Shrinking Class Sizes...even if the schools can't/won't

Had some fantastic conversation with colleagues today about accommodations for ELLs, but the question kept coming up about how to provide accommodations for these students while still teaching the other students in the class. I suggested using the ESL Instructional Aides and Resource Teachers in the classroom in order to be more creative in our approach to teaching. Here are a couple of suggestions that came out of our conversation:

1. Teachers seem to often schedule their entire class for a day on Study Island (or another computer-based project where the students are largely working independently). The teacher's role is often to monitor the students on the computers or record the student results as they report in. If this is the case, then the suggestion is to schedule two days instead of one. Divide the class in half. Have half the students work on the computers or on the computer project. Work with the other half of the class in small group. On the second day, flip the groups. If someone needs to monitor/support the students on the computer, that's a great leadership opportunity for one of the students. If there is an instructional Aide in the class, that might be an opportunity for them, as well.

2. To get an even smaller class size, consider formalizing a group rotation format that will allow you to meet with groups of 10 (in the event that you have a class size of 30) so that you can target the needs of individual students. This will definitely require another adult for support, so it's most appropriate in classes where you have a collaborating teacher or a collaborating aide in the room. But here's how it would work:

The class would be divided into three groups. Group make-up, of course, is up to the teacher. It can be by ability level, language challenges, or heterogenous depending on the goal of the lesson. 

The class period would be split in half with groups rotating at the halfway point in the class. 

The whole class would be set up on a rotation that would look like this:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Monday
Group Red	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent
Group Blue	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B
Group Yellow	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A

So for the Red group, the first half of class on Monday would be spent in 20-25 minutes of direct instruction with Teacher A. At the halfway point in the class, they would move to Teacher B for some guided independent practice of the concept just taught. For the Blue group, they would start out Monday working on, perhaps, a computer program like Study Island or Fastt Math. Then, they would go to direct instruction with Teacher A. For the Yellow group, they would start out with Teacher B for the first half of the class and then go to the independent assignment for the second half of the class.

Some thoughts/ideas:
*.This rotation is set up so that every seventh instructional day is an assessment day, and then the teacher can reassign groups based on student need. 
*. The role of Teacher B may be intervention. It may be language instruction. It may be upping the ante for the students who seem to be breezing through the concept. That's part of the cool part of this rotation. 
*. Getting the students used to the rotation/having the grouping and the rotations posted on the classroom wall is key to the success of this idea. Otherwise, too much instructional time will be wasted in procedures. 

Summer

I'll be back. I am taking a much-needed break from thinking about school for the summer. This is an unusual move for me. Last year, I was thinking about the next school year before the school year even ended. I spent all summer preparing for a PD delivery for my co-workers. I stressed about the hiring of a new teacher in our building. I had to go to trainings. I was never not working.

This summer, I am very good at being on summer vacation. I went to one lunch meeting with some folks from work, but I really just listened. I went to one meeting with the representative from Scholastic so that we could purchase books for a new course that we are going to be running for our long-term ELLs, but then I walked out the door and back to summer vacation. My next work responsibility is on July 13th when I have a full day of PD related to the Seven Habits. I'm not thinking about it until I walk in the door.

I spent much of this last school year stressing over issues that were external to my own teaching, and I was not happy. The time off this summer has given me some time to rethink my thinking on that, and I'm working to get re-centered on where I know my skills, talents, and passions are. I am getting excited about the challenge of National Boards Certification work this year.

Just a quick summer hello. I'll be back here when my brain shifts back into school mode.

The Leader in Me... and ELLs

Our school is starting a new initiative next year called, "The Leader in Me." It is grounded in the "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," and it gives schools a common language for discussing leadership skills with our students. The program has been implemented in all the elementary schools in our district, and the middle school where I teach is exploring the program now with anticipated full implementation next year. 

I feel a collective eye-roll at times when I start coming at these things from an ELL perspective. I get it. 88% of our students are not ELLs. But 12% of our students are. And our current population of ELLs is coming to us from refugee camps in Thailand and Burundi and Somalia. These aren't kids who have been living in the United States for years and are still struggling with language acquisition. These are kids who have just arrived in the country and are just trying to get their cultural feet under them while struggling to maintain a hold on their home culture. Some are just stepping into a school for the first time. 

So I've got questions. Read this paragraph from The Leader in Me: 

"First, observe the universal nature of the leadership principles that are being taught at the schools. The principles are timeless and, in most cases, commonsensical. I did not invent the principles; they have been around for ages and are familiar to all cultures. So whether a student is stepping out of a sizable home in an upscale neighborhood or out of a thatched hut in a rain forest, the principles will enable them to make better choices today and improved their tomorrows" (13).

Honestly, this paragraph made me really uncomfortable. So I'm trying to explore why. I started a conversation about this at a faculty meeting last week, and a colleague suggested that all cultures value respect, and that is one of the things that this program teaches. At the time, I agreed. But I was still uncomfortable, and I went home that night and thought about it, and here's the thing: yes, all cultures value respect. But showing respect differs greatly from one culture to the next.

The book, Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands, is great for leadership reference. It explains how to do business in sixty different countries. Here's a bit from the book about doing business in Austria:

• Austrian executives are often very charming, relaxed, and unhurried. They do not usually respond positively to high-pressure tactics or limited-time opportunities. 
• Austrian management style emphasizes consensus-building and sophisticated "people-skills." Confrontation is to be avoided even if rules must be bent to do so.

However, in Argentina:

•  Argentinian negotiators have a reputation for toughness, yielding very little. Part of their immobility is due to the fact that they are generally averse to risk. 
• Personal relationships are far more important than corporate ones. Each time your company changes its representative, you will be starting again from scratch. New alliances must be built before business can proceed. 

Let's translate this to some things I have seen in my teaching. Students from Burma call their teachers, "Teacher." It is a term of respect. They would never call their teachers by their names at home. In the same way that I call my doctor, "Doctor" and not "Steve", they call their teachers by the title. And kids arrive in schools in the United States, and the rules shift on them. While it seems like a very small issue, it is an issue of formality and familiarity. Titles mean something. I'm still struck when my colleagues call me, "Mrs. Bowman" in our faculty meetings when no students are around. I want them to use the familiar, "Kim" when talking with me. I'm not comfortable with the formality. I think it makes building personal relationships more difficult. I've been asking people to call me by my first name for six years. Yet that's not always the norm for the culture of our school. So it's a tough shift. Imagine what that does for students when we ask them to use a more familiar term than what they've used their entire lives.

Or when having a disciplinary conversation with a student from Tanzania, it's nearly impossible to get them to make eye contact. How many times have I heard teachers say to students, "Look at me when I'm talking with you?" Who knows? But respect in the United States means that when I am speaking, you are making eye contact with me. Even if it makes you uncomfortable. Students have told me that they can be admonished for eye contact in their home countries. That level of disrespect can warrant a smack with a ruler in some places. And then they come to our schools, and we ask them to show us respect by doing something that has been ingrained in them as being disrespectful at home. And we wonder why their disciplinary issues leave them feeling all topsy-turvy?

The other day I was teaching, and a student from Tanzania wouldn't stop talking out of turn. I gave him a quick warning, and his apology was quick, as well. "My bad." Sigh. I stopped class for a teachable moment. I pointed out to him that "My bad" is an apology perhaps better used with friends than with teachers and that it isn't appropriate to apologize to a teacher using that phrase.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. A non-ELL student was coming out of the cafeteria. He had just picked up his yearbook at lunch, and he was walking down the wrong side of the hall with the book open, looking down at the pictures in the book, and not paying attention to where he was going. He ran right into me. The corner of his book caught my arm in just the right spot and left a three-inch scratch/slight cut on my arm. His reaction? "My bad." Sigh.

What's the takeaway? All of our students need a lesson in registers of language. But some kids are trying to negotiate appropriate responses from a different point of view. And we need to be sensitive to that as we implement any program in our school.

People are excited about this program. Me, too. I have a background in leadership development. I used to run a Challenge Course for a living, and I spent my days dangling from climbing towers and trying to get people to understand how they impacted the others in their group. I just am wary of implementing any program without considering the cultural biases that may be embedded in the program or in the people implementing it. I have questions. But I'm out of coffee this morning. Just want to start people thinking. And talking. If I can. 

