Instructional Strategies for an ‘ELL Teacher's Toolbox’

- Hi everybody, this is Larry Ferlazzo and Katy Hull Sypnieski. I hope you can hear us or see us and ideally both. Maybe you could indicate in the comments if you can indeed hear us.

We're here in Katy's classroom and we're here to talk about english language learners. And Katy and I have written three books, here's our first one, (laughs) this is our second one and this is the one that just came out this week. - Whoo hoo!

Hot off the presses - First we thought we'd introduce ourselves. I'm Larry Ferlazzo and I have been teaching english language learners and IB Theory of Knowledge classes as well main stream students for the past 15 years at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento and prior to that I was a community organizer for 19 years. I've written nine education related books and do an Edweek teacher column, teacher advice column and write about ELLs for the New York Times.

- And I'm Katie Hull Sypnieski I've been teaching in Sacramento in the same district as Larry for over 20 years. I'm currently teaching middle school, ELA and ELD and yeah in my spare time I write books with Larry. - Yeah when I can pressure her and make her feel guilty about it.

- Yes - Yes - So today we're gonna cover what we think are three critical elements of ELL instruction. Obviously there are many others, and we are human power points today. Okay - High tech - One is differentiation, the second is student motivation, and the third is affirming error correction.

We'll be talking about a lot of online resources and you can find a link to them on my blog if you just search Larry Ferlazzo on the web, my blog will come up and it's actually I think, the second or third post down, however edublogs, which is the premier blog service for educators internationally and nationally is unfortunately down went down this afternoon so it won't be, and it's still down I'm sure it'll be back up before the end of the evening but if you try to go there now you won't be able to find it. But I think the title of the blog post is online english language learner resources and it'll list, it'll lead you to a list to those resources as well as some videos I've been doing some professional development at my school and we've had multiple student panels where English language learners have been sharing what they think teachers have done that have been helpful to them and what teachers have done that have not been helpful to them, so you might find that interesting. - And so two things that we wanted to share with you oh, the light goes off in my classroom every few minutes, this is reality here folks so I will need to stand and turn it back on.

We wanted to share two things that really guide our teaching of ELLs. And the first is we look at them through a lens of assets and not deficits because they bring so many rich experiences to our classroom, they speak multiple languages, they possess numerous skills and abilities and we want to encourage them to continue develop all of these skills while they're learning english. Also researchers have found that ELLs tend to feel more strongly about having a growth mindset because they can see the application, they can almost immediately apply what they are learning, they are also, they tend to be more creative because of their exposure to so many different experiences and just like most of our english only students, they already demonstrate a lot of perseverance and grit.

And they just need to be encouraged to apply that in an academic setting. The other thing, the other thing that guides our teaching is the idea that good teaching for ELLs is good for everyone. And so we use these same techniques in our mainstream classes, Larry teaches an IB class and he uses it in that class because these strategies work.

Although sometimes our english only students tell us to that we can speak a little faster and not use gestures. - Before we continue we should mention that if you have comments or questions, agree or disagree with us, please share it in the comment section and we will look forward to seeing those and responding to some. So just wanted to mention that.

I mean hopefully we'll see it on our screen. - Right. Yes.

Okay there we are. - Great So we're gonna talk a little bit about differentiation. And it's important to keep in mind that treating students equally does not necessarily mean we're treating them fairly.

And in my experience, students get that pretty well and most teachers do, but you know for example, least in my classes, students know that if I let some students listen you know, a student listen to music while they're reading, students and I ask other students not to do that, students know that if I don't let that student read, you know, listen to music be bouncing off the walls right I mean so it's you know we need to look at that idea that all of our students have different challenges and needs and we need to acknowledge that in our practice. So let's talk about some ways that we can differentiate for ELLs and for all of our students since as Katy mentioned, good teaching for ELLs is good teaching for everybody. One is wait time.

