5 minute read
Conclusion
like they cannot do something, the teacher can direct them back to their profile or autobiography to remind themselves of what they can do and build on that. Have students share their profile with a peer and ask that peer to add positive characteristics they observed about that student. Students can also ask family members, student teams, and the entire class to share more positive characteristics.
English learners need explicit instruction that integrates language learning, literacy, core content areas, and the social-emotional skills that will facilitate all learning. The integration is applied by English learners and classroom peers when cooperative learning is the vehicle to practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing in pairs or in small teams of four that are carefully orchestrated by the teachers. There are specific opportunities for pair practice, such as vocabulary practice during step 6 of the seven-step method for preteaching vocabulary (page 27 in chapter 1) and during partner reading with summarization. A myriad of teamwork opportunities comes after partner reading that helps to anchor knowledge. We shared some in this chapter.
The cooperative learning strategies in this chapter are intended to be used mainly after partner reading. Some, such as vocabulary buddies, can be used for class building or team building at the beginning of a class period. However, most are to be used after students have worked in pairs.
For pairs or teams to work effectively, social-emotional discourse and protocols for working together should precede any activity. The students adhere to these social norms much better when they are part of the decision making of what will work best for their team. Taking a few minutes to reflect on their performance and achievement after working together helps students develop empathy, respect, self-awareness, and self-management. Working together intensifies positive relationships and appreciation of their teacher and school.
Tips for Reflection and Planning for Teachers and Coaches
•Review the five CASEL SEL competencies and their attributes.
•Parse your lesson’s material to select words to preteach. • Identify the competency’s vocabulary and sentence structures you will teach. • Identify the competency you want students to apply. • Use the cooperative learning strategies during the twelve lesson components. • Model samples of the social norms to share with students; teach that language to English learners. • Preteach vocabulary, partner reading and summarization, and the social norms that go with each. • Offer rubrics to students to self-assess.
•Monitor teamwork, assess, and give constant feedback to
English learners.
Tips for a Whole-School Approach to Professional Development and Teacher Learning Communities
•Provide schoolwide professional development on cooperative learning. • Parallel to that, provide schoolwide professional development on social-emotional competencies. • Follow up the professional development with coaching individual teachers to support their implementation. • Follow up with teacher learning communities in which teachers discuss how to integrate SEL, social norms, and self-awareness with cooperative learning structures and the content they will teach. • Teachers and administrators meet to review and find policies and structures that need to be revised in order to effectively implement evidence-based integrated instruction. • Explicitly teach classroom norms of interaction.
•Preteach key words related to SEL competencies for an activity and words for understanding the task, peers, and content students will be processing. • Explicitly teach the five SEL competencies and give examples of how to use them during each learning activity. • Provide more cooperative learning opportunities to enable more student talk, develop social-emotional skills, and improve relations among diverse students. • Offer choice in team strategies for learning in STEAM subjects and project-based learning. • Offer choice in self- and team-evaluation rubrics.
After studying, discussing, and implementing discourse opportunities for students to enhance their academic language and social interaction skills, the class can move on to writing instruction. By now, even English learners at the emerging English level can write because they have been pretaught key vocabulary, used that vocabulary during discourse with peers, and read texts with information on the topic of the writing assignment. They now have language and information to use for writing and a high level of comfort in their writing ability.
Cultivating Competence in English
LEARNERS
As promising modes of instruction like socialemotional learning (SEL) emerge, they can often leave behind English learners and multilingual learners. Authors Margarita Espino Calderón and Lisa Tartaglia and contributor Hector Montenegro provide a research-backed guide for making SEL part of the vocabulary-learning process, creating classrooms that allow for social awareness and tapping into the social and emotional properties of reading and writing. In Cultivating Competence in English Learners: Integrating Social-Emotional Learning With Language and Literacy, core content teachers who have English learners in their classrooms will glean insights from tested-and-proven models from experimental control schools, explore the importance of SEL application to the English learning process, and learn how to best improve learning for all students. Readers will: • Understand the core tenets of SEL and how
SEL applies to English learners • Implement a schoolwide culture shift toward
SEL practices • Improve student SEL competencies • Assist English learners and multilingual learners in developing their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills • Accelerate language and literacy development
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/EL to download the free reproducibles in this book. “Calderón and Tartaglia provide valuable, research-informed, practical ideas for fostering learners’ social, emotional, and language development in a way that recognizes learners’ diverse cultural backgrounds and strengths and promotes equity.” —Kent Lee, Assistant Professor, University of Alberta “For every secondary content area teacher who has ever asked, “But how exactly am I supposed to support literacy development for English learners in my classroom?” here is the help you have been waiting for. Robust background information and longitudinal research provide a convincing rationale for making time in content area classes to support all learners to become more proficient readers, writers, speakers, and listeners.” —Susan Adams, Associate Professor & Faculty Director of Diversity, Butler University “In this book, Calderón and Tartaglia eloquently show educators how to provide multilingual learners with rich academic and social-emotional learning so they leave our schools reading at grade level, with strong self-management abilities, and with sound relationship skills.” —Luis F. Cruz, Solution Tree Author and Education Consultant
