Artifact: Equity and Law Analysis Paper

Artifact: Equity in Library Funding

Artifact: World War II the Homefront: Gallery Walk and Bilingual Texts

Artifact: Texts of Emails with a Student’s Parent

For standards relating to professional development, partnerships and advocacy for my ELL students I completed a wide range of meaningful assignments which made me “continually evaluate the effects of my actions on others” in the context of my position as an ENL teacher for a group of students who are frequently confronted with structural and linguistic challenges that made it challenging for them to meet standards level proficiency across their content areas. I also saw how as an ENL teacher I could bridge that gap while growing professionally.

One insight that I had into the community resources available to my ELL students and to me as a teacher was the inequity in locally funded resources when they are based on town boundaries and local property taxes. My research paper for ESC 502 allowed me to learn about the extreme disparity between access to libraries and their resources as a comparison between different school districts.

When I examined the library system of my school district, I was shocked. Growing up in New York City – even suburban New York City – I was used to every neighborhood or large town having extensive community resources in the form of a library. That is also the way it is in the town where I live in suburban New York and in many of the towns I was familiar with. In the East Ramapo school district, where I worked, which is one of the largest districts in population in the region, there was only one library. In the comparatively populated area of similar size directly to the east, there was almost a dozen libraries.

This doesn’t just affect the ability of students to check out books. Libraries are sources of additional cultural programming, and more importantly for ENL students, the primary venue for ESL classes for adults who would like to increase their command of English. I was asked by the monolingual Spanish-speaking mother of one student where she could find classes to learn English. I told her at the community college and at the single branch of the library. In both cases, there was no easy way for her to get there by public transportation. Were resources such as library ESL programs distributed as evenly in most other regions, this would not have been the case. My research for ESC 502 made me more aware of the unfairness of this fact than I otherwise would have been.

Even more directly linked to students are the tutoring programs available in many libraries. The East Ramapo library had an effective program pairing academically successful high school students (a valuable community resource that comes at an affordable price). Unfortunately, in a district that’s ten miles long, there was hardly a majority of students that could walk to the library or easily arrive by public transportation. Previous to writing my paper, I had not known and thought through the ramifications of library budgets being funded largely through local property tax levies controlled by politicized local school boards who don’t always have the best interests of public school students in mind. On the other hand, by visiting the library and learning about its programs, I made contacts in the larger community that allowed me to support students’ learning and well-being.

These issues were further developed for me personally by writing artifact two, which forced me to examine from a broader viewpoint how the fundamental issues of educational inequality that were addressed by Brown V Board of Education in 1954 were just the start of a long war that has had many successful battles for students rights but left broader inequity and inequality remaining. Throughout many courses I came to know how public issues  affect my students but this particular paper made me consider how on balance there are many glaring issues of inequity which are not in the political limelight and how it is my job as an advocate for such students to discuss them publicly and also to keep the student central in lesson planning and deciding what kind of environment I want my classroom to be.

Artifact three, a recent lesson I gave in a classroom composed largely of students of Ecuadorian Spanish-speaking homes, allows me to show how I act on some of these concerns. I collaborated with the social studies teacher, other ENL teachers, and ENL department staff before I designed the lesson to show how World War II affected the United States domestically.

I would not have written this lesson plan the same way at the beginning of my courses. It was only after my classroom experiences that I shifted from the student as vessel into which the main historical points are poured, to the student-centered, bilingual, and culturally relevant lesson that I gave. In writing the lesson plan, I realized how much I myself had learned in the content-area: how World War II was not just a historical and political event in the grand game of world politics and a tragedy for some and hardship for others who served, but also a transformative event that was partially responsible for so many of the Civil Rights and cultural changes that followed the war, primarily the struggles for Civil Rights for a variety of disenfranchised groups and the cultural changes surrounding the women’s liberation.

The texts of a brief conversation I had with the mother of one of my students demonstrates the benefits of family partnerships.  By writing in Spanish, albeit not perfect Spanish, I believed I helped to “promote a school environment that value diverse student populations.” This was certainly impactful as I found the mother an extremely helpful resource and together we made sure Inigo did a lot more work and achieve a lot more academically than he would have without staying in close touch.

Artifact: Paper on Mexicans in New York

One of the more personal and, because of this,  enjoyable projects I did was my paper on Mexicans in New York for my class ESC 769: Latinos in US Schools. I wrote a major portion of the research paper while I was with family in Norway. This caused me to reflect on the points in common that my immigrant family had with the history of Mexicans in New York, while also highlighting the differences. While I did not include it in the paper, many themes arose both in common and in contrast between the two groups. I also saw how the practices inside a classroom are very much driven by the legal decisions and research that happen outside it.

I reflected both on how far the laws have come since my grandfather came from Norway and received a “certification” in English from an English for adults program in his local high school and the history of laws and social change that both helped and hindered Mexicans who moved to the United States. One of the fundamental differences in two groups was in transportation. My grandfather came here to stay as an adult. My research on Mexicans showed that many students in New York schools came to the US as children and frequently went back and forth. Fortunately, today the law classifies them as SIFE  (students with interrupted formal education), and attempts to provide them with additional resources.

It would not have been as effective for my grandfather to move to the US prior to adulthood not only because he didn’t have close relatives to live with but also because many of the laws formalizing and mandating fair and equitable for English Language Learners did not exist. Key landmark cases such as  Lau V. Nichols and Aspira V. New York and legal changes such as the Bilingual Education Act and Every Student Succeeds Act have created a linguistic environment far different from the 1930s.

My entire career track is predicated on recent laws, most notably the Educating All Students Act passed under the Obama Administration, which mandated more funding for ELL education, No Child Left Behind, which mandates high standards and high stakes testing at all stages of students learning, and New York State law part 154, which, in mandating the hours students must receive ENL services, has pushed ENL education in New York away from stand-alone classes and towards co-teaching, with its simultaneous challenges and benefits. All of these changes have required me to learn specific methodologies and practices in order to provide the support my students need to succeed and all of them are rooted in political decisions and progressive changes through history.

The impact of this knowledge on my students is harder to place. I cannot change laws or change history. However, being aware of the changes and how we exist in flux makes me more likely as a teacher to be an advocate for my students and place their success, which is more important, in equal or greater place than following mandated and often hard to follow laws such as part 154 in New York or the standardized testing which can have a demoralizing effect on ELLs who don’t progress rapidly.

Artifact 1: Rubric

Artifact 2: Final Project

While the rubric shown as artifact one for Standard 4c Classroom-based assessment is adequate for grading learners of all language proficiency, I believe the modifications for assessment shown in artifact two are what makes this assessment adaptive for ESL Learners in different stages. This is an end-of-unit assessment and as such would be a necessary addition to a student’s portfolio, and allow the student to have continuous intellectual development at a level that is challenging and also engages them socially with other learners in productive ways.

The final assignment and grading rubric were parts of an interdisciplinary unit I wrote with two classmates in ESC 766, Teaching ENL across the Content Areas. We designed this unit for a whole class so it would include both students of average language proficiency and ENL students who had varying levels of proficiency from transitional to expanding and commanding. We all believe and agree that ENL students need to be held to the same high standards in content area classes. For this reason, every student had to solve the math equation and write a short essay reflecting on the connections between the math and science learned and how such knowledge helped the character in the book change the lives of people in Sudan. Working together in this class for this assignment made me aware of the spectrum of expectations for ENL students. I believed their primary obstacle was the extra time they needed to complete tasks and that is why I believed in modifying the final task by asking some students to create their own problem and solve others while some only had to solve. Ideally, the ENL students do do all the same tasks as other students, but this assignment made me realize it is not so common to modify the assignments to account for this. This assignment strengthened my belief in varying assessment so that English Language Learners content-area knowledge can be assessed independently of their language proficiency.

Given the difficulty of the task both in ELA, Earth Science, and Geometry, I felt that the trifold brochure, a suggestion of one of my classmates, was a good adaption of classroom tasks to account for varying stages of ENL development. All students would produce a brochure, but, given the extra time needed for ENL students to write, it was only fair that they spent less time creating their own math problem. This was a fun assignment but I believe I can only grow more by seeing it done in the classroom and finding how students achieve the tasks.