TESOL 2012 Presentation

If you are looking for my TESOL Presentation on using iPads and iPods in the classroom, please see my links page.

TESOL--Nodding with Kate Kinsella

I am at TESOL in sunny Philadelphia this week. I seldom find myself nodding my head while listening to a speaker, but I've nodded my head at all three presentations I've seen by Dr. Kate Kinsella this week.

If you aren't familiar with her work, check it out. Below are some links:
Many resources from the Santa Clara County Office of Education

Or do a search for her name.

I had the opportunity to speak with her briefly at a dinner hosted by National Geographic, and I was excited by our conversation about needing to find a balance between theory and activity. When you are at a conference like TESOL, you see a broad range of presentations--many very theoretically based and many activity based. True pedagogy, though, is somewhere in the middle between those two, and I think that's where a lot of teachers are lacking balance. They want to ask, "But what am I going to do with the students?" without thinking a lot about why they are doing what they are doing. Teachers often feel as if keeping the students busy is a sign that learning is taking place. On the other hand, teachers who spend all their time thinking about theory don't think about lesson delivery. Balance.

She is working with multiple publishing companies, and I have seen three programs of hers, and there is a common thread running through all of them--rigor for students at all stages of language acquisition. There is also a structure to the teaching piece. I love her push to have teachers be more thoughtful about the language of their instruction.

So here are the three programs:

From Scholastic: English 3D
From National Geographic: Academic Vocabulary Toolkit
From Oxford: Oxford Picture Dictionary for the Content Areas

If I get some time to do a more complete review when I get back from TESOL, I'll put those up here and link them in the other section, but I'm excited about all of these series.

Vocabulary Relay...a Friday wrap-up activity

This week, I wanted to close the door, ignore the lost top of my desk, turn off the phone, and shut off the email. I finally got to Friday. Second period. And I was there. My class was wrapping up a grammar-based unit on comparative and superlative adjectives, and I needed a closing activity. Vocab relay. 

We had a set of adjectives that we had been studying as a class, so I took the pictures that were representative of those adjectives and made three copies of each picture. Each adjective was marked with an A, C, or S. A=Adjective. C=Comparative. S=Superlative. And then we took the pictures and mixed them up on three different tables in the back of the classroom. By the time we were done, there were a total of 69 words for the students to consider. In addition to mixing up the pictures, we also mixed up the numbers assigned to each picture. So on any given table with 23 numbers on it, a group might have 2, 38, 47, etc.

Students were divided into three teams at the front of the room. One person was chosen by each team to be a writer for the first round.  The other team members were designated as runners. (The writer would change in each subsequent round.)

The game would be played in four rounds of five minutes per round. Each team was assigned to a table for each round. This prevented traffic jams and kept the students focused. After the first three rounds of being assigned to a particular table, the groups had the fourth round to run free to any table.

Rules were simple:

• Students had to be back in their seats at the time that the bell on the timer rang.
• Students had to work in English.
• Only the writer could write. Other students in the group could not take the pencil (or an eraser) to correct.

I've used this activity before in several different ways, but this was the first time I'd done it with this vocabulary. As I was going around the back of the room making up the master list, I became acutely aware of all of the layers of thinking that had to go on in order to have success. The mixed up numbers required that I remember one thing. The vocabulary word itself required that I come up with another. And then the label A, C, or S required that I determine the proper spelling for the word even if I knew what the base word was. And I was just making the master list. My students had to figure all of that out and then go back and report it to someone else who was desperately trying to write it all down. 

After we played the four running rounds, I gave them four minutes in their small groups to check and correct their papers. 

Wrap-up: I took their group papers and checked them. I made a copy of each group's paper for each student in the group, and I gave those back out to the students with the incorrect responses marked. Then, individual students went back to the tables and corrected the work that they had missed during the game. This gave me a chance to see who was still overly reliant on their vocabulary notebook. 

