mentor, and then send them an email to thank them for their role in your life, and perhaps to ask a question that is on your mind about your future direction. Mentors who know us well can give us the needed praise and support we often need to give us the courage to take steps in a new direction. Don’t wait until you really need that mentor for a letter of recommendation to suddenly reappear in their lives.

2. Determine the Kind of Mentoring You Need Now

Mentoring works best when you know what you want. After you have done some life audit and résumé reflection, write out the type of job titles or roles that you aspire to have in the near future. Then, look for people in your network and beyond your network who hold those titles or have performed those roles. Be proactive and bold in reaching out to ask for connections in your online communities of practice, professional associations, frolleague network, and through friends and family members. Be specific in your request to speak for 30 minutes, for example, and open a conversation.

3. Enter the Mentoring Relationship With an Open Mind

Mentoring is a change process. When you seek out a mentor, be prepared to listen well and to be open-minded and open-hearted. It can be difficult to hear feedback that is uncomfortable or discouraging, but honest perspectives are what can really help us make key choices about how to close skill gaps or seek further learning opportunities to get us to our goals. Remember to be well-prepared and professionally dressed, and to use the mentor’s time with concrete goals for the conversation and no expectations for them to “take care” of us. Some mentors will have invaluable insights but very little time to spend, so keeping realistic expectations is important.

4. Remember That Mentoring Is Mutual

Finally, as much as we gain from being mentored, we also gain from mentoring. As Kamhi-Stein and de Oliveira state: “When you contact a leader in the field, think of ways in which the relationship can be two-way support. If you describe the potential benefits that mentors can gain from working with you, potential mentors will be more open to the idea…” Remember, too, that you can be a mentor to others. Look for ways to support current and former students as well as colleagues as they reflect upon and advance in their careers. Oftentimes, those we mentor become colleagues we later consult to mentor us!

As the year comes to an end, use this time to survey your support network and plan to strengthen and expand your circle of mentors in the months to come!

In the comments, share any ideas about mentoring in your professional development!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/4-steps-to-create-a-circle-of-mentors/

5 Tips for Supporting New Multilingual Students and Families

Over the last fortnight, I spoke with several immigrant families with school-aged children who narrated to me their stories of migration and starting a new life in a different country. As they reflected on their experiences of starting a new school, I realized one common thread that connected them all: their worry that they may not be understood, and that they may not be able to understand others.

Arriving in a new country and attending a school where they are surrounded by and have to learn in a language that is not their own is, of course, extremely difficult for students. But it is also challenging for teachers. As teachers, we want to get to know the students and their families. We want to ensure that students are happy, comfortable, and ready to learn. This is hard to achieve if there is a communication barrier. So, what can we do to support new students, create an environment that empowers them, and help their families to thrive? Here are five recommendations, based on the experiences of the families I spoke with recently.

1. Collect Background Data From Incoming Families

To establish a partnership between schools and families, it is important to get to know the families well right from the beginning. Some of this should be done by the school during the enrolment process. But teachers should follow this up with additional information:

• Which countries and cultures do the students associate with?
• What languages are spoken at home?
• In what ways are those languages used?
• Are children literate in their home languages?

Find out about everyday routines and family leisure activities. Find out too what the learner enjoys, dislikes, becomes frustrated about, helps them to learn, and so on. It may be useful to try and set up a home visit early on as families may feel more comfortable speaking at home than at school. It also gives the teacher an insight into the life experiences, cultural practices, and interests of the child that can become the foundation on which to build their learning.

2. Create a System of Support

One family I spoke with talked about how the school would check in on the family in some way once a week. This was sometimes an email or a text message. Sometimes it was a phone call or a (prearranged) visit to the home. The check-ins were a way to ensure that families were doing well, and see if any help was needed. Given the challenges of the pandemic for many families, this was a way for parents to signal the help they needed. Schools that had systems of support set up can be a source of comfort for families as they know they have people to turn to when in need.

3. Create and Maintain a Language and Literacy Profile for Each Learner

Providing appropriate support for language learners starts with understanding what languages learners use and how they use these languages. What is the learner able to do in their home languages as well as in the school language? Identify priority areas to work on. Take the time to compare the linguistic differences between learners’ home languages and English. Given the diversity of students in every class, even the most dedicated teacher may struggle to do this for every student, but if taken on as a whole school endeavour, the school could develop a resource that could be used by everyone. Teachers who understand the language starting point of their learners can better predict progress, anticipate likely problems, and better explain the differences between students’ home languages and English.

4. Adopt Nonverbal, Nonthreatening Ways of Communication

Picture word cards are a great resource to use with new students who may not be familiar with the words for essential items and procedures in the classroom. Learners could be provided a set of cards or a booklet that would function as a mini-picture dictionary. For some students, initial communication may involve simply pointing to a picture, before they gain enough confidence to respond or speak verbally.

Visuals are always a great way of enhancing instruction. Labelling everything around the classroom and creating a labelled photo collage of everyday routines and commonly visited areas in the school would also be helpful.

Use nonverbal cues to show learners what you want them to do. Have peers model behaviours and expectations as well. Play games like Simon says, or charades. Allowing learners to associate visual cues with verbal/written language will help them to notice the new language and accelerate learning.

When using gestures and body language to communicate, it is important to remember that not all gestures are understood or interpreted in the same way in all cultures. For example, nodding the head can mean yes or no, or indicate something else, depending on the culture.

5. Establish Orientation Procedures

For an incoming student and their family, everything is new—even the most basic things that you may take for granted. This is why it is important to have in place an orientation package and procedure that would familiarise them with the school. This may include taking the family around the school for a tour, explaining school routines, safety procedures, and identifying points of contact. This would be a good opportunity to identify language needs of the family—are they comfortable with communication sent home in the school language, or would they prefer a translation/interpreter? Explain the curriculum and the approach to learning in the school so that parents know what to expect.

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Taking the time to set up processes in the school to welcome and support new students and their families will help build trust and provide families with the comfort that someone is there for them and will care for their child.

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/5-tips-for-supporting-new-multilingual-students-and-families/

6 Ways to Evaluate Games for the Classroom

Hello and welcome to this end of the year edition of the TESOL Games and Learning Blog. For this month’s edition, let’s examine what should guide our implementation of games into classroom practice. If game-based learning is to make the shift from a focus on the games themselves to a focus on pedagogy (Spano et al., 2021), there needs to be more careful consideration of how we implement games in our classroom practice.

The brilliant Carol Chapelle, in Computer Applications in Second Language Acquisition, established six criteria by which we can evaluate computer-assisted language learning tools, and these criteria are a great way to consider how to best fit games into our classroom practice. Let’s take a look at what Chapelle recommends.

1. Language Learning Potential

What to ask: Does the technology allow for my students to acquire language or use the language in practice?

Often, games for the classroom can be selected because of their engagement or the ways they motivate students, but the focus should be on student learning. If the game does not have explicit ways in which the students can acquire or learn language, then it is up to us to create learning opportunities around the game. For example, see the March 2021 blog post, “Language Learning With Among Us.”

2. Learner Fit

What to ask: Does the technology match my students’ (and my) needs and abilities? Will it be easy for them (and me) to use and understand?

Arguably this criterion can apply to us more than our students. If you are not an avid video gamer, consider how well you will need to know the game to use it effectively in class. If you are not familiar with a game, it can be helpful to watch “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube that show and explain games, or to look for games firmly established in educational practice, such as Minecraft.

3. Meaning Focus

What to ask: How can I use this technology to enable learning? What do I want to teach with this technology?

When using technology, the teacher must decide how to use the technology to teach specific language material. With games, educators can often struggle to define what it is they hope to teach by using it in the classroom. This always highlights a lack of connection between the game and the learning objectives or course goals. If you find yourself struggling to connect a game to your course objectives, it may help to explore the process of backward design—in short, do not pick the game to play in class until the lesson objectives have been clearly defined.

4. Authenticity

What to ask: Does the technology let my students use their language in creative ways? Do they get to see and use language in a specific context?

What is great about games is the ways they can present players with open-ended problems that have no clear solution. It is up to the creativity and ingenuity of the player to invent a solution. Be sure the qualities of the game match the expectations of student language output. If a game stresses creativity and discovery, consider matching it with an active classroom activity versus a worksheet, for example.

5. Positive Impact

What to ask: Does this game motivate and encourage students to collaborate and work together or create conflict? How do we balance these different goals to create a positive learning experience?

People play games for varied reasons, some to compete and some to socialize. When bringing a game into class, consider what each student may want out of the game and create groups appropriately by putting the competitors together and those who enjoy collaboration in a group. A great starting point can be checking out Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types.

6. Practicality

What to ask: Can I use this in my classroom?

After positive impact, this is the most important criterion for technology in the classroom. Think about ways you may need to change approaches depending on your students and classroom and what technology you and they have. After all, a great game is all about mechanics, and not flashy graphics. If you do not have computers, is there a mobile version of the game? How about a board game that has the same mechanics, or can the game be played with pen and paper?

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I hope the ideas this month encourage you to think more about how to incorporate games into your classroom practice. Are there any games that you find fit all these criteria for you? Let us know in the comments.

Until next time, play more games!

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/6-ways-to-evaluate-games-for-the-classroom/

8 Reasons Teachers Are Burned Out (And 4 Ways to Help)

Most U.S. schools moved to virtual learning in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused many sections of the country to shut down. By the time schools closed for the summer of 2021,  many teachers reported how stressed and burned out they felt. Stress was the most common reason teachers cited for leaving the profession before and during the pandemic, according to a RAND Corporation survey of nearly 1,000 former public school teachers. Three out of four former teachers said their jobs were “often” or “always” stressful.

In August/September 2021, most teachers returned to school in their their brick-and-mortar buildings. We all thought the pandemic was winding down. However, the teacher stress from the past 15 months has not been alleviated.  If anything, it has increased.  There are very few studies that look at teacher stress in the Fall of 2021. I have gathered reasons for this stress from one-on-one discussions with individual teachers and what I’m hearing in discussion groups and Twitter chats.

8 Reasons Teachers Are Burned Out

Here are some areas that I’ve found have added to teacher stress since teachers came back to school in August or September:

1. Many schools were not able to fully staff their schools for the fall 2021 opening of school because of high teacher retirement numbers and a lower number of teachers coming into the profession.

Many teachers approaching retirement have retired before their retirement date. According to Brookings, educators who have had to change instruction modes (virtual to hybrid to in-person) at least once during the past school are 13% more likely to have considered leaving or retiring from teaching.

2. With the rise in COVID cases since October, teachers worry about contracting the virus from students, who are still mainly unvaccinated.

My daughter, who is a special education teacher in Connecticut and is fully vaccinated, recently got infected with COVID by an unvaccinated student. Her school couldn’t fill all of the teaching positions in their building this year, and they have very few substitute teachers. Her students didn’t have appropriate coverage during her 10-day absence. This was a very stressful time for her.

3. Many teachers are telling me that many of their students are having a very difficult time adjusting to face-to-face instruction and to wearing a mask.

Students came back to school after being taught virtually for 15 months (March 2020 to June 2021), and it’s been hard for them to adjust to being in a classroom again with a more rigid schedule. The behavior of students appears to be a source of teacher stress.  Teachers of multilingual learners are further stressed because a number of their students did not thrive during virtual teaching, and some left school at the beginning of the pandemic and have not returned.

4. It was highly touted that the pandemic would change the way children were taught in U.S. schools.

A plethora of articles were published about what schools learned during the pandemic.  Many teachers have shared that this claim did not become a reality. Schools raced to test students to see where they are academically as soon as they returned to school in August or September. The emphasis has been on remediation rather than starting where the students actually are.

5. While virtual teaching, educators had much more flexibility in their schedules and many had some say in how fast the pace of their classes was.

Teachers have lost flexibility and input into their schedules. For teachers of multilingual learners, their instruction with their students is interrupted for testing because they are often asked to proctor tests for general education students, which interrupts their own instructional time. This is true for not only standardized testing but benchmark tests as well.

6. Teachers of multilingual learners are expected to be in charge of everything that affects their students.

Part of these teachers’ job is now to be everything to everybody. In addition to teaching their students, they are deluged with questions and demands from administrators and colleagues.

7. Some ESL and special education teachers are reporting  that their relationships with classroom teachers, with whom they always worked, are fractured.

Teachers are often so stressed that they are unwilling to add to their workload by differentiating instruction for multilingual learners and special education students in their classes.

8. Teachers are not taking care of themselves. 

Teachers are so overworked and stressed that they are not making time for self-care. Stress in teachers, aside from contributing to teacher burnout, also affects student academic progress.

How Can Schools Alleviate Teacher Stress?

1. Add Flexibility.
Find ways to add some flexibility to teachers’ schedules. Lack of flexibility is a huge teacher concern.

2. Be Vigilant About COVID.
Alleviate stress that teachers have about contracting COVID-19 from unvaccinated colleagues and students. Many schools who have been testing consistently and promoting vaccinations have found that it relieves stress surrounding the virus.

3. Support Self-Care.
Support teachers’ use of self-care strategies throughout the school day. Involve teachers in discussions about what to do about teacher stress. Stressed teachers are not conducive to student achievement.

4. Honor Work Hours.
Administrators need to limit the time they expect teachers to work beyond the school day. Teachers should not bring work home from school, and administrators should not call teachers after school or on weekends.

Do you have other ideas about what your school can do to alleviate teacher stress? Please share them with us in the comment box below.

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/8-reasons-teachers-are-burned-out-and-4-ways-to-help/

Co-Teaching and English Language Learners 👀

Have you ever wondered about 

Co-Teaching and ESL?  

How does it work?  What does it look like? 

 Let’s take a peak! 👀

Hello teachers ~ 

I can’t believe it is December already!  Whoa!!!  January is often a month of change and if you are thinking about co-teaching, this post will interest you!  Read on 🙂

Co-teaching is an enjoyable and interactive way to share the responsibility of teaching some or all the students in a classroom.  Teachers with differing expertise, competencies, and /or knowledge come together to create a vibrant classroom full of learning and sharing. Co-teaching is a fun and inspired way for English Language Learners (ELL) and students with differing language levels, prior knowledge, and cultural understanding to learn from two teachers who may have varying ways of thinking or teaching students.

There are three main objectives of co-teaching English learners. 

 

💧The first objective of co-teaching is intended to expand the range of instruction. Students who are taught using more than one teaching styles often better understand information presented in the classroom.

 

💧Second, co-teaching is intended to enhance participation of ELLs.

 

💧Thirdly, it is intended to improve performance outcomes for ELLs.

 

When co-teaching, both teachers are working together to deliver instruction within one classroom.

The determination of who does what is decided by both the classroom teacher and ELD specialist.  This collaboration ensures a clear understanding about the role of each teacher.

 

In classrooms where ELD and classroom teachers co-teach both teachers strive to engage ELLs in instruction that is grade appropriate, academically rigorous and aligned with English Language Proficiency (ELP) and Common Core Standards .  Leveraging the expertise of the ELD teacher and the content teacher heightens the success of English Learners.  This collaborative method of teaching assures that English Language Development is integrated into every lesson.

 

Teachers working together can develop a variety of instructional repertoires. Teaching together brings a fresh and interactive feeling to the classroom as teachers play different, but equal roles in this instructional setting.

 

When teaching the Language Domain of the Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) standards co-teaching elevates the importance of English grammar, conventions, vocabulary in the classroom for all students.

 

If you are an ELD specialist or classroom teacher don’t miss the opportunity to co-teach.  It is a rewarding experience and so very beneficial to all students in the classroom, especially English Language Learners!

 

 

 

Happy Teaching!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2021/12/Co-Teaching and English Language Learners.html

STEM and ELT: 4 Science Strategies

This post covers the final four strategies in my STEM and ELT series. The strategies I discuss here, including the four strategies from Part 1 of this series and the seven science reading strategies from my November Blog, are intended for immediate use in your classroom. These strategies have been gathered from various sources, such as the 2008 book Science for English Language Learners: K-12 Classroom Strategies (edited by Fathman & Crowther) and research by the National Academy of the Sciences. 

As a reminder, here are the nine strategies for teaching science to ELs. Strategies 6–9 are covered today.

1. Connecting With Students
2. Teacher Talk
3. Student Talk
4. Academic Vocabulary
5. Reading Skills
6. Writing Skills
7. Collaborative Learning
8. Scientific Language (Engaging in Discourse)
9. Process Skills of Inquiry

Remember, these strategies are listed and explained individually, but for English learners (ELs) to gain a better understanding of the science content and the English language, the strategies should be used in combination.

6. Writing Skills

Science and STEM content classes contain a lot of academic language and require a lot of writing, from lab reports to journaling. This may be easy for native speakers, but for ELs it poses a challenge because ELs have to expend more time and effort finding the right words. Writing requires processing of language and a vocabulary database in order to construct sentences and produce a message. So, how can you assist your ELs in writing in the STEM content class? By adapting writing assignments so ELs can more easily provide their answers. Following are some ideas.

For lab reports, provide EL students with three to four logical choices in place of having them write out a hypothesis. Students can then select which choice aligns with their hypothesis by marking a box. This can also be accompanied with sentence frames or sentence starters to help them write why they chose their selection. The following chart is an example of logical choices for a hypothesis for a Bouncing Ball Challenge. The Bouncing Ball Challenge required students to complete a task to determine which ingredient(s) would make the ball bounce the highest.

Student Hypotheses

Ingredient	Yes	No
Borax ?
Cornstarch?
Glue ?
Food Coloring ?

Sentence Frame Examples

1. My hypothesis is that increasing/decreasing (circle one) the amount of ____________ will make the ball bounce higher. *Notice how the sentence frame used the academic word “hypothesis.”
2. I reduced/increased (circle one) the amount of _______ from ________ (amount) to _______ (amount). The ball bounced ________ high. *Be sure to add units in your answers. 

Figure 1. Using pictures to aid in procedure writing.

To aid the student in writing the procedure, allow the students to use pictures (provided by you) or to write the word to show the order they followed. See the picture in Figure 1 as an example.

7. Collaborative Learning

STEM subjects provide students with varied ways to not only develop new technical knowledge, but also many opportunities to read, write, speak, and listen to English, which is crucial in reaching language proficiency. STEM subjects allow ELs to engage in substantive conversations about what they are learning and to make connections between spoken and written practices.

We must remember that language is a product of interaction and learning, nor a precursor or prerequisite. When creating collaborative groups, teachers should be mindful of the students’ language proficiency and pair students accordingly. You do not want a group consisting of beginner or lower proficiency level students only. You want to be sure that there is a nice blend of proficiency levels and native speakers so that ELs can hear and learn content and vocabulary used in proficient speech. Here are some ideas on how to help ELs participate in collaborative groups:

• Be sure to set group goals and roles for each member.
• Set timers for each group so each member has an opportunity to speak or participate in the discussion. (Students with developing proficiency can be provided sentence frames and be allowed to draw, write, or use another speaker of their language to translate for them, if available.)
• Set expectations and clearly articulate the roles of each group member. For example, a recorder, reporter, illustrator (great assignment for beginner language level students), and spokesperson.

The bottom line is that you want ELs to know that they are an equal part of the group and that their opinions and participation matters. Every member of the group must understand that the group is interdependent and that their individual success is dependent on the success of the group.

8. Scientific Language (Engaging in Discourse)

STEM subjects consist of a lot of academic language, which is problematic to ELs. Pauline Gibbons, in her book Mediating Language Learning: Teacher Interactions With ESL Students in a Content-Based Classroom (2003), states that the more registers a student can participate in, the more the students’ growth in language. Registers are the way a person uses language in different circumstances, such as whole group, small group, pair work, and individual thinking time. Each of these registers requires a different type of speaking.

For pair work, students can use less sophisticated communication by pointing, drawing, and using body gestures. When working in small groups or with the whole group, they must use more sophistication of language to better articulate what they are trying to express. For example, the Bouncing Ball Challenge shows how students can practice various registers within one activity: The students work together to complete a few trials. They will then move from talking in small groups about what quantities they used and the height of the ball to explaining to the teacher or the whole group the process they followed in determining which variable created the highest bounce. The teacher can guide the students during these conversations by having ELs focus on key vocabulary words, asking for clarification using guided questioning, or restating. Here is a possible conversation between teacher and student:

Teacher: Tell us what you discovered in making your ball bounce.

Student: We changed amounts until ball bounced highest.

Teacher: Okay. Can you be more specific? Which amount did you use for each ingredient to get the highest bounce?

Student: We found that using more glue and did not change the other amounts.

Teacher: How many trials did you do?

Student: Three.

Teacher: So from your three trials you found that increasing the amount of glue gave the highest bounce?

Student: Yes. But we keep the other amounts the same.

Teacher: So, to use more scientific language, you only changed one variable at a time? Is this correct?

Student: Yes. We only changed one variable at a time.

The teacher allowed the student to explain using their own words, then asked for clarification before using the scientific words in context. Here are examples of sentence patterns that you can provide your students when engaging in discourse in the science classroom.

9. Process Skills of Inquiry

Hands-on, inquiry-based science is one of the best ways for all students to learn science, not just ELs. Carrying out hands-on science experiments or STEM tasks require students to use the process skills of observing, communicating, classifying, measuring, predicting, inferring, formulating, hypothesizing, controlling variables (as in the Bouncing Ball Challenge), creating models, and interpreting data.

Because ELs have varying backgrounds and levels of English proficiency, you may need to take steps to build the specific skills necessary for performing a particular inquiry-based activity. For example, for prediction, you could present the students with a sequence, but leave out a part of the sequence and ask the student to draw the missing part. Using the Bouncing Ball Challenge, you may have pictures of the ingredients with upward arrows to represent increasing the amount, a downward arrow to represent decreasing the amount, and a picture of the ball bouncing high or low. This can be done for each ingredient. The student can place the pictures in sequence to state their prediction. For interpreting data, you could create a table with the variables listed, the amounts, and measurements of heights the ball bounced, and have the students analyze and explain the data.

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These strategies, including the ones listed in October and November’s Blog, provide you with ideas that you can use when teaching ELs in your science/STEM classroom. Without a doubt, the science classroom is a place where students have the opportunity to practice language in its context while simultaneously learning English. The science classroom provides students with opportunities to learn English using multiple registers and modalities because ELs benefit from multimodal interactions and diverse opportunities to learn.

Which one of these strategies are you going to try in your classroom?

from TESOL Blog http://blog.tesol.org/stem-and-elt-4-science-strategies/