Have to thank Richard McCabe of Carolina TESOL for “PD in your Pocket.” At least I believe he coined the phrase.

Well, he is spot on! You don’t have to be a “Twitter Person” to grab some great learning this week from your phone or any device.  Just hop over there and follow the #ELLchat_BkClub hashtag to see what kind of insight is being shared on these questions this week.

We are doing a deep dive into the 5th edition of Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners, The SIOP Model.  You don’t necessarily need to have the book as you will see if you follow the threads.  These questions are important for most classrooms.  As always, I’m super grateful to Dr. Katie Toppel and Tan Huynh who created this slow chat.  The SIOP leads and everyone participating are really adding to my learning this week. I hope you’ll come check it out.

I’m honored to be leading this last week of the slow chat. (that is a chat with questions that lasts over several days in this case).  We are collaborating around SIOP Component #8, Review & Assessment through May 18 so you still have plenty of time to check it out.  Lurking without commenting is totally ok. But we’d love to have your voice! Just include the #Ellchat_BkClub hashtag if you comment so it will show up in the thread.

WEEK 8 Questions/Frames:

8Q1. The difference between evaluation and assessment is…

8Q2. The difference between formal and informal assessment is…

8Q3.  An example of informal assessment is…   This information is important because…

8Q4. One way for ELs to review newly learned vocabulary is…

8Q5.  A challenge faced by teachers when assessing English learners is……

So please do join us or just check it out!

VirtuEL19

I know I’ve told you about this before but the line up is solid now so I think it is a great idea to remind folks about #VirtuEL19.  Please make your plans to join us on June 15th from 10am – 12pm ET!  If you don’ t know about this… OMG!  You must!  It is a non-profit virtual conference that removes the physical, financial, and time barriers for teachers of English learners.

You and your colleagues are invited to join us!

This is our 3rd annual virtual conference and it is AMAZING!  You get to interact with the presenters and each of them is a leader in our field.  So don’t miss out. The keynote is by Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld and Dr. Maria Dove.  

We don’ t need your email.

No registration.

Just watch on YouTube and interact if you’d like.

Check out all the details here. 

Also, check out the website now so you can take advantage of VirtuEL17 & VirtuEl18 which are still available there for you to view!

I’m super excited to learn with you in those free PD opportunities.

Please reach out if you have any questions.

{{HUGS}}

Carol

 

Here are other places I’ll be in the near future:

Featured Speaker at the Sanibel Leadership Conference in Florida on June 20th

FALL of 2019 – Stay tuned for dates & links:

 

Tonya Ward Singer and I will be keynoting in Missouri for the MELL Conference on October 2nd & 3rd.

Kentucky educators can attend a FULL DAY of Boosting Achievement at this year’s KYTESOL conference on Oct 4th

FULL DAY of Seven Steps to a Language Rich Interactive Classroom on October 10th in Detroit Michigan.

 

I’ll be the keynote speaker for BCTESOL in British Colombia in the fall. FULL DAY of Rapid Literacy Pre-Conference Oct 24 and then the Keynote on Oct 25!

Coming to Colorado as a featured speaker for COTESOL on Nov 1st.

FULL DAY of Seven Steps to a Language Rich Interactive Classroom on September 24 in Omaha, Nebraska.

FULL DAY of BOOSTING ACHIEVEMENT is coming to Orlando & Missouri in Nov & Dec of 2019 . Stay tuned!

Do not despair!  If you are teaching an older student who may have low or no literacy in their native language, there are certain advantages that student has over a young child who is gaining literacy.

Today I am at the Long Island ESOL (#LIESOL) conference at Molloy College in New York. Thank you Andrea Honisgfeld  and colleagues for inviting me. I’m on the opening panel of the conference and also offering 2 breakout sessions for people who work with older learners.

You don’t need to have the book but a lot of what I share is from Boosting Achievement, Reaching Students with Interrupted or Minimal Education. But ALL of those principles are in the free book study on this site.  Just read through the posts and you can get the learning without the book.

Today I will only have an hour and 15 minutes so I will be giving a quick overview of what is possible and participants will leave with the resources below. I’m going to start by trying to change the mindset of anyone who might think these students are not capable of learning quickly.

