This is the image that I place on the front of my classroom door and the message I repeat to my students no matter the task. Our ELL students bring with them a diverse set of experiences, resources, languages, cultures, identities, interests, beliefs that are a generative source of knowledge that should be nurtured and affirmed in the mainstream classroom. Our differences strengthen us and our students prior knowledge should be activated regularly as I learn from them I hope they learn from me and their peers as we grow together.
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As I added to my "learning section" in my K-W-L chart I noticed how quickly I was typing what I have learned, how I referred to theories and terminology easily and without pause, and how I ran out of room quite quickly! My hard work and commitment towards this course has played a key role in my professional development and growth as an ELL educator.
I have grown in my understanding towards not only the complexity of language learning (studying the brain, how language develops, different theories around stages and processes of language development) but I have come to understand the importance of supporting the student as a whole as they journey into a new culture and environment. Not every language learner is new to Canada and actually a wide majority are Canadian-born and it is essential not to limit culture as being foreign to Canada--we do not have a monolithic culture that we as Canadians ascribe to--our diversity is exactly what defines and strengthens us. I have learned about practical approaches to differentiated instruction to support these theories and I am excited to begin implementing them into my classrooms. I am better equipped to advocate for and encourage language learners to advocate for themselves through a culturally relevant and reflective pedagogy that welcomes all students and affirms their identity, culture, and language leading to self-empowerment. That is my ultimate goal: through language acquisition these students will feel empowered to contribute and add their unique voices and perspectives to every facet of Canadian society. Intercultural Competence
Technology & Alternative AssessmentsI am an advocate for 21st century learning skills and integrating technology in purposeful and meaningful ways to extend learning. This task allowed me to explore alternative assessments for ELLs, their importance and how they need to be both non-technological and technologically driven. Many students spend a lot of time staring at screens and through social media so technology should only be utilized meaningfully in the classroom and alongside non-technology ways to assess learning and for learning. I was able to explore a new digital tool: Sutori which is a fantastic resource for "timeline" building and allowing students a multimodal approach to both teaching and learning. Experiential LearningThis task consolidated my learning throughout this course as it asked me to go out and learn from others after applying everything I have learned. I developed a myriad of questions from topics we have covered throughout the course and was able to hear from a teacher who has taught ESL courses both here in Toronto. in Italy, and now for the first time in Vietnam. Understanding the implications of teaching English internationally is interesting and important as it is a job I am intrigued to take on in the future as well. I feel like we can only learn so much about other cultures here in Canada and that through travel we can really gain a global and sock-cultural competence necessary in our globalized economy of the present. I want to learn how to best support all of my student and that means learning from them who they are, how they identify, their languages, interests, cultures etc., so that i can create and provide differentiated instruction and resources that will best support them. This interview also exposed unique challenges that I may or may not face teaching ESL here in Canada as well and mediate those through effective teaching strategies that I have also learned throughout this course.
In this first task, I really grounded the theories of critical literacy to possible practical approaches into the classroom. I learned about the importance of multiliteracies: it is so important for students to have opportunities to work with diverse resources that affirm their identity, cultures, and languages while exposing them to other identities, cultures, and languages present in the classroom. Offering a variety of multimodal resources and research-based reading strategies are theoretical models that find their way into the classroom and help students in a very real way. I used the theory to create a chart for myself to track students progress in their literacy development in both their L1 and L2 languages. This offered me a real resource to use in the future and to add to so that I can track my students progress and find the best next steps to support their literacy development. I chose this activity because it allowed me to take many of the theories I had been learning thus far and apply a critical lens to a lesson i have previously used in a class. It is one thing to understand the theory behind culturally relevant pedagogy, and quite another to effectively apply it to your classrooms. I was able to re-visit this lesson and, with language goals in mind, provide a series of differentiated instructional strategies to support ELLs at any stage: word-walls, pre-reading strategies, predictions, think-pair-write-share, graphic organizers, story-maps, concept-maps, pacing, reflection, investigation, and action strategies. This truly was a task that allowed me to apply all of the practical strategies I have learned thus far and better prepare me to teach this lesson again with language goals in mind and a differentiated tool kit to meet my students diverse needs. This was my cumulative task and it built upon the lesson I have attached above because I created the lesson plan from scratch, taking everything I have learned into consideration. I ensured that this lesson heavily relied on group work, graphic organizers, vocabulary investigation with the help of technology, and multimodal resources chosen/performed by myself and chosen by students. No lesson is perfect, and reflecting afterwards on how well I think I did reminded me of how much more work I still have to do, accommodating ELLs looks different for each student and I tried to create a lesson that leaves enough room to apply differentiated instruction that allows for reading, writing, and speaking. I enjoyed creating this lesson very much and reflecting on it afterwards because i can see how far I have come in my lesson planning and how integrated language goals are to my lessons now and how I automatically think of multi-modal and language-rich activities not only for ELL students but for all students!
