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.

An addendum...fight or flight part 2

Cannondale didn't call. I went through with the training. I didn't vomit on my shoes. I did have technology challenges. I witnessed some of the most amazing conversation I have ever seen at this training.

So here's the thing. I work with incredible teachers. On Wednesday, I don't think I knew that. I knew about individuals in the building--there are a lot of people in my building whom I really admire. But I don't think I viewed our staff as a whole that way. I felt like people didn't know me, and I felt like I had a good sense of who a lot of them are. I was definitely wrong on the latter point. And on the earlier one, I think they know me now. By day 2, I was loosening up to the point that I felt like people were really seeing me.

It makes me wonder how often we get pigeon-holded into our classrooms and then pigeon-hole other teachers into what we think is their space. And the school year is about to start, and I know my space is in the back corner, but maybe my open door will feel even a little more open now.

Fight or flight... the courage to teach

In my dreams, I am really fast. Smoking fast. In the water, on the bike, on the run.
In reality, I am anything but. I'm pretty fast in the water--I finished in the top 20% at both the Ironman races that I did. I can get there on the bike with proper training. But I'm a slow and steady kind of gal on the run, and that isn't going to change.  If Cannondale called me tomorrow and said, "Hey, we just happen to be looking for a slow runner with average cycling skills and a decent swim stroke to round out our team of sponsored triathletes," I would quit my job and train full time. I love the idea of being paid to sweat.

Why am I writing about this on a teaching blog?
My fight or flight reaction is kicking in. I'm under pressure (somewhat self-imposed, somewhat externally applied). Options: wrestle the gorilla or start writing letters to Cannondale.

The school year officially starts in two weeks. Two weeks from today, actually. And I have only two students currently enrolled in my class. There will be more, but we have to wait for the students to get their immunizations in order and such. So for this part, it's best to just breathe and wait and know that the seats will be filled and the school year will roll forward.

The pressure is in the training that I'm delivering to our staff this week Thursday and Friday. With permission from WIDA, we are using some components of the CLIMBS course training to train our staff how to better work with our ELLs. I have put incredible care into developing the materials for these two days of training. I've spent hours thinking about transitions between activities and grouping and how to best emphasize the most salient points. I've woken up in the middle of the night thinking of ways to convince the staff that this work is important and worthwhile. I've written, rewritten, noted, printed, copied, and collated papers for the whole staff.

I pulled Parker J. Palmer's book, The Courage To Teach  down off my shelf again and started to read the first page, and I was struck by his own reflection after a bad first day of teaching that it might not be too late for him to find a new career. I didn't read beyond that first page. I just was caught up in the idea that it probably isn't all that uncommon for people faced with challenges to look for an out, no matter how far of a stretch that out might be. (The chances of Cannondale calling me between now and Thursday are not very strong.)

So here is the thing about doing a training like this. It is like wrestling a gorilla. The difference here is that sometimes the gorilla is like a personal trainer that you hire to put you through your workout and sometimes the gorilla is a bit of a wildcard. I feel like I'm not sure which gorilla will be showing up on Thursday and Friday, and that is where my anxiety comes from.

Courage, KKB. Courage. (And keep those fingers crossed for Cannondale's call.)

The end of one year runs into the beginning of another...

Funny how that works. We have been out of school for two weeks. I'm not sure what it is that is preventing me from shifting into summer vacation mode, but my brain refuses to power down. Things I'm wrestling with right now:

• A change in leadership. The principal whom I absolutely adore and admire is retiring as of June 30th, and I was on the committee to select his replacement. That went well, and I'm really excited about the person that we have taking over the helm. I am interested to see what direction the upcoming year will take for our school. (And I will miss a person whom I have come to consider a friend.) Also, the ESL district boss (I don't know a better way to put it...she has so many jobs, but in my world that's her role) who has been an amazing person to work for is retiring at the end of July. I have no idea who will be trying to fill her shoes, but there will possibly be some changes in the coming year. (And I will miss another person whom I admire greatly and have come to consider a friend.) 
• A change in staffing. My friend and fellow ESL teacher is headed out on an adventure to China for at least the next two years. Our enrollment is up. So we are hiring not one but two ESL teachers to work in the building next year. And while historically that end of the building has been separate from what I'm doing on my end of the building, I'm going to have to be more involved in that other classroom next year. I'm excited about the possibilities.
• KTIP. I'm going to be trained this summer to be a resource teacher for KTIP. It's a Kentucky program to help first-year teachers reflect on their teaching practices and determine if they have the tools to be successful in the classroom. I went through it a few years ago. This upcoming year, I think I'm going to be a resource teacher for one of the new ESL teachers. 
• Summer training. We are doing a training for our whole staff on working with ELL students and making appropriate modifications on July 28 and 29 at our school. This is on my mind ALL the time. I have been doing a similar training at the district level for the last two years, but I want to do something outstanding for our teachers. I hope to inspire them to work with the new ESL teachers to better support our ELLs.
• Technology. The ipads and ipods are always on my mind in terms of how to best use them. I didn't get a lot of the info off of them for the summer for storage, and I have to figure out the best way to store the videos that my students made before cleaning those off for next year's kids. We are also about to start designing our own web pages as teachers in the district, and I'm excited for that. I have a class blog, but I'd really like to have more that is student friendly. So as soon as I get the green light, I'm going to start working on a class web page this summer. 
• CLIMBS. I am hoping that with the change in leadership we will continue to offer this at the district level. I LOVE doing that training even though it's really stressful. I love the challenge of it, and I have enjoyed revising it again and again to every time I've worked on it. I love working with teachers from other schools. 
• National Board Certification. I'm doing the Take One version of that this year. That's just one part of the four part National Board process. I'm excited about it, but I know it will be a time commitment. I'm not worried about it... it's just sitting there in the back of my head. 
• Random thinking. Revising my units for the beginning of the school year. Doing work with System 44 to improve comprehension for my students. Painting a wall in my classroom that always gets marked up with pens and pencils. Sharing the technology with the new teachers (I have to learn to play nice in the sandbox.) Why the heck can't KYTESOL get their act together and post their call for proposals on the website? Getting involved with changing the testing system for ELLs. 

I guess that's it for this morning. No deep thoughts here. Just a dumping ground for the way my brain is working this summer. All this thinking, but I don't think I'm getting a lot done. Time for a second cup of coffee. 

blah blah blah... teacher talk time

I woke up this morning thinking about teacher talk time. Literally. I was actually dreaming about an action research project, and my husband woke me up, and my brain was spinning with ideas about how to get this done. My CLIMBS partner and I are going to be delivering a PD to teachers at our school this summer. It will have some elements of the CLIMBS model in it, but we will need to pick and choose the topics carefully to maximize the PD for the other teachers.

Throughout CLIMBS, I have been trying to convince teachers that it is really important that their ELLs are actually speaking in class. (Honestly, I think it's really important that ALL students are speaking in class. They should be engaging the content by using academic language and the vocabulary of the content orally and in writing.) I often say that I am convinced that there are students in our school who go an entire day without speaking. I should revise that to say that I think that there are students who go an entire day without speaking about academic content.

In a class of 30 students, in a 45 minute period, if each student has the floor with no teacher talk time, that means each student would speak for just 90 seconds in a class period. That's with a bunch of ifs. I've been in classes where teachers did 90% of the talking. That meant that there were only about 5 minutes left for the students to do the talking. 5 minutes. 30 students. You do the math. But my dream about an action research project on this makes me want to put my money where my mouth is.

I've thought of two different approaches. One is to pick a couple of students and follow them for a day. I'd like to just watch them and keep track of how many times in the day they engage in the content orally in class. The other is to go around to each teacher's classroom for one period and keep track of two things. 1) How much of the time in the class the teacher is speaking and how much of the time the students are speaking. 2) How much of the student speaking is actually using the content language.  I'm rambling, though. Because as I write this, I think about the number of challenges to either of these approaches. Perhaps, I should go less formal.

The idea, either way, is to just have some more or less hard data to share with the teachers when we get together this summer. I do want to see if what I suspect is accurate--that most students are not orally engaging with the content regularly in their classes. But I also hope to see if this is impacting not only ELLs but also the other students.

This stems from a structured activity I did in my class on Thursday last week. I actually gave my students a "script" to follow as they engaged one another to get information from each other to fill in their papers. And when students started, they were nervous. They didn't have control of the language. They weren't sure even what they were asking. By the time they spoke to the 15th student in the class, I saw them gaining confidence and academic language that they could use in their classes. The content matter was the States of Matter. But the language that they were practicing was academic information gathering. And late in the day, when I was in conversation with one of my students and the conversation spontaneously produced the question, "Can you spell that for me?" I was thrilled.

But I wondered if having structured activities with structured oral language would have an impact on other classrooms, as well, or if I was seeing things through the narrow lens of my class and my particular students. Too, this is an informal survey I'm planning. I know there is already hard data out there. There are plenty of researchers smarter than me who have done this work before. I'm not really looking to reinvent the wheel. Rather, I want to know if what the research is showing is true in our school, as well. Guess we'll see.

CLIMBS. Module 3. Assessment. The elephant in the room.

I deliver/facilitate the CLIMBS workshop for our school district. I have 37 teachers and administrators sitting in a room at Central Office for five days, and I get to use those five days to try to help them to help their ELL students. Today was day 3. And I was dreading it.

I spent hours and hours and hours revising and supplementing the materials, and I think I delivered something today that was useful and useable. And the point I kept stressing to the people in the workshop today was that the things that they are doing with their ESL students are the things that will also help their non-ESL students. That's the thing that I don't think I've gotten them to buy. We got many great comments at the end of the day, but the one that stuck with me was a teacher writing that s/he felt sorry for the native speakers in his/her room.

I have no idea how to feel about that. There's some honesty there. It's easier to teach a class when everyone knows the language. What the impact is on the students is when there isn't linguistic diversity in their classes, I don't know. But I do believe that ALL students will benefit from a teacher who can teach both language and content. And I do believe that ALL students can benefit from working with diverse learners. So I don't know how to feel about the honesty of a teacher who says that s/he feels sorry for the native speakers in his/her room.