I thought the summer might be a good time to re-share posts from My All-Time Favorite Posts! list…

 

 

In anticipating of a series of staff development sessions I led for our school’s faculty, I gave a survey to many of the ELLs at our school asking for their feedback on their classroom experiences.

You can see the survey and read its results at English Language Learners Tell Us What Helps Them Learn.

The survey uses the outline of an article that Katie Hull and I have written for The American Educator, the journal of the American Federation of Teachers (unfortunately, its publication has just been delayed until September).

The article and survey focuses on three key areas – differentiation, student motivation, and affirming error correction.   It’s likely that it will be the first in a quarterly series of articles Katie and I will writing on key qualities of ELL instruction, though those future articles will be appearing in a different publication from The American Educator. (by the way, the third book that Katie and I have co-authored on teaching ELLs will be published in two weeks).

I also used those three elements as the outline for the staff development sessions I’ve been leading (you can see some of the online resources I’ve been sharing during these trainings here – I’ll be adding more for Science and Math teachers next month).

Each of those three parts of the training begins with a panel comprised of students who all entered our school as ninth-grade ELL Beginners and who are now taking one or more International Baccalaureate now or next year.  You can read about the impact their participation has had on our teachers here: Guest Post: Professional Development in Education – Involving Everyone.

We taped the panels after they presented to teachers (it was logistically difficult to get a straight shot during the sessions) and students and their parents agreed to have it shared here so other teachers could learn from them.   They answered questions during the training, but those responses do not appear here.

Feel free to leave a comment about the videos – I’m sure students would love to hear your thoughts!

One of the students did some splicing and dicing of thee presentations and came up with this shortened version: