Co-teaching is often considered the apex of instructional collaboration. In my experience, while co-teaching is tremendously effective, it takes intentional planning and norming of practices in order to reach the potential of the models. Below is an example of co-teaching resources I put together for our district to help teachers better understand the models and (more importantly) norm their collaborative practices as a unit. I’m proud to say that our co-teaching practice is evolving measurably each year!
Daystar Academy is a strong bilingual immersion program that develops world citizens by embracing Chinese and Western culture through its integrated education model. Daystar students strive for distinction in comprehensive Chinese and English studies, creative thinking and character development for the purpose of serving the community at large. In short, Daystar students are highly bicultural and biliterate to a degree few people ever achieve.
While the success rate is high, one of the challenges in such a time-intensive model is finding opportunities to implement lengthier interventions for students who need additional interactions with academic English concepts and content. In traditional English-only schools, this burden is distributed throughout the school day or is lessened by students being surrounded by English in the world around them. In contrast, our ELLs (who make up 70% of the student body) only receive 12 hours of instruction a week and have very little exposure to English in their lives outside of school.
In order to create additional opportunities for these students, a small team of us were able to do a needs assessment of the students and parents and reach out into the larger Beijing community to find partners who could provide extra support aligned with our mission and curriculum. After interviewing several candidates, we settled on the Learning Tree. Working together with our two curriculum teams, we have been able to facilitate the creation of the Daystar Bridge Program. As it is aligned with our learner outcomes, program of inquiry and standards, and given that there are pathways established for teachers to share feedback and data, students have been able to receive extra targeted support. We’ve even been able launch parent education sessions to help parents support students at home. Results have been fantastic. Reading and writing scores are improving quickly and students and parents alike are reporting higher levels of understanding and enjoyment in learning.
Welcome to my video section of the site. Here, you can view teaching samples as well as educational support videos I have made or facilitated with our ELL/EAL teams to support parents and students.
Teaching Sample 1: Elementary ELLs – Supporting Language Arts
Standards assessed: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.5.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade 5 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.3 Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.1 Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
Teaching Sample 2: High School ELLs – Supporting Language Arts
Standards assessed:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.11-12.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grades 11-12 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1 Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.4 Present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective, such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and a range of formal and informal tasks.
Using Technology to Support Your Child’s Literacy at Home
This initiative was a collaboration between the ELL teachers and Chinese teachers to help English and Chinese speaking parents support literacy at home in a concrete way by helping parents understand and use two of our favorite online literacy resources: Reading A-Z and Phonics Genius. The teachers collaborated with Chinese colleagues to shoot and translate the videos. The result was a marked uptick in use of these tools with parents and students!
Using Reading A-Z at Home to Support Your Child’s Literacy
Using Technology to Support Phonics at Home
Reading With Your Child at Home Using Reading A-Z
Bilingual School Expectations Videos for Students and Parents
This initiative was a collaboration between students and ELL teachers in order to help all students and parents understand school expectations given that there were many new-to-country families to our school who had limited or interrupted formal schooling in the past. The students brainstormed school norms and agreed to them through voting. They then co-wrote the scripts and created the videos with graphics and sound.
Banaadir Academy Expectations: School Arrival
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Hallways
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Cafeteria
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Recess
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Bathrooms
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Dismissal and Busing
Research shows that non-native speakers take an average of 4-7 years to attain academic English proficiency (Cummins, 1981; Snow, 1987; Collier, 1995). It’s a long Journey, but one that is doable with intentional instruction and self-study. Parent support can often be a key component to success in this endeavor, so our ELL/EAL teams place a high value in communicating with parents.
Coffee Talks
At Daystar Academy, we have a tradition of hosting Coffee Talks: a gathering where we share food, ideas, resources… and coffee (and tea)! Over the last several years, our team has hosted dozens of these sessions as a way of opening up a dialogue about the program and as a way of learning and sharing together strategies and tools aimed to help language learners succeed.
We’ve learned a lot from each other during this process with activities ranging from phonics games, vocabulary strategies, asking questions while reading and using technology.
Through this process, we’ve seen a big uptick in parent involvement, which has in turn shown increases areas such as reading fluency, comprehension and vocabulary usage.
Parent Online Resources
Given that not every parent can attend a Coffee Talk, we view it as essential that our parents have a way of perusing our bilingual session notes and resources. Thus, we place all of our materials and resources into an online resource hub. Parents can access programatic information, bilingual videos, bilingual PowerPoints and handouts and share them with their children or each other.
Parent Newsletters and Content Previews
As a part of our parent outreach, we send home semi-monthly newsletters that overview student learning engagements and various supports that we are using. We also send out previews of the next week’s lesson and vocabulary words, background knowledge videos, and an abridged reading or summary, as well as a unit overview. This has lead to students being more ready to start the week as they come to class on Monday already having background information on the subject as well as a general understanding of the reading. Students also often come in on Mondays comparing original student-generated definitions and sentences using the Tier 2 vocabulary or the week.
Using Technology to Support Your Child’s Literacy at Home
This initiative was a collaboration between the ELL teachers and Chinese teachers to help English and Chinese speaking parents support literacy at home in a concrete way by helping parents understand and use two of our favorite online literacy resources: Reading A-Z and Phonics Genius. The teachers collaborated with Chinese colleagues to shoot and translate the videos. The result was a marked uptick in use of these tools with parents and students!
Using Reading A-Z at Home to Support Your Child’s Literacy
Using Technology to Support Phonics at Home
Reading With Your Child at Home Using Reading A-Z
Bilingual School Expectations Videos for Students and Parents
This initiative was a collaboration between students and ELL teachers in order to help all students and parents understand school expectations given that there were many new-to-country families to our school who had limited or interrupted formal schooling in the past. The students brainstormed school norms and agreed to them through voting. They then co-wrote the scripts and created the videos with graphics and sound.
Banaadir Academy Expectations: School Arrival
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Hallways
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Cafeteria
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Recess
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Bathrooms
Banaadir Academy Expectations: Dismissal and Busing
Like most reflective educators, I find professional development energizing. I value the opportunities to learn from and share with educators from a wide range of backgrounds. In addition to the valuable skills and takeaways, I thrive off of the feeling one gets after professional development… being amped up but yet wrung out at the same time. These moments push collaboration, reflection and initiative in ways few can.
The following is a list of professional development that I have attended recently.
Assessment
Jim Knight
Seven Strategies Of Assessment – By Jan Chappuis – 20 hours
As an ESL practitioner, I believe firmly in assessment, planning, differentiation and reflection. I use iPads and spreadsheets to engage in weekly formative assessment and reflection. Further, I am experienced in administering the full suite of assessments from World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) as well as state standardized assessments. Using this data, I have helped facilitate differentiated instruction for students with a wide range of varying backgrounds, interests and abilities by implementing supports, such as sentence frames/stems, realia, and interactive graphics, and flexible grouping. I also believe strongly in using technology and have utilized the following software and services to help differentiate instruction: Reading A-Z, Readlive, Read Works, Imagine Learning, Newsela, and Moodle. Similarly, I employ the use of iPads, PowerPoint, Google Slides/Docs, Smartboards, and Promethean Boards to create dynamic differentiated teacher and student-generated content. Through these classroom practices, I have assisted East African students to raise WIDA scores by an average of one full point year over year. Moreover, I can show measurable gains in student writing through student work samples.
I also developed and managed a school-wide online knowledge base for teachers to pool and share resources and gain access to often-used forms and materials and managed Banaadir Academy’s website and published all of its content for four years.
As an ESL teacher, I value diversity as not only important but necessary to foster a well-rounded and productive educational environment. In this regard, I have accomplished many things that have helped Banaadir Academy become a more culturally responsive school. In order to address low first-language literacy and limited background knowledge about the U.S. education system, I collaborated with students to produce a series of bilingual training videos for SLIFE and their parents, detailing school procedures and norms. An example video can be found at http://www.fossenbell.org/videos/. In addition, I facilitated the creation and implementation of our school’s interpreting team. Both of these initiatives led to a marked increase in parent-teacher communication. In a similar vein, I implemented and managed the Somali Word of the Week initiative to help Western staff learn more about Somali language and customs.
I have a documented history of taking initiative and holding leadership positions at every organization for which I have worked. Most recently, I served as a Professional Learning Community (PLC) Lead for grades 5 and 6 and facilitated data-driven flexible grouping of students which has led to increased test scores and overall student success. Further, I created, implemented and managed the award-winning Reading Buddy volunteer program, which has provided students over three thousand hours of extra small group and one-on-one support. Lastly, I facilitated a school-wide transition to adopt the WIDA W-APT and MODEL for language assessment and placement.
Co-teaching is often considered the apex of instructional collaboration. In my experience, while co-teaching is tremendously effective, it takes intentional planning and norming of practices in order to reach the potential of the models. Below is an example of co-teaching resources I put together for our district to help teachers better understand the models and (more importantly) norm their collaborative practices as a unit. I’m proud to say that our co-teaching practice is evolving measurably each year!
