Online Reflection #4
One of the aspects of student teaching I find to be of great value is when we are placed with mentor teachers that teach more than our content area. I have fellow English education colleagues that are placed with teachers that also teach theater, interventions, and I’m sure many more. In my case, my MT also teaches ESOL. These unique experiences allow us to explore other options and witness classroom dynamics in a different environment.
We were recently assigned a reading in our methods class giving us an overview of language acquisition, which was beneficial for me as it revived some knowledge on ELL students I previously understood from another class but was much more pertinent now that I am currently working with ELL students. I witness on a daily basis, misunderstandings like that of the example used in our assigned reading where “fall events” in English translated to “fall down events” in Spanish. So, using instructional strategies like read alouds, visuals, modeling, gestures, graphic organizers, and think-pair-share are important for the success of our students. This got me thinking, while these are working and are beneficial tools to help us along the way, what about those students that verbally express their thoughts and ideas, but struggle with putting those thoughts in written form? For example, I have a student that speaks five languages and expresses themselves fairly well orally, but when the time comes to put those thoughts on paper, they struggle. For now, I have used sentence starters, and have taught them how to restate the question in their answer. This works for the most part, but when we begin working on the body of our paper, they get stuck again with no idea how to proceed. I have considered whether this student struggles with simply writing in English, but that does not seem to be the case as they spell decently and do well with sentence starters. It appears that while they can connect ideas orally, they just don’t see a way to put that on paper.
In search of answers, I found an article by Jennifer Gonzalez on Cult of Pedagogy titled, A Strength-Based Approach to Teaching English Language Learners. Reading her six tips made me think that this student perhaps needs a confidence boost. It’s a joy to talk with this student. They teach me new things every day, but perhaps I’m not pointing out their strengths enough. Working with what I know about this student I can deduce they want to do well in school and work hard to reach that goal. They critically think and connect to the content, but I think maybe they are focused on doing so well that they struggle with putting those thoughts on paper because they are trying to do it the way they think I want it.
So, this coming week, we will be discussing voice and word choice. While my students are writing, I will be conducting mini-conferences with each of them. My plan for this is to assess each student and make sure they understand their first language is an incredible asset, I will uncover their strengths, and highlight what they do well.