This initial assignment laid down the foundational understanding of the different levels of oral communication ELL students must have the opportunity to engage in. Conversational English (BICS) often formulates at a more rapid pace if the student has opportunities to work with their peers, have peer-mentors who can speak in their L1 language, and fostering an environment where ELLs feel comfortable and confident in speaking. CALP or Academic English is extremely different, and Cummins provides much exploration on how educators can facilitate the growth of CALP in diverse discourses. ALL teachers and language teachers and creating language-rich environments that reflect not only academic english, but also L1 languages is a terrific strategy to foster a deeper understanding of specific content-area language. This assignment allowed me to work with the theories behind both of these important oral communication skills that ELL students need support in and provided many practical approaches to achieving this. Scaffolding is an essential instructional strategy to help ELLs develop their communication skills at each developmental stage. This task allowed me to take what I have learned thus far in the module and critically reflect on a filmed lesson. This lesson employed many of the scaffolding strategies we have learned: activating prior knowledge, dual-language strategies, pre-reading, vocabulary. This lesson was also an example of teacher-centred approaches that leave little time for meaningful group work and discussion that helps ELL students practice the English language and gives every student the opportunity to work with the language of the discourse (CALP) while communicating with their peers (BICS). Due to the previous tasks, I was able to identify these important missing areas of this lesson and recognize how i may do this in my own lessons. Watching videos of teachers stepping back from the discussion (depending on the level of ELLs and the scaffolding done beforehand to get to that stage) I realize how important it is to build a collaborative environment and how beneficial it is for ELLs to develop Oral communication skills. In my communication skills inquiry I chose to re-visit a topic I was interested in in the opening Modules. Corrective feedback is a big part of mainstream English courses and learning about the differentiated constructive feedback strategies and being able to assess their effectiveness for each individual student is so important! Studies have shown that corrective feedback can have negative consequences on a student's language development, confidence, and uptake; however it is necessary for an ELL to learn how to speak the language, that is why it is so important for me to understand how to ensure very piece of corrective feedback i give has a positive impression on the student's language development. I learned about each of the different CF strategies and the theories that explore them as well as the important practical strategies for implementing them: understand your students, ask them what kind of corrective feedback helps them the most, and understand how to approach correction in the most effective and supportive ways. I think knowing your student's developmental stage, acknowledging their content and meaning first, tracking their errors, and understanding the ways they appreciate feedback the most are all essential strategies to corrective feedback in terms of oral communication that i am excited to implement in the new school year!
This activity allowed me to read a diverse set of experiences from ELLs and some of their teachers and/or mentors. When we are focussed on theory, research, and outside voices, the true experiences and curriculum as lived experience can become lost. The reason why we are taking this course and why we continue to collaborate together to improve our teaching strategies is to improve the learning experiences and success outcomes for ELLs. Through these stories, I was able to see how alienated ELL students can feel and how the biased messages teachers send negatively affect these students and their motivation to learn, It is important that students are not neglected and ignored, we have a responsibility to empower their sense of confidence and affirm their identities, cultures, and languages. Empathy is the key tool we need as educators; many ELL students are facing several challenges in our classrooms that transcend language learning. We must take socioeconomic factors into consideration, truly get to know our students and foster an inclusive learning environment and use tools (like dual-language learning and peer-mentorship) to mediate and address these challenges. Understanding the STEP process and the kinds of strategies and activities that go into it is important for all teachers to understand. These assessments are used to help students, support staff, families, administrators, and educators plan and set goals that will best support the student. I was able to compile 60 pages of curriculum documents into a graphic organizer that helped me to better understand the process and the differentiated strategies in administering those assessments and providing necessary support and on-going assessments. Every student is different and will require different steps in order to achieve their goals and become proficient in English. One important thing I have taken away from this assignment is that STEP can be a fantastic resource in helping to support and identify the initial and ongoing developmental stages of ELLS; but that is only one part of the process to support ELLs on their journey to language acquisition. I created a video exploring many of the visions outlined in the EDUgains site and used what I have learned so far in this course to create an action plan to make sure these goals become a reality. I was able to have a product of the learning I have done thus far and feel as though many of the action plans will help support ELLs in my classroom to become confident and empowered by their diverse identities, languages, and cultures. Professor Cummins Pedagogy of Empowerment in our discussion of culturally inclusive pedagogy's informed my vision and action plans heavily as I related to the coercive power relations he discussed throughout my own education and was a reason i wanted to become a teacher to reverse those power relations. It is through a collaborative learning and working environment where real learning occurs and were student are put first and given opportunities to curate their own knowledge with support from the educator. I am looking forward to continuously adding to my vision and altering my action plan as this course goes on and my practice informs what i have learned here.
K-W-L ChartIt is important to first establish your own beliefs and prior knowledge before you are able to confront them. I realize now how little I really know and how much more I need and want to learn. This is an important step in challenging and continuing to challenge what I know about teaching English Language Learners. I am particularly interested in Literacy skills and standardized testing as that is a key component to my job as a secondary English teacher. I also want to expand on the methods and modes of teaching ESL so that i can use differentiated instruction based on the individual needs of learners. I think this will be a key artifact to return to at the end of the course as I continuously add to the what I have learned section. This chart can be utilized as a physical representation of how much I have benefited from this course as well as a quick collection of all of the resources I have gathered that will inform my teaching practice. Exploring Theories: "Should I Correct my Students' Mistakes?"This task allowed me to explore a topic I have always been concerned with: corrective feedback. I was able to explore multiple, and polarized sides to the same argument. I found myself, after reflection, agreeing with Coelho that it is about the method and quality of feedback not only for ELLs but for all learners. How many times have I corrected a student's grammar before commenting on the message of their work? It is important to realize that language acquisition is a process and you must meet students where they are at and be selective about the mistakes that you choose to correct. Forming bonds with your students and understanding their mistakes is an important step to knowing how to respond and how best they will take to your feedback. This is an important document to return to as I continue to build on my theoretical understanding of corrective feedback and how best to support my ELLs and all my students with the ideas presented within them. Capacity Building Series: ELL Voices in the ClassroomIt is easy to get lost in theoretical concepts to the point where an educator forgets that you must take from them important information that will inform your practice and impact real lives within your classroom. I chose to analyze the "ELL Voices in the Classroom" document from the Capacity Building Series. My biggest gripe with this document is that it seeks to give educators the resources and practical approaches to supporting ELL voices within the classroom, without actually including their voices within this document. Were any ELL students and/or parents part of the creation of this resource? I think this analysis is important because many teachers will think they are applying these theories to support ELLs without actually listening to them. Students must be involved in their learning process and have a say in what they learn and how they learn it (incorporating L1 languages for example instead of being discouraged from using it). I found many of the practical approaches and activities helpful (if done well) and that is why I want to save this artifact as it reminds me of the importance of criticality alongside action. Theories mean nothing if they are not applied appropriately and meaningfully to benefit ELLs.
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