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