Researches have found that in a typical classroom in the United States the wait time between when a teacher asks students for a asking a question and when they expect a response is one second. So obviously for ELLs that's not gonna work too well if the question is in Spanish, in English and for most students its not gonna work very well. Researchers have also found that if you extend that time to between three and five seconds, the quality of the response is much much higher.

And you know oftentimes what I'll do is I'll tell students okay I'm gonna ask you a question but I don't want anybody to answer, I want you to think about it first. Oftentimes doing think pair share and that feeds into the common core talks a lot about collaboration as opposed to cooperative learning. And in collaboration the idea is a student doing some work whether it's thinking, whether it's writing, and then sharing with someone else, getting feedback and then going back and making their thinking and their work better.

So this idea of wait time feeds into that. Another way to differentiate is the fancy word or fancy phrase of non-linguistic clues. - Sorry - Yeah just cover my face, that's fine.

I'm told I have a good voice for radio. Anyway and I have to excuse, I've got a cold so my radio voice isn't even that good today. Gestures, pictures, graphic organizers fairly standard stuff that we all need to use with our english proficient students as well.

Slide, our next slide, or our next sign is word walls. And I don't know about you, but in the past sometimes I just put a bunch of words up there you know, in some kind of decorative way as opposed to having images associated with them, having them in categories, it doesn't mean I've gotta do the images, it doesn't even mean I have to come up with the categories, even better in fact then word wall is Valentina Gonzalez who's an ELL teacher in Texas, I think she's doing a workshop on, on that soon, talks about interactive word walls. And the idea is have it up there so to make it more accessible to students, it's not just decoration.

Another way to differentiate instruction is a tried and true strategy in bi-lingual education called preview view and review. And that is done, which the idea is, the lesson is previewed in the students home language, lesson is then viewed done in English and then reviewed in the students home language. That, I mean you can obviously do that in a bi-lingual classroom, in a mainstream classroom it's more complicated, but the version that we use is that there are tons of free resources online in our students home languages.

And there's links to all those on my blog. So for example if I'm teaching my ELL US history class, I'll often print out a copy from a textbook, it's not our textbook that we're using but it's about the same era in Spanish or Arabic or you know Vietnamese, you can give it to the student a week ahead of time, and for the student to review so it's a great resource for that. And some of you are familiar with brainpop which has similar resources, has great animated videos in English and in Spanish and it costs I know over the years I've paid for a teacher subscription, I think it's worth it, but also it's another way for students to help activate and develop the prior knowledge that they need to access the lessons we wanna teach.

The next one is same text, different levels. Again there's zillions, I mean literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of articles online in different sites, that are divided into lexile levels, the text complexity levels, so in the mainstream classroom or even in the ELL classroom, giving students different levels of the same text. And there are sites, free sites like rewordify that allow you to copy and paste your own text and they will simplify it and they do a fairly decent job of it.

Our English department was playing around with it last month we were impressed with what they did with Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven. Collaborative learning and I talked a little bit about collaboration earlier, and this is just simply getting a getting ELL students in a small group with where there's one student who wants to help them. Doesn't have to, doesn't even have to speak their home language, but just wants to help.

And plenty of research shows that the tutors are gain as much benefit if not more than they're tuttees. Academically. And this idea of collab learning leads us to the jigsaw.

Many of us are probably familiar with that and it's perfect for ELLs where whether you are you have a group studying and doing a biography of Abraham Lincoln and you give your least english proficient students their job is to identify the personal milestones of Lincoln, when he was born, when he got married, how many kids he had, when he died and more english proficient students what are the accomplishments or the challenges that he faced? Or with a text you can give the beginning ELLs a paragraph, more proficient ELLs a page. And John Haddy who's sort of the big international data educational guru these days highlights jigsaw as the instructional strategy that basically knocks everything, is off the charts in terms of high level thinking and literacy instruction.

And so it's a great, it's a great tool. Next one sentence starters right, I agree because I disagree because, etc. Having those on the wall are great, or in front of students.

And then writing frames which are basically extended sentence structures. There's lots of different strategies for that in the blog post. There are links to many downloadable templates, ABC, answer the question, back it up, make a comment, I say, they say, I say, why I say it, they're great.

And then writing structures which are a little different. So writing frames are basically expanded sentence starters writing structures, so writing frames is fill in the blank, writing structures tells you what goes where. Let's say hook, thesis statement, but you've got the writer and the student has to come up with it.

So in some of my classes I'll give some students writing frames and some students writing structures. Katy's jumping up and down trying to make the lights go on. So, so that is a short list of differentiation strategies.

And now Katy's gonna talk about everybody's favorite subject, grading. - So in terms of differentiated grading for ELLs our district and our schools don't have a set policy even our state doesn't. Larry and I recently wrote an article that is going to be available on the blog which shares our opinions about grading.

And you know federal civil rights guidelines say that if a beginning student enters as a ninth grader, it's up to the school to create the conditions for that student to graduate in four years. And we need to keep in mind the research shows that it takes four to seven years to learn academic english and if it is on the teacher to make this content and assessment accessible to ELLs that can be a big challenge. And so in theory, we're supposed to be able to have them graduate in four years and have it be accessible however we recognize that some teachers either don't know how to do that or aren't going to do it because of time or other issues and our question is if you're not going to make the content and the assessments accessible, how can you ethically not differentiate your grading?

So you can see our article just for more on that. And just a few other things to keep in mind in terms of differentiation of course talking slowly, Larry needs to be quicker, quicker on the - Maybe I'm not a very good human power point. - Closed captioned videos, we always make sure those are on and also if we're watching a video like on youtube, studying it to a slower speed can be helpful, providing written and verbal directions for students, checking for understanding beyond asking does everybody understand?

And looking out to see everyone nodding. But actually having students explain to a partner or write down what they've learned as an exit ticket. Modeling of course, so modeling what we expect students to produce but also the steps for how to get there, and pre-teaching academic vocabulary, we actually have an example here so maybe we can get it a little bit closer, but something like this where students are looking at the academic vocabulary, they can write the meaning in their own words, they can do a translation with related words, and they can draw a picture to show their understanding.

And like Larry was talking about earlier, using peer tutors. And of course it's great if they speak the students home language but we have a lot of students who are English only or speak a different language from the student who needs help and there's would love to help and it's good for them, like Larry said, it's good for the tutor and the tutee. - Student motivation, our next primary topic.

- And thanks Jen. She says great strategies. - You have good judgment Jen.

Okay so in student motivation there's this concept called self determination theory. It has several components and how to help students develop in terms of motivation, how to create those conditions. And one is autonomy.

Does a student have some control over what is studied, what is done, and how it's done. So there are three ways, three primary ways for to help develop autonomy. One is procedural, I'm sorry one is like organization.

So for example where do you wanna sit? Alright that's an example of organizational autonomy. Procedural autonomy is another strategy of how to help develop intrinsic motivation.

So procedural could be okay here are four different prompts you choose which one you want to respond to. The third way to encourage autonomy which and researchers have found had been the primary way, the one that has developed the most intrinsic motivation is cognitive. Which is cognitive choice.

Which is I mean one way I do it is for reading strategies. So after we're learned a lot of different reading strategies I tell students, okay use the reading strategy that you think in this text would be most helpful to you. Or when we're exploring homework, challenging students to think okay what homework, what homework site do you wanna work on and what topic do you think you need to work on most.

So that's the idea you know, of cognitive choice which works for developing autonomy. Competence is another way to help develop autonomy, I'm sorry, helps develop intrinsic motivation. Do students feel like they are capable of doing what they are being asked to do?