If I were to do this project again, I believe we also could’ve been helped by having an earth science teacher to bring additional techniques to inform classroom instruction that would be specific to that content area. The strongest part of our work was how it was focused on academic production of writing and math, but, by having students share their brochures and solve each other’s math problems, students could be assessed across intellectual and social development. I have been told by many teachers that ENL students should have the exact same rubric as other students. While I think that’s unfair, this project made me reflect on how this is another case where as an ENL teacher I could provide an additional rubric on top of the one for the whole class that emphasized whatever language goals I was working with the student on at that particular point in the year. One area that I would like to grow in professional is in how to still maintain the legal mandates of standardized testing, but finding the technical ways in which I can legally provide a  balance to give more accurate and fair measurements that don’t have the effect of marking Emergent-Bilinguals as academic failures for too large a portion of their school careers just because they struggle with language proficiency. 

Artifact 1: Rejected Example

Artifact 2: ENL Report Card

One of the more directly useful assignments  I was asked to do was to design the kind of summative assessment we would use in our classes at the end of each marking period.  In Professor Demaris Veras’ class, ESC 761, Teaching English as a Second Language to Adolescents and Adults, we discussed the different ways we could show progress and assessment for ENL students. As related to standard 4b, we discussed and addressed how to “measure students’ discrete and integrated language skills” and how they could lead to “effective instruction” that would ultimately end in “exit  from [ENL] programs.” I decided to focus on the actual report card, or end assessment in the class I was teaching, I was very frustrated by measuring my ENL students by state standards and them consistently receiving “1”s. I found the state progressions for ENL students to be more precise and better at showing the movement they made towards proficiency. I was also surprised that my school did not ask me to do anything more than “contribute” to the grades that other teachers gave the students. My mentor teacher suggested that I create a separate form of evaluation for my students.

Initially, I focused on a very specific progress report, which is artifact one, which I took from Colorin Colorado. I did not modify it because I rejected it. While there is a place for specific focus on goals, I believed that students do need to be help accountable to make progress in all areas and this assignment made me reflect on that. If ELLs are going to be identified, reclassified and exit from programs based on very specific requirements, the assessments that they and their parents see should reflect that.

For this reason, I decided to move to a broader one that students could compare to their report card. I found an excel report card from a Syracuse district and modified it to what you see as artifact two. The most important part for me was that students could look at how they are doing in regard to their proficiency level. I believed it was important to teach effective test-taking strategies and for students to understand their proficiency and assessments in relation to their peers and their expectations, but I did not feel it was fair for students to not see themselves making any progress except on annual instruments like the NYSESLAT. This more personalized instrument met that need and making it made me think about how it is my job to bridge the gap between a students proficiency and the social and academic language they are required to use to be at grade-level.

Ultimately, I believe a combination of the two is important. When I look to grow further in this area, I would like to think about how I can combine the two progress report formats. I think the broader report card, on top of a standard report card, can be overwhelming, especially if, as is often the case, the parent’s of the learner do not have a detailed awareness of the academic English proficiency required in assessment of all students, including ELLs. In an ideal world, I would have time to do both reports and explain the student’s strengths and weaknesses. I did have the opportunity to do this on parent teacher night but not all parents were there. In this way the impact on the student is limited by the parents’ knowledge of the report, which is an area I would seek to change. 

The key to fair assessment is using a variety of standards-based language proficiency instruments  and that includes informal assessment strategies that show the student is not just becoming more capable at taking standardized tests, but showing continuous, intellectual, social and physical development in ways that those kinds of tests like the NYSESLAT and English Language Arts Regents are not able to show. If we are to focus as teachers on reverse planning, working backwards from the goal, then we need to think about not just the goal of the unit but how progress will be shown to parents and students and how that fits into the students classification as an ELL.

Artifact: How to Create an IEP

Reflection & Discussion of Issues of Assessment

The reading and discussion for Julie Esparza Brown’s article on issues of assessment with emergent bilingual students made me more aware of issues that should have been obvious as an ENL teacher but that can get take a back seat to the manifold demands and sources of pressure that teacher have. The article made me very aware of not just formal assessment issues as they affect ELLs, such as special education testing and referral, language proficiency and accountability but also how the more informal issues of assessment that we often take for granted, such as a student communicating a “bad day” or being sick, or having problems integrating into the class. All of these compound the problems of assessment that ELLs are confronted by.

Nonetheless, the article did make me more aware of the problems of referral when it comes to students who are underperforming. In some cases, issues of assessment are very grey and students suffer from this. I had one student who was below-proficient in oral expression but whose testing results were close to non-existent when it came to writing in formal academic English. Whether he suffered from the routine occurrence of ELLs gaining higher proficiency in speaking and listening more rapidly than in writing or reading comprehension or not, or whether he had problems with organization, it was very hard to say. Fearing misdiagnosis because of language issues, it was only after numerous tests that I felt comfortable agreeing with the Special Education teacher that the student’s needs were not due to language proficiency.  This student was in 7th grade and it is a testament to the challenge of this confluence of issues  that he was diagnosed at such a late age. I believe these issues must be exacerbated in districts with smaller percentages of ELLs and for specialties such as speech language pathology that are in high-need of bilingual professionals.

Sometimes special needs issues compound language issues so that where one might have gone unnoticed or not needed intervention before, together it amounts to a clear and significant need for additional services. Using multiple sources of information, and multiple professionals, preferably bilingual professionals, is an urgent need for this community. 

Artifact # 1: Open Educational Resources Paper

Artifact # 2: Unit Plan with Resources

One of the most enjoyable and detailed assignments that I did at Lehman was to write a paper on Open Resources for English Language Learners. I tried to find and survey a “wide range of print and resources including ESL curricula, AV materials, webquests, podcasts and other forms of multimedia” as well as other internet resources that were designed specifically for ENL learners. This was not for a specific teaching assignment, but as the final project for the class we were required to look at a specific issue confronting Emergent Bilinguals in depth. It did end up helping me teach classes because it was easier to find electronic resources of a higher quality which resulted in an impact on student engagement. I looked for throughly-vetted and in-depth materials that K-12 ENL teachers could use. What was interesting was the contrast between the wealth of actual material, which was almost infinite; placed alongside it’s quality, which was varying but in general not high; and the total lack of accessible resources that organized this material for potential use in ENL classes.

This assignment prepared me for the time-consuming and laborious efforts I would take when later finding resources on the internet to use in my classes. This is one of the things I dislike about teaching. Creating an original lesson plan is and should be valued, but I do not believe teachers should have to devote so many hours to creating lesson plans from scratch.

The additional artifact I include was the result of hours of work on the part of three teachers and only scratches the surface on the amount of resources needed to adequately source ten days of lessons across two content areas.

I felt that the materials were challenging but that we scaffolded them and provided supports — especially vocabulary supports — that made them more linguistically accessible and supportive of student learning.

While my paper on open educational resources did open up some technological tools to enhance language and content issues, I believe it is still very much a developing field and very much lagging behind the actual pace of technological advancement. I have used web-sites like rewordify to enhance language instruction by replacing complex vocabulary with more accessible vocabulary, but I feel like it is not a replacement for well-designed curriculum or “off the shelf”/ready-to-be-taught materials such as that available through scholastic, teacherspayteachers and a limited few other websites. All of these sites need to develop more scaffolded materials for ENL learners as well as more accessible vocabulary in multiple languages.

Standard 3B: Implementing and Managing Standards-Based ESL and Content Instruction.  

Artifact: A Respect Worksheet

Incorporating rules into the four modalities. Class Rules: Be respectful to yourself and others.

As an itinerant ENL teacher who arrived after the start of the semester, I struggled with the creation of clear rules for my groups. Whereas in my previous iteration as a classroom ELA teacher I would have spent multiple classes discussing the rules, I felt that because of my small groups, and because most classrooms had rules written on the walls, I didn’t want to make things unnecessarily complicated by having additional rules. The only rule I explicitly added was “Be respectful. To yourself. To others. To your parents. To the teacher. To the work we do.” Initially, I would remind them to be respectful and then query who or what we were being respectful for, and for the most part, I was correct and this was all that was necessary. My students worked well in their groups and the small sizes allowed me to take a more “hands off” approach to controlling them.

There was one exception. One student was a known disruptive student. For the most part she paid attention and participated but later in the semester, she developed an antagonism with another student. Due to my working with that small group of just five students, I couldn’t separate them. I had to develop another tactic: strict rules for small group discussions. Part of ENL and all class standards is speaking. Not only does this inevitably integrate into content, but it is a large part of ENL students concentration on their NYSESLAT exams.

I firmly believe that ideas should be made as simple as possible. I decided that I needed one rule to apply specifically to the situation. So in my short list that I brought to that class that I saw five days a week for one period was “One person speaks at a time. Critique ideas, not people.” In order to more deeply impress this on students, I made a worksheet.

Because I work in small groups, I have the benefit of having small group discussions where students don’t have to raise their hands. In the future, I will set a clearer guide from the start: we will have set rules for talking in respectful ways towards peers. If we follow the rules, students get to have the privilege of not needing to raise their hands to speak. If they break the rules, they will have to raise their hands. This empowers the student more will providing a clear set of enforceable rules.

I feel that my activity and rules followed the disciplinary procedures of both the classroom and the school. Teachers were discouraged from talking to students in the hallway, as would be my go-to disciplinary procedure in other schools. I feel that my worksheet allowed us to discuss the rules at length. We did it step by step and together after listening to that standard song that they all knew the words to.  I believe this also effectively integrated all four modalities as I try to do with my students whenever possible. If I had more time, I would make it visual: I would ask students to make a large poster-sized comic that represents their idea of using these rules.

Artifact: Character Traits

Artifact: Lesson Plan

The lesson plans and attached worksheet clearly demonstrate the importance of both modification of plans and materials for ENL learners and the importance of adhering to the same content objectives. They also show how I could not have taught the class without the collaboration of my co-teacher, Fran Guber, in these 4th grade ELA/ENL lessons. I was a “push-in” teacher in the this class although I tried to be a “co-teacher.” There is an important difference and it reflects the struggle that many ENL teachers have. They are going into the classrooms of teachers who are in control of the location and students for the rest of the day. It is difficult to be a “co-teacher” but necessary. What prevented me from surmounting the difficulties was coordinating with five different teachers across different grade levels and trying to keep up with their lesson plans. In this particular class I was able to do my best because of the cooperation and positive attitude of my co-teacher, who planned alongside me and provided me with detailed lesson plans and worksheets that she was using.

Part of the challenge of being an ENL teacher is dealing with a wide variety of students, both in terms of background and ability. I was lucky in this particular class that students only ranged from transitional to expanding, and I was able to adjust the material accordingly. Working with ENL students requires both that students get more material and less. More material because students may need additional background. For example, this lesson was based on the book “Mr Lincoln’s Way” whose central theme focused around a racist student and his interactions with an African-American principal. While we may falsely and optimistically assume that racism is internationally recognized as wrong, this is a complicated cultural issue to unpack for students who may either come from a place where people are largely all of the same ethnic background, or racism is viewed differently. It is certainly part of the cultural knowledge that students acquire at schools in the United States, but we cannot expect students from other countries to always have that knowledge.

While the whole class discussed the central theme, I had to devote extra time to the ENL learners to make sure that they “got it,” restating the concepts in different and simpler terms and recasting the question so they would have multiple points to access the knowledge. At the same, students cannot be expected to do the same amount of work in the same amount of time. They need extra time to listen, respond, and to write. For this reason I gave my students extra gaps of time in the conversation, as long as they were focused. On top of that, as in the worksheets, I reduced the amount of synonyms that they had to learn. Not all students were going to learn all the synonyms anyway, but I could ensure that the ENL students learned some of them well rather than devoting time to every word and not devoting enough time for them to comprehend and remember the word by repeatedly activating their knowledge of it.

Preparation is integral in this endeavor. From reducing the size of the worksheets, to figuring out which parts of the book to focus on, to figuring out which vocabulary has to be explained, preparation is key to all teaching but especially for ENL students who must deal with the challenges of both content and language learning. The most difficult part of this finding out from the co-teacher what will be taught in the class so that ENL students are learning the same topic as other students. In this particular case it worked out well. Because I knew what was being taught, I was able to preteach essential vocabulary, plan questions to ask to ensure comprehension of the stories, and — most importantly and the most necessary to be timed right — write starter sentences so students can focus on completing the content task instead of the language production taking up all of their time.

Cognates are another aspect requiring preparation. Part of addressing students diverse backgrounds involves figuring out useful cognates for these students. I knew that my students were largely Spanish-speakers, so I thought about which words were cognates between English and Spanish and also which English words the students might know in Spanish. I know Spanish but this doesn’t help me with students who speak Haitian-Creole, the other large cohort of students, or the one girl from West Africa who speaks French. In order to still make those students feel included, I asked them how to say certain things in their home languages and asked those students to discuss it between themselves. We also wrote one word on the board that we recognized as a shared cognate with French and we all repeated it.