I’ll do that by asking if the person is lacking literacy, were they also lacking easy access to technology for many of their formative years?  If so, they may have a cognitive advantage according to the work of Jane M. Healy and Nicholas Carr.  In Boosting Achievement I cite their research by pointing out the following:

In her book, “Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think And What We Can Do About It” Healy examines how television, video games, and other components of our culture negatively impact a child’s ability to concentrate and to absorb and analyze information.  In Carr’s book, “The Shallows” he provides a thoroughly researched examination of how the Internet is actually changing our brains and our neural pathways. He warns that technology has created a means of artificial memory, which seems to be hindering our cognitive abilities (Salva & Matis 2017). 

That is just one example of why we might want to raise our bar for students who are pre-literate.  We need to realize what types of things fail our ELs (see this post with work from EL guru Tan Huynh) and that their inability to read is not a permanent condition. It is usually just a lack of opportunity and we need to provide more opportunities to gain English and gain literacy.

I recommend a pre-assessment that will give you an idea of how many sight words and one that is also a phonetic test.  I just googled and found many on PhonicsHero.com.  They have printables and assessment instructions like this one and I would be fine using these as long as it is the same type of assessment every few months to track progress.

 

Then I DO NOT primarily teach with alphabet or lists of words.  Instead, we learn in context.  I want these participants today to see how I train the students to “hack literacy.”  Our students must understand that they will be able to independently decode text more and more easily as they gain the ability to sound out our letters and blends and also gain sight words.

Everyone must understand that high-frequency words come up frequently!  So we must co-create a lot of text and read with our students A LOT.  They also need materials they can read on their own and with support when they are not with us. For older students I will recommend NewsinLevels.com because it is FREE, it offers choice and scaffolds for the students.  Please make sure your students pick a story and go through Level 1, 2 and 3.  ALL THREE LEVELS every time they read a story… even when they get more proficient.  These are super short news stories and the students will see the change of language structures from one level to the next.  Verbs change and there is a lot that can happen when students attend to these things.

With an older learner, we can capitalize on metacognitive awareness.

I will absolutely share this MUST READ post with these educators because they need to get proficient with QSSSA (to support structured conversations, offer wait time, honor voice, etc.) and with Language Experience Approach (to co-create text with students immediately.)

We will get a quick overview of balanced literacy but only to realize why we are doing what we are doing.  I’ll focus more on QSSSA, W.I.T questioning and Language Experience Approach.

I’m also going to offer them the most important slide that I can think of for this type of PD.  If they challenge themselves to get these messages across to their students, they will be well on their way to success.

There are several videos on this blog that can be helpful to you if you’re also working with this demographic and don’t know where to start.  Check out the PODCAST page and click through those posts.  All have the pre-literate student in mind while I’m teaching a class of multi-level learners.

The most important thing is to raise your bar for the learner.  One of the biggest challenges they face it low expectations.

 

I am so grateful to be at Molloy College today at LIESOL. Please consider attending next year!

And please connect with me on Facebook or Twitter. I’d love to hear from you.

AND THANK YOU FOR TEACHING!!!

Hugs,

Carol

 

Hey! I hope I see you at one of these events

April 5, 2019 in Edmonton, Canada at Edmonton Regional Learning Center – Presenting 7 Steps to a Language Rich Interactive Classroom.  

May 9 & 10, Michigan Association of Bilingual Educators  (MABEMI) I’m a keynote and I have break out sessions

Awesome $129 rate for Rapid Literacy pre-conference May 8 through MABEMI.($99 if you go as a group!)

Andrea Honigsfeld will be the Keynote Speaker for #VirtuEL19! – Let’s get some IRL watch parties together!

 

 

Here are some of my most requested videos that people use to offer PD or for their own reflection. Hope they are useful!

Newcomers and SLIFE tell you what helps them most in their classes (1 hour video):

Effective Questioning in Social Studies (QSSSA Deep Dive) 30 min:

Language Experience Approach and QSSSA modeled. Non-Example and Example (30 min):

High School Newcomer explains how he gained so much English in 7 months. (4 min):

After watching that video, Uri is inspired and puts incredible effort. In the following video, he explains how he went from Beginner to Advanced High in reading  in less than one school year (6 min):

In this video, he explains his 2 top tips for teachers of newcomers (3 min):

Uri talks about the importance of Voice and Choice for students (3.5 min):

A middle school student changes his mindset so we can get literacy off the ground (3 min)

Using Kahoot with Newcomers (30 min)

For your PTA to blast to the community if you need volunteers (6 min)

There are many more videos you can use on this page of my blog.

Thank you for your interest in these videos and for all you do to help our ELs! Contact me with any questions.

{{HUGS}}

 

Carol

PS:

Do you need any support in your district?  We are currently booking engagements for training, coaching and speaking so just reach out at carol.salva@johnseidlitz.com.  I’d love to hear from you.

 

“It’s easy to say ‘Don’t give up.’ But you don’t know how the person feels when the failure happens to them.” – Emily Francis

This week is Part II in a series about what we do when our English Learners don’t pass their assessments or graduation requirements.  How do we support them to the finish line?  You can listen to the show in iTunes, Soundcloud or right here:

You may be interested in listening to Episode 30 which is Part I of this series.

I’m so grateful to Emily for joining me again on this topic.  She is highlighted in my Boosting Achievement book for her excellent ESL teaching methods but at that time, I didn’t even know her own story. You can watch a 3 min video about how we met here:

I later read a blog post by Emily where she told her story and I’ve been using that with my classes ever since.  It’s like gold!  I wrote a blog post about Emily and what is possible for our students who may have missed formal education. I mention just a few of Emily’s many accolades and achievements as that post begins a book study on the topic of students in this demographic. You can read that post here.

Reflections from Episode 31 podcast: One of my biggest take-aways from this recent talk with Emily Francis is that THIS is the moment I decided that explicitly showing students failure stories is key to success of SIFE students and those learners trying to overcome similar language and literacy challenges.  I decided here that it may be more important than hearing about people who overcome challenges where we don’t actually hear about their failed attempts.  I have come to realize that so many of our newcomers and SIFE will experience failure academically (like I did and like Emily did) in their initial attempts at grade level assessments.  We know this to be a fact because they are only just learning the language while learning new content.

Of course, we have some amazing strategies for providing comprehensible input and fantastic teachers everywhere are offering students ways to show mastery.  Also, we absolutely have students who gain enough language and proficiency with accommodations to pass state assessments in their first year.  That is always the goal.

But the reality is some of our students come to us struggling with literacy and other issues and they often experience failure in the beginning.

So Emily and I recap our conversation with the students from the last episode.  But if you pay attention, you’ll hear that we are really reflecting more on how we model getting up from failure.

We all fail.

None of us seems to want to.  And yet, that is where most of the growth in our life might occur.

I mention this video by Derek Rhodenizer and friends. I love what he did for the students at his school  in Ottawa, Canada. I was honored to be a part of it.

I think modeling failure for students is probably one of the most important things we can do.  For ALL students.

Next episode we will go into more of the actual programs and even literacy techniques we are seeing that are effective.  I’ll be talking with Talisa Harris who reached out over email about this issue.  We will be talking about what we are doing at each of our schools.

Thanks for listening and join us for bit.ly/VirtuEL this Saturday!  Even if you read this after Saturday… it’s all still there!  Go check out all the great free PD for teachers of ELs!  #VirtuEL18 will be amazing!

Please connect with me on Twitter at @MsSalvaC or at www.Facebook/SalvaBlog.

Hope to see you at #ISTE18, at the Region 10 ESL/BIL conference or for CarolinaTESOL in Greensboro, NC next month.

Stay awesome!

Carol

 

If you came to the state TxTESOL conference, I hope I got a hug from you.  If you ware unable to attend, you will find so many resources by following the hashtag #TxTESOL2017.

How-To Videos for making Booksnaps.  Tara Martin has some great ideas if you don’t have Snapchat.  And look at all these #BoostingAchievement booksnaps on the padlet created by Emily Francis! https://padlet.com/astrid_francis/ytawrws68zqj

These are the resources on my session about SIFE thriving at a secondary campus.  The following videos are paired with reflective questions about our beliefs.   We hope you can use them in your own PD! Please help change the mindset about what is possible:

How much does growth mindset matter when we are teaