ENDR 557 Discuss the importance of varying instructional approaches when teaching content to students.

How does instructional variation contribute to planning for differentiation in the classroom? I think it is extremely important to vary instructional approaches because that demonstrates respect for all the different types of learners in our classroom. For example, some may learn best by listening to lectures, while others may learn best by handling objects and or observing visuals. Additionally, differentiated instruction can be a way of acknowledging different student backgrounds. This is particularly relevant in the context of ESOL, because we will need to adapt our classroom adjectives to meet the language skills of ELLs in our classroom. This may mean that we need to spend a little extra time with these students and come up with different ways of assessing their learning. I think we have learned about several different approaches for accessing prior knowledge and assessing what students have learned that can be easily tailored to meet the needs of diverse groups of students. For example, the KWL chart is a great tool for accomplishing both of those goals while reinforcing the idea that it is okay not to know all the facts right away and that asking questions is an important part of good academic practice. Explain how teachers engage in the role of mediation to contextualize ELL student learning while taking into consideration each students zone of proximal development. In my experiences as a learner and student teacher, I have observed that sometimes teachers become so preoccupied with making sure assessments are not too challenging for students who are struggling, that sometimes we forget to make sure that the types of activities and assessments we are planning for them are actually relevant to their lives. For example, I have students in my current fifth grade classroom that are reading at about a second grade level. While the teacher has made sure to provide them with a reading textbook that is at their level, Ive noticed that the stories in this book do not interest the students at all. Usually, the content of these stories seems very juvenile or basic compared to the kinds of interests my fifth graders have. As a result, they have little enthusiasm to read the story or respond to the reading. In short, the students are having difficulty contextualizing or relating to what they read in this book. This means that these students may end up staying at their current level or falling further behind because they are not motivated to move forward. I wish that I could spend more time with these students to find out what truly interests them, and then find books on those topics that are at their level. Students who are struggling should not have to compromise interest and enthusiasm for a topic just because the text is a bit more simplistic. While they may not be able to navigate this problem on their own, adults should be able to guide them toward picking a leveled book that theyll also find interesting. In this way, we can best access that area in the zone of proximal development where learning occurs. Schumanns Acculturation Model suggests many sociocultural factors that contribute to second language acquisition. Discuss how classroom teachers and school communities can support the acculturation process for a diverse community of students. I think schools can definitely build on the concept of cultural congruence by ensuring that all teachers

receive training in cultural competence. In other words, teachers should be aware of the different cultural backgrounds their students bring to the classroom. In this way, they will be able to make the transition process much easier for kids who are struggling to adjust to a new language, country, school, etc. Going along with this, I think it is also important for teachers to provide students with explicit instructions and routines, so that students can settle into a predictable pattern of activity in the classroom. When students grow comfortable with a routine, they will most likely find it easier to focus on academic instruction. Compare and contrast comprehensible input and comprehensible output. Examine the importance of both in the acquisition of a second language. Comprehensible input is knowledge that is received and understood. Output is speaking and writing that doesnt contribute to acquisition but may lead to cognitive development. The two can be seen as having a symbiotic relationship: output can help students learn academic content and engage in conversation with others, which ultimately leads to more input and therefore, acquisition. Comprehensible input is vital to the success of ELLs because if they receive information that is either too challenging or not challenging enough, they will not continue to learn. Output is also very important in language acquisition because it is the act of producing that cements what students have learned in the classroom. Additionally, it harkens back to that idea of social learning, which allows ELLs to learn from their peers. Explain how teachers actions can influence the social-emotional and academic achievement of ELL students. Include any anonymous observations youve made during your Clinical 2 visits this week. I think a teachers actions can sometimes be more important than their words. Our nonverbal signals, even those we may be unaware of, can make a huge difference in how our students perceive us. Simply smiling while interacting with students can give them a better sense of our humanity and help them relate to us better. I have noticed that my Clinical 2 teacher is a very good example of this. She is very cheerful and enthusiastic with the students, even at the very end of the day when the students start to get tired and less responsive. Positive reinforcement also makes a huge difference. Our teacher told us that she does not like to scold students for doing something wrong. Instead, she asks them to do whatever it was they are supposed to be doing (i.e. Please walk quietly instead of Stop running!) Ive also noticed that she does not raise her voice in the classroom. If she needs to make an announcement, she will hold up her hand and wait for students to be quiet. The students have this routine memorized and respond very well. I think this soft-spoken yet firm approach helps students to feel more calm in their learning environment, which could in turn lower their affective filters. Describe the attributes of an intercultural school. If you were a teacher at this school, describe and discuss your classroom community. Intercultural schools incorporate students languages and cultures into the curriculum and involve minority community members, like parents, in the school. Additionally, they implement transformative

pedagogy, which means that teachers help students to make connections between curriculum content and their own experiences. This, in turn, facilitates discussions about broader social issues that affect the students lives and how they might transform their social realities through social action. Finally, intercultural schools also design assessments that allow all students, including ELL students, to demonstrate what they have learned. This may mean that a student can show what they have learned in their heritage language. If I taught at such a school, I would make sure to have some instruction and/or course materials in my ELLs first languages. Additionally, I think it would be important to have artifacts and posters around the room that reflected their language and culture. Id also love to be able to talk about the cultures represented in my classroom, perhaps as social studies or literature lessons. I could make these lessons even richer by bringing in realia or food. I think I would be most excited about the idea of using my curriculum to get students connected to social issues that are relevant to their lives. This could be facilitated by looking at current events, taking a field trip, or having guest speakers. I would want students to see that they can take an active role in issues that may feel they have no control over. By encouraging this kind of engagement, we may be helping to lay the foundation for a world that is more socially just. Discuss the importance of understanding the different types of ELL students in your classroom? How does differentiating between your SEL, LTEL, and LFS students inform your instructional decisions? I am glad that we are learning about these distinctions among ELLs. Since starting this program, I have wished that there was better language to describe the English language learners in our classes. In my opinion, the term English Language Learner is much too broad. Technically, even people who speak English as their native language are English Language Learners. We do not stop learning English just because it is our native language. Even now, as an adult who majored in English in college, I am still learning about how the English language works. I also think it is important to make distinctions such as SEL, LTEL, and LFS within ELL student populations because we cannot assume that every ELL has the same learning needs. It seems unfair to vary instruction for our class as a whole but not for ELLs. It is certainly not equitable to treat all nonnative speakers the same, especially when they come from different cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, different types of ELLs made need different types of scaffolding, depending on what prior knowledge they have. Considering Cummins quadrants, what instructional planning decisions will you make to ensure cognitively demanding learning experiences for your ELL students? Discuss how Cummins suggests building academic language in the classroom. During your Clinical Field Experience this week, use Cummins Quadrants to rate some of the instructional activities you observe. Share one example later in the week on the forum. After observing Cummins Quadrants, I would say that it is better for early ESOL instruction to be more context-embedded, so that students can gradually grow comfortable using the language. It is important to challenge students. However, we also need to make sure that they do not feel

overwhelmed and have several opportunities to succeed so that they become more confident in their own language abilities. As their confidence and abilities continue to develop, we can encourage them to be more independent by slowly reducing context. With the reduction of context, we make learning experiences more cognitively demanding. Cummins suggests that we build academic language in the classroom by thoroughly contextualizing instruction and activities. With added context, students have the opportunity to learn and use more content-specific vocabulary. Furthermore, by using pictures or hands-on activities to provide context, students will be able to use new vocabulary in meaningful ways. In my clinical II classroom I have observed this sort of structure in our Literacy Squared lessons. My mentor teacher almost always provides our students with sentence stems before they start an oral discussion or writing assignment. Additionally, we do Dictados everyday (I read, You read, We read). These methods dont just help students learn new vocabulary, but also demonstrate how to incorporate that vocabulary into written and oral communication. That structure will help students grow comfortable using that vocabulary in and out of the classroom until they are able to construct meaning more independently. Discuss how you might implement opportunities for ELL students to engage in academic discourse in your current clinical placement. Also, thinking about your own future classroom, how might you plan for collaboration experiences that build academic language? I think a great way to get ELL students engaged in academic discourse is to provide sentence structures and build routines for speaking and writing. Using sentence structures helps students learn what kind of language is acceptable in different situations so that they can eventually do it on their own. Similarly, establishing routines (i.e. name and date always go in the right hand corner of my paper, always indent when starting a new paragraph) will provide good foundational knowledge so that students can spend more of their energy thinking about more subject-specific content. Collaboration with peers is also a key ingredient in building academic discourse and language. Students need the opportunity to experiment with language and make mistakes in front of their peers, not just their teacher. Students can learn from the successes and mistakes of their peers. Good collaboration experiences that build academic language include, Think Pair Share, learning centers with group work, and classroom KWL charts. These activities are very versatile and leave plenty of wiggle room for vocabulary scaffolding. Middle/high only: When planning instruction, how might you incorporate a variety of books to support your content area of instruction and engage ELL learners? Oh my goodness, the possibilities are endless for an English Language Arts classroomthat is why I LOVE my subject area JIt is important to have a wide variety of genres available so that students can choose books that truly interest them. If they arent interested in any of the books we read, they wont read, or at the very least they wont enjoy reading. I also want to have a variety of levels in my classroom library, so that students can pick books that arent too easy or too hard, but get right at their zones of proximal development. Finally, I think it is important to have books that speak to my students

cultural backgrounds. For example, for my Mexican American students, it would be nice to include books by Chican@ authors, like Rudolfo Anaya or Amada Irma Prez. For students from migrant families, we may bring in books that speak to migrant worker experiences, like Esperanza Rising or The Circuit. I think this will help them build personal connections to literature and understand that reading (and writing) is a good way to reflect on the challenges they may face in their personal lives. Textbooks are often a daunting experience for many students, especially ELL students and struggling readers. Students need to be taught about this type of reading as well as other genres of reading. Please share a strategy for helping ELL students navigate a text or non-fiction book. Middle/High only: How will you prepare your students for reading specifically within your content area? Textbooks are still daunting for me! I think it would be helpful for us to textbook scavenger hunts with our students before they attempt any reading assignments. I remember doing these in elementary school, middle school, and high school. We would get worksheets with several questions to assess if we knew how to find and use to the table of contents, the chapter summaries, bolded key words and definitions, the index, and other features that were more specific to each textbook. Within my subject area (English Language Arts) I think most textbooks will be reading textbooks with short stories and practice questions at the end of each story. I think the key strategy with these types of books is to not rely too much on the pre-written questions or get into the pattern of read and respond, because that will get old with students really quickly. Literature textbooks are really helpful in that they are shared texts. Students who have the same level of textbook can read to one another the listeners follow along in their own copies. Having the same text will also lead to richer discussions because students can compare and contrast what they each got out of the reading. Consider a content area/subject of particular interest to you, how might you model and teach academic writing specific to this content area/subject to ELL students? How might you contextualize the writing to make it purposeful, relevant, and meaningful for these students? Well, by now all of you know that my favorite content area is English Language Arts. I will definitely be doing a writers workshop in my future classroom, no matter what grade level Im teaching. I will use mentor texts alongside the writers workshops so the writing will be informed by the characters, themes, styles, etc of the texts. The mentor text will also help me highlight vocabulary and build good sentence frames that I can model with students before they begin the workshop process. In order to make the process more relevant for students, I would try to choose books that students could relate to. While mentor texts are the most obvious way to model and guide student writing, we can also use pictures, videos, field trips, and much more to provide a context and access prior knowledge. Discuss evidence of scaffolded writing instruction present for ELL students in your current placement. Explain how these supports make academic writing more attainable for ELLs.

I think the science lessons that my partner I have taught in our 3rd grade bilingual classroom have been good examples of how one can scaffold writing instruction and make academic writing more attainable. As Ive mentioned before in my posts, we taught a lesson in which students had to put together a moldy bread experiment and come up with testable questions, record observations, and draw conclusions. Before we even started the experiment, we spent time familiarizing the students with the academic language we would be using, like observation, prediction, hypothesis, and testable question. Then we practiced using that language with sentence frames like I observe that and I predict that and modeled them up on the board. My mentor teacher calls this shared writing because the entire class practices using the sentence frames with the same examples before starting on their individual or small group work. Finally, they had a chance to discuss what they wrote with a partner and with the entire class. For one of our observation days, we even had the students draw a picture of what they observed in addition to their writing, and it was great to see how much they enjoyed expressing themselves in that way. Today, as we did our wrap up, our students asked When are we going to do another project? We want to do another one! Success! :) ENDR 558 Discuss the importance of Sheltered Instruction, such as SIOP, for the language acquisition and content learning of ELL students. According to Echeverria et al, the foundation of school success is academic literacy in English...[because] without proficient oral and written English language skills, students are hard pressed tot learn and demonstrate their knowledge of mathematical reasoning, science skills, social studies concepts, and so forth (12). The authors go on to detail how effectively the SIOP model builds this foundational piece of English language acquisition. SIOP accomplishes this through the meaningful use [of language] and interaction. But how do we, as future educators, know what actions we must take to make language meaningful and interactive in our classrooms? The text breaks it down into the following components: Language and content objectives should be woven into the curriculum The content should be made comprehensible in a variety of ways (visual aids, modeling, graphic organizers, peer tutoring, native language support, etc.) The teacher should foster specific connections between the content and students' prior knowledge/experiences Teachers should pay attention to students' cultural backgrounds and learning styles Offer a variety of ways for students to demonstrate understanding Bring in additional materials to supplement that academic text (which will also help teachers reach students at different proficiency levels in English) By incorporating these strategies into regular practice, teachers can make their classrooms more comfortable and productive environments. In facilitating the development of academic literacy, teachers will set their students up for continued success in all subject areas.

While in your clinical placement this week, evaluate the learning environment. How does the learning environment meet the needs of the ELL students? How might you enhance the learning environment to better meet the needs of your students? Because I just received my placement today, I have not yet had a chance to visit the classroom I will be in. However, I was particularly interested in some of the ELL strategies I saw in an elementary classroom I observed today for my Inquiry and Methods class. This class was an ESOL classroom, but not dual language. I noticed that the environment was rich with visuals and text, but that what was displayed was actively used or seemed very purposeful. For example, the teacher had posted anchor charts for reading, writing, and math workshops. I thought these anchor charts were particularly helpful to ELL students because they were simple and visually oriented. There were enough words to clearly communicate the process without confusing students, arrows connecting each stage, and visuals associated with each stage. However, I thought that anchor charts would be even more effective if they were more interactive. When I was observing in another classroom, I saw that the teacher had created anchor charts that had pockets at each stage. Students could place a popsicle stick with their name written on it in different pockets as they moved from stage to stage. I like this idea because it incorporated tactile learning, and would further cement procedural knowledge for ELL students. Scaffolding provides ELL students with Strategies provide ELL students with Scaffolding and strategies allow ELL students to access the content equitably Discuss a SIOP strategy that can be impactful for ELL students in your content area. Scaffolding provides ELL students with varied ways of expressing their knowledge in a supportive context. Rather than getting all students from point A to point B in the same way, scaffolding creates check points for students to demonstrate that they are understanding the concepts before they move on to higher-stakes tasks. Strategies provide ELL students with the basic skills and encouragement they need to move forward. For example, paraphrasing, a type of verbal scaffolding, validates students' individuality and creativity but can also be an opportunity for teachers to gently guide students in selfcorrection. If students realize that the teacher's version of what they said is not what they meant to say, they will think of another, more clear way to say it. Scaffolding and strategies allow ELL students to access the content equitably because it breaks down the content language into more understandable forms. For example, in my former 3rd grade bilingual classroom, the teacher would provide sentence stems, often in both English and Spanish, for almost every activity where students' progress was dependent upon content specific language. When we were teaching the scientific inquiry process, we demonstrated the meaning of observation by accessing students' prior knowledge, then we had them make observations about their own science experiments using the following sentence stems: I observe that my science experiment..., This observation makes me think...., One question I have is....These sentence stems were helpful in eliciting richer responses than students would have generated had they been worried about generating entire sentences on their own. A SIOP strategy that has proved to be impactful in my Spanish Language Arts classroom is thinking aloud. My teacher and I often use this when we are reading our class novel, El Dador (The Giver). We begin by showing students how to set up their notes (headings, subheadings, etc), then start to read a chapter out loud. As we read, we periodically pause and ask guiding questions like I wonder what the hook was in that opening paragraph? What would I have written in my notes so far? Did I find any

evidence for the community heading in our themes section? This helps keeps students engaged because we are taking on the mindset that we don't have all the answers, so they don't feel like are searching for the one right answer or just parroting back the reading. Integrating language and content across language skills For example, Discuss how the content lesson in your SIOP content text integrated language and content. Integrating language and content across language skills is very important to building academic language. In order for ELL students to truly comprehend the content we are teaching, we must make sure that they understand the language they need to get there. As I mentioned in my previous post, it was important in teaching my former 3rd graders a science lesson to make sure that they understood how to use the word observation before we asked them to record observations of their experiments. Similarly, it is important for my 7th Spanish Language Arts students to understand the meaning of comunidad, rituales, and normas (community, rituals, norms) before we engage in a discussion of El Dador (The Giver.) Students need to truly understand the components of a community before they can understand and answer the question What type of community does the main character live in? It is crucial to scaffold this vocabulary and give examples prior to reading if we know that we will be assessing students on how well they can describe community within the context of the novel. Learning strategies and collaborative learning support higher order thinking What scaffolds and strategies can you implement to encourage MS/HS ELL students to elaborate on their ideas? Discuss SIOP interaction activities that can support learning in your content area. Learning strategies and collaborative learning support higher order thinking can help students become more aware of their own learning. If the teacher effectively scaffolds questions and material that promote higher order thinking, students will begin to learn what kinds of questions they need to construct meaning when reading and throughout the learning process. While students may not be able to distinguish the nuances between remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating, we can teach them to determine when a question is literal or inferential. A scaffold/strategy that I've used and will continue to use to encourage my middle school students to elaborate on their ideas is modeling the process of asking questions to construct meaning by thinking aloud. Seeing me making myself vulnerable through asking questions may encourage my students to ask their own, even if they are initially afraid of asking a stupid question. After a while, students may be able to see a pattern emerging that helps them determine when to ask certain types of questions. Another strategy I use is giving students time to work in small groups and walking around to provide feedback before students are required to present their ideas to the rest of the class. This is a great way to build background when introducing a new concept because students have a chance to share their ideas and learn from the peers in a less threatening setting. This also gives me time to walk around to ask questions and give feedback in ways that are more specific to my students needs. I get to formatively assess the whole class, but in a way that is much more manageable and accurate.