A few great things:

The language generated by this activity is awesome. When the students are under pressure from the clock to communicate with one another, the target language is not just the vocabulary from the back of the room but also the language of negotiation with a writer who is trying to understand what they are trying to communicate.

It's a great assessment piece without the students feeling the pressure of formal assessment. After watching my students go through all the rounds, I knew who understood the grammar construction intellectually, and I knew who understood it and could use it orally. I also knew who only got the basic vocabulary and did not yet have the comparative/superlative concept. 

The kinesthetic side of things made for an awesome Friday morning activity. 

Schema Activation...and a little luck

We had CLIMBS day 4 on Thursday of this week, and it's all about schema activation in order to get the students to better connect with the content. There are three components to schema activation: developing vocabulary, building background, and linking concepts to prior learning. We hit the afternoon after a lot of conversation in the morning, and I put a slide up asking participants in the workshop to discuss ways to activate a student's schema related to the topic of probability in math class.

People talked in their table groups, and we came back together and came up with a healthy list of vocabulary that the students might need in order to be able to access this content. The problem, though, was that we hadn't come up with any activities that might help them to connect. I asked about that again, and crickets filled the room. Well, no, the sound of crickets filled the room. Well, maybe the sound of crickets chirping just filled my head. But the table conversations had all revolved around the vocabulary, it seems, but not around linking to prior learning or building background.

I suggested that we might consider the fact that different cultures view the concept of "luck" differently, and that might be a good jumping off place for activities. But I didn't really have a well-developed plan for responding to my own question, and that's a no-no in presenting. Sorry, friends.

So, of course, I've been stewing about it all weekend. I came up with these activities that I might use to start a unit on probability in math class:

1. Anticipatory Guide: put together a series of statements that students have to agree or disagree with related to luck and probability. Have them make choices and discuss with a partner before coming back to a classroom discussion to share out as a group.

2. Writing round robin: Have students write for three minutes on a time that they felt that they were lucky or unlucky and why they think that the luck/lack thereof occurred. Students can all share in a group of four, and then the instructor can ask each group to share out one story from their table.

3. Previewing video: Put together a video where a  hand is drawing colored marbles out of a bag. Stop the video. Ask students to work with a partner to make predictions about what color they think will come out of the bag next and why. Ask students to narrate the video without sound for their partner. Then, come together as a class and talk about the predictability of the next marble.

4. Have students read this article from Wikipedia. Make it a jigsaw so that each person has to report back to their group on the part of the article that they have read.

The idea is to have a four-skills activity that requires students to NOT work solo, to make connections to the content before having to wrestle with it, and to give the class a common language base from which to work. I'd like to give one of these a whirl, but I feel like probability is a ways off in the class I'm teaching this year. Any takers out there?

What worked today...what didn't.

"Mrs. Bowman, you are my people!" That's what one of my students said to me today when I tried to redirect him to question the people in his group instead of me by saying, "I don't know, buddy. I'm not in your group. Ask your people." There comes a really cool point in every school year when the language of many of my students has developed to the point that they can be intentionally funny. Love it. The other day, I asked someone to do something, and another student chimed in, "Me, too!", and a third chimed in, "Me, three!" And the whole class laughed. How cool is that?

After having read Walqui's book, I have started to think more about how to develop group interaction in the tasks I design for the class and how to mix in content instruction with language accuracy and language fluency. I also want to do my best to draw on all four skills during every class day in a very intentional way.

Some things that worked really well today:

Reinforcement of the content vocabulary: Students started studying the content vocabulary words (precipitation, evaporation, condensation, etc.) yesterday. I was surprised when even my strongest students weren't able to pronounce the vocabulary in any recognizable way. Hmmmm. So what worked? I found a song on the water cycle on a video, and I printed out the lyrics for the tune with the exception of the content words. I left those as blanks in the work, and the students listened on their individual computers.  The fact that it was a song made it easy for the students to sing along, and by the end of the activity, I had nearly perfect pronunciation of all the vocabulary words. Not so original, but it worked today.

Here's the water cycle song. It's not on youtube. That would go in the list of things that didn't work well today. YouTube wasn't working at school this morning, so I needed to find the video elsewhere. Slight panic.

Reinforcement of pronunciation: Found this app, Songify on Daniel Bemiss' blog. After the kids did the listening exercise (and singing exercise, really...wish I could have caught the off-key singing. Nothing is better than off-key singing in a room full of kids wearing headphones), they hopped on the iPads. This app allows users to read up to sixty seconds of text, and it converts it to a rap/r&b/"I'm so not cool that I don't even know the style of music" song. So the students got to listen to themselves reading the first stanza of the song from the video into their iPads. Pretty darn cool. (Free app, too!)

Production of academic language: In our afternoon task, I put the key vocabulary from the unit on the boards around the room. In their small groups, students were directed to write three sentences on the board that were related to the content vocabulary. They were supposed to produce something original. Then we rotated through and each group had to work on the next board. Below is a picture of what the three groups produced on one board:

Cool stuff about this activity? No notes. So the kids did all the negotiating in oral English to produce these sentences. No teacher intervention. There's some serious content vocabulary happening here! My favorite thing is the thinking beyond the class-delivered definitions. Gotta love the sentence about the bicycle!

One thing that didn't work well today:

Grouping: It's important to be intentional in grouping, and the groups I put together for the afternoon didn't work as I wanted them to. One had a funky boy/girl dynamic going on. And another had a girl who seemed to have the marker in my hand every time I turned around. Must remember to front-load activities with a little bit of a caveat to ensure everyone writes.

Next up: CLIMBS day 4 tomorrow. Version 3.0. Every time we run this workshop, we run it differently. Same content, different methods. I'm kind of fired up about tomorrow.

Language & Literacy website

Have you seen www.jeffzwiers.com?

If not, you should. Click on his "Resources" page, and you'll find an unbelievable number of resources for teaching all learners. He has a lot there on scaffolding academic language for ELLs. And he has a lot on sentence frames.

If teachers could get a little bit of training in how to use this information, it would help all learners in their classes.

Sentence frames + text to table

My class has had a science focus for the week: plants. Our language focuses (or foci for you Latin geeks out there) in addition to the vocabulary of plants (photosynthesis, germination, pollination) has been the language of comparison. I also wanted the kids to learn these "academic" words and be able to use them in conversation: diagram, label, match, title.  So we've asked students to understand what we called "both" sentences and "but" sentences when talking about plants. Yep, it was Venn diagram week in class.

The point, though, is to share here two things. First, sentence frames are a really, really, really useful tool for ELLs. And there seems to be some confusion about what sentence frames are. So here's what they are not: fill-in-the-blank sentences. A FITB sentence has one response. _______ is the President of the United States is a FITB. We only have one president, and you can only put one name in that blank for it to be correct. A sentence frame provides the language structure for an ELL to use. And while it might be context-specific, there should be multiple uses for that frame. A good example from a recent geography lesson in my class: _____________ is to the ____________ of __________. So students would fill in the first and last blank with place names and the middle blank with a directional word. "Kentucky is to the north of Tennessee." It has multiple uses for the kids, and the "glue" words don't change. "Mrs. B's class is to the left of Mr. White's class." "My locker is to the right of Aung Sung's."

Second, I wrote earlier about the text to table to text lesson, and I want to share the progression of that here. So here are a series of pictures from this week:

Working on some germination action here.

The lesson I'm showing pictures from is somewhere near the middle of the unit. The students had already studied a lot about the parts of a a plant and what each part does for the plant. We had also started comparing various plants (to practice using those plant parts) among other things. 

I wanted the students to be able to work with a more complex text by the end of the week, but we started with a sentence-level reading. Students had a blank Venn diagram, and I went through a text and pulled out sentences like, "Apples and peaches grow on trees." or "An apple has many seeds. A peach has one big seed." I then took those individual sentences and put them onto paper where I underlined the key text for them--the text that they would need to transfer to their Venn diagram paper. 

Above, you can see two of my students working on one of those sentence papers. They had to find the appropriate phrase and decide where it belonged on the paper--in the outer circles that indicated that the fruits are "different" or in the inner circle that indicates that they are the "same." 

After students had collected the phrases from the individual sentences in the back of the room, they had to turn those phrases back into comparison sentences using these sentence frames:

Both ___________ and _______________ _________________.

____________ _______________, but ____________ ____________.

Both apples and peaches grow on trees.

Apples have many seeds, but peaches have one big seed. 

Yes, this is close to what they had seen on the papers in the back of the room, but remember that they had only put the phrases on their paper--not the complete sentences. And the sentences were not always worded so closely to the sentence frames. So this was requiring them to re-think the information that they had seen in the back of the room. 

Later in the week, they read this two-page text:

Longman Science

And the kids put together this Venn diagram with minimal support from me (yes, the handwriting is mine--they told me what to write):

And then they took the information from the diagram and turned that into a paragraph comparing animals and plants.

One final use for sentence frames in the unit wrap-up for the week is shown below. I gave the students a list of options for the first blank because I wasn't sure they would know how to say what all we had done over the course of the week, and then I left the second blank open for them to fill in. All the students were able to produce responses that were strong and even used some of the academic language that we had studied this week. 

Scaffolding the Academic Success of Adolescent English Language Learners by Walqui and van Lier

The first chapter of this book is called, "A Pedagogy of Promise" followed by the subheading, "Helping Students Become What They Are Not Yet", and the text delivers both theories and methods based on this sense of optimistic pedagogy. While the focus of the title of the text is on English Language Learners, teachers of all students should consider implementing the instructional design outlined by the authors.

Vygotsky fans will get excited about this book because his theories are the root for the practice. The density of the first chapter made me want to read it twice and furiously take notes in the margin (although I had borrowed the copy, so I couldn't!). I'm a geek for theory. If you aren't a geek for theory, though, the first three chapters should be enough to convince you that the "sage on the stage" mentality of old-school teaching is not the most effective way to reach students.

The last three chapters of the book are dedicated to the actual practice of what they call "QTEL" or Quality Teaching for English Learners. These practices are rooted in these five principles quoted from p. 81 of the text (my computer is not letting me put quotes where I want them):

• Sustain academic rigor in teaching English learners
• Hold high expectations in teaching English learners
• Engage English learners in quality teacher and student interactions
• Sustain a language focus in teaching English learners
• Develop a quality curriculum for teaching English learners

 For me, personally, there were several lightbulb moments in the text. I need to spend more time in my class on the quality of my student interactions. I always struggle in that aspect. I want the kids to work together on tasks, but that is often reduced to one student doing the work and other students then copying from that one student. This book suggests several task-designs that would support more positive student participation.

I need to focus on giving students multiple opportunities to focus on both accuracy and fluency in the language. I use sentence frames a lot in my class, but that often limits what the students produce. And then there is a "right" or a "wrong" moment that doesn't support them thinking on their own. So I need to move beyond my focus on accuracy to giving them multiple opportunities for expression.

I also need to up my game in terms of academic rigor for the students. If I can get the first two pieces above in order, then I can certainly increase the rigor for the students. The expectations are high in my class. Often, the academic rigor is high, as well. But I think I can be doing more in terms of using the students' background to improve their opportunities to interact with higher-level thinking activities and to solicit the language needed to work through those activities.

There is a very clear, three-step design to units of study. The first step is to prepare the learners, the second is the scaffolding of their interaction with a text, and the third is in extending the ideas of the text. (That's the part that I personally loved!) Lessons are objective based. There are plenty of examples of "real-life" teachers using these methods, and teachers should walk away with some ideas that they can use in their classroom immediately.

iPod Dictations--a twist on an old favorite

Whenever I've done dictations with classes in the past, I've always had to say a hundred times, "I'm only going to say the sentence twice. Two times. I promise, I'll repeat it. And I'll say all the sentences again at the end. I promise. No, I won't go back and do number two. Just stay with me. Please." Yes, a hundred times. And that's for a four-sentence dictation. Tedious.

But I've figured out a way to use the iPods to give dictation a new twist.