You know there are lots of ways to help promote that. One is online practice, and online practice where students can make lots of mistakes and the only one who knows they're doing that is the computer. This idea of growth mindset and it's important to differentiate, when you talk about growth mindset, growth mindset is not just praising effort but it's also praising the strategies that students are using in their effort.

And when we, we think about developing, helping students develop a sense of confidence and competence, we wanna remember that researchers have found that it takes for every one critical interaction, students need to get three to five positive. So that, those are some ways to develop the sense of competence. The next one is relatedness.

Is what the student is going, is being asked to do, will that help him or her further develop a relationship with someone they like and or respect which could be their classmates or their teacher. So for example I'll specifically ask students to befriend and work with new students who have come into class. And then teachers the idea of just asking students about their lives, trying to find out what their goals are.

Relevance How does what we are learning connect to the students goals, hopes, and dreams? I know one student, one of my students wants to be a doctor and every week she develops, we develop a short plan and what is she gonna do this week to help prepare her for that. Another way researchers have found if you just have students write a couple of sentences after a lesson about how they think they can apply what they learned.

So those and lots of again, on the blog, lots of online resources related to all practical ways to help develop intrinsic student motivation. - K so our third critical element affirming error correction. I got the fun ones.

- Okay that's right. - Grading, error correction. So ELLs make a lot of mistakes as Larry and I do, as we speak Spanish and write in Spanish and so the question is how do we deal with these in an affirming way because we want our students to be able to take risks and see mistakes as opportunities to learn.

And so one lesson that we do involves asking our students to make a list of english mistakes, it could be from the past couple of weeks or the past month. These can be mistakes they've made when speaking, or listening mistakes, they thought they heard something else or writing. And we have students write down the mistake and then also write down what they learned from that mistake.

And so we compile a class list and students are able to see how much learning has occurred because of all of these mistakes that they have made. Some other quick strategies, just if it's an error or a mistake people are making but we've taught that already, just pointing at the mistake. Usually students are able to fix it right then and there.

When students are working on a writing assignment we usually just target one or two types of errors and like Larry was talking about online homework practice can be a great way for students to feel comfortable making mistakes because the only person who knows is them and the computer. Probably our favorite strategy for dealing with error correction is concept attainment. And we're gonna just demonstrate really quickly, lemme see can I borrow this from you?

Ah there we go, k. So in concept attainment we have a yes and a no column and we have this up on the overhead. And so we will tell students take a look this is a yes, and it says "she has shoes.

" And here's a no. "She have a small house. " K Here's another yes.

"She has a black shirt" And here's another no. "He have two cars. " So we might ask students to pair up and talk quickly what do they notice about the yes's.

What might those be, why are they yes's? And why are these no's? And we will continue doing examples and non examples and having students generate the rule has and have.

Our students love doing this because it makes it like a puzzle. We love it because then they are inductively constructing the concept that we want them to learn. And then another way that we work with, deal with errors is through games, to make it fun and engaging.

There's lots of ideas on, on the blog for games but one, just quick one we love the white boards and students can work in a team or they can work by themselves and we will just put a sentence that has a mistake or mistakes in it and students have to write the correct version down and hold it up and winners and if they don't Larry says you're losers! - It all relates to the classroom culture, a little, - Yes I think sarcasm, sarcasm has its place if students know that you truly care about them as opposed to being weaponized. - And if you don't teach middle school.

- Yeah - Okay so that's the end of our presentation. - We're happy to answer questions or we're also happy to end this session as well. So we have no need to continue to hear ourselves speak.

- At the end of a long teaching day As you are probably also tired. - Great - Okay - Well thank you for joining us - Yes thank you - Jen wants to know are these ideas posted? - Yes - Somewhere - Yes go to the blog - Go to Larry's blog - And the vast majority of these ideas you will see in the blog post once edublogs is back up and hopefully soon, so.

- Great, well we wish you all a good rest of the school year and we hope that these ideas have been helpful to you and your students. - Alright, thank you very much.