First, I write a dictation that is ten sentences in length. Those ten sentences have two key components to them: the content vocabulary that we are studying in class and sentence structure that is familiar to the students. So the connecting vocabulary or verb tenses need to make sense and be familiar based on what we have been studying. At the end of a recent unit on the structure of the United States government, I had a dictation for the students that had sentences like, "The President is in the Executive branch at the National level," and we had studied the key words president, executive, and national. The frame, then, was:

The ___________ is in the ____________ branch at the ____________ level.

There were some other frames mixed in that we had used and studied along with content vocabulary from the unit.

Next, I record myself reading the dictation to the students using iMovie/iSight on my laptop computer. I repeat each numbered sentence twice. I publish the dictation out to iTunes, and it shows up ready to be loaded on the student iPods.

The students take the iPods and listen to my dictation and write down the numbered sentences. For some students, a word bank is a helpful tool for the content vocabulary. I try not to scaffold any of the sight words for them because the goal is for them to have absorbed the sentence frames at this point. After the students have written down the sentences, I have them turn in their written copy to me. This gives me a chance to assess both listening and writing/spelling issues.

For the reading/speaking portion, the students then switch on the camera on the iPod and read the dictation back to me. I give them a typed copy of the dictation to read to me so that if they made any errors in their writing, they don't transfer those errors over into the reading/speaking exercise. I ask the kids to read each sentence twice, and I listen for the best example from each piece. For assessment on this piece, I listen to the students' recordings and draw a line under any of the words that I consider to be major errors--errors that impede understanding. And I circle any specific issues that we are working on in class (right now, my students' focus is on hitting the word endings as they tend to truncate them.) In terms of scoring, I take a point off for every two major errors and 1 point off for every four issues circled.

While I haven't always been a fan of dictation in the past, there's something about adding the iPod into the mix that makes this seem pretty great. First, it allows students to self-pace. They can listen to the sentence as many times as they'd like to train their ear. Second, they can use the recorded dictation to help them practice for their reading. And again, they can hit on it as many times as they'd like. Finally, they can record themselves as many times as they'd like until they are satisfied with their own recording. This assessment is about accuracy, and it's great for the kids to pay attention to detail in their speaking periodically. And really finally (I already used finally), it's easy to give feedback because you have a recording. The kids can re-listen to their recording with your comments in hand and learn from the assessment.

From text to table to text

It's funny when I start doing something in my class that I think is really working, and I get really excited about it, and I want to write about it, and then I realize that someone else already has. The cool thing is that the people who did, Levine and McCloskey say that what I'm doing is a best practice. The not as cool thing is that if I'd just finished reading their book that I've been toting around with me forever, I would have figured this out a lot sooner and been doing it in my classes.

So here's the thing that's been working in classes for us in the last couple of weeks (that I now know is a Best Practice (I like labeling that with capital letters because it makes it seem much more official). I'll try to post some pictures of student work if I remember to pull out the camera when I get back to work on Tuesday.

I call it "from text to table to text." And here's the thing. I have to preface this by saying that I hate graphic organizers. I don't hate them as a teaching tool, but I hate them for my own personal use. I skip over graphs and diagrams in books that I'm reading. I can't remember the last time I willfully pulled out a paper with a bunch of funny boxes on it to help organize my thinking (and I'm wondering how many of you do?) or my understanding of a reading. Yet, they seem to work with my kids. Sigh.

The text: I choose a text related to the topic we are studying and at the appropriate language level for the students. Two examples this week were a text on symbols of the United States government and the branches of the United States government.

The table: I design a graphic organizer that will correlate with the information in the text but that also requires the students to add their own thoughts into the mix. This is important. I want the kids to not only regurgitate the information from a text that they have read, but I want them to make a personal connection with it. For both of the above examples, the students had to find information in the text to fill out the chart. For the branches of government text, they had to tell me who is in the branch, what the branch does, how many people are in the branch, and where the branch is (which building). For the student part of the mix, I asked them to think about something that we had done in class that was like the duties of that branch, and I gave them a sentence starter so that they could show me they understood the connection. So, for example, we had in our table, "The Legislative Branch makes laws." I gave them the sentence starter, "In our class, we were like the legislative branch when we ____________." and had the kids fill in the rest from an activity that we had done that week.

The text again: Once the kids have filled in their table from the text, we then use a paragraph form to turn their table back into writing. For the branches of government activity, I modeled the first paragraph for them using the information from my chart on the executive branch. Then, I had the students walk me through the second branch together using that form. Then, the students had to take the information from their chart and the paragraph form to independently practice creating their own paragraph.

So it's a Best Practice. Good for me. Better for our students, though, that we are finding a way to get them to do extended academic writing despite the fact that they are level 1/2 writers.

Taking the words right out of someone else's mouth...

I don't want my teaching blog to become a series of posts written by other people, but the words of this teacher really struck me. I came to public education late in the game. I was working in private schools for a while before moving to the school where I currently teach, and I honestly had no idea that 100% proficiency by 2014 was not only a goal but a standard teachers were being held to until a faculty meeting early in my first year. I remember being quite dumbfounded when someone brought it up, then laughing out loud. And I remember finding it really strange that no one else was laughing out loud, as well. I still find it strange.

What David Reber writes below articulates my frustrations with the conversation about public education better than I could.

In what other profession...

August 27th, 2010 by David Reber

I’m going to step out of my usual third-person writing voice for a moment. As a parent I received a letter last week from the Kansas State Board of Education, informing me that my children’s school district had been placed on “improvement” status for failing to meet “adequate yearly progress” under the No Child Left Behind law.

I thought it ironic that our schools were judged inadequate by people who haven’t set foot in them, so I wrote a letter to my local newspaper. Predictably, my letter elicited a deluge of comments in the paper’s online forum. Many remarks came from armchair educators and anti-teacher, anti-public school evangelists quick to discredit anything I had to say under the rationale of “he’s a teacher.” What could a teacher possibly know about education?

Countless arguments used to denigrate public school teachers begin with the phrase “in what other profession….” and conclude with practically anything the anti-teacher pundits find offensive about public education. Due process and collective bargaining are favorite targets, as are the erroneous but tightly held beliefs that teachers are under-worked, over-paid (earning million-dollar pensions), and not accountable for anything.

In what other profession, indeed.

In what other profession are the licensed professionals considered the LEAST knowledgeable about the job? You seldom if ever hear “that guy couldn’t possibly know a thing about law enforcement – he’s a police officer”, or “she can’t be trusted talking about fire safety – she’s a firefighter.”

In what other profession is experience viewed as a liability rather than an asset? You won’t find a contractor advertising “choose me – I’ve never done this before”, and your doctor won’t recommend a surgeon on the basis of her “having very little experience with the procedure”.

In what other profession is the desire for competitive salary viewed as proof of callous indifference towards the job? You won’t hear many say “that lawyer charges a lot of money, she obviously doesn’t care about her clients”, or “that coach earns millions – clearly he doesn’t care about the team.”

But look around. You’ll find droves of armchair educators who summarily dismiss any statement about education when it comes from a teacher. Likewise, it’s easy to find politicians, pundits, and profiteers who refer to our veteran teachers as ineffective, overpriced “dead wood”. Only the rookies could possibly be any good, or worth the food-stamp-eligible starting salaries we pay them.

And if teachers dare ask for a raise, this is taken by many as clear evidence that teachers don’t give a porcupine’s posterior about kids. In fact, some say if teachers really cared about their students they wouldinsist on earning LESS money.

If that entire attitude weren’t bad enough, what other profession is legally held to PERFECTION by 2014? Are police required to eliminate all crime? Are firefighters required to eliminate all fires? Are doctorsrequired to cure all patients? Are lawyers required to win all cases? Are coaches required to win all games? Of course they aren’t.

For no other profession do so many outsiders refuse to accept the realities of an imperfect world. Crime happens. Fire happens. Illness happens. As for lawyers and coaches, where there’s a winner there must also be a loser. People accept all these realities, until they apply to public education.

If a poverty-stricken, drug-addled meth-cooker burns down his house, suffers third degree burns, and then goes to jail; we don’t blame the police, fire department, doctors, and defense attorneys for his predicament. But if that kid doesn’t graduate high school, it’s clearly the teacher’s fault.

And if someone – anyone - tries to tell you otherwise; don’t listen. He must be a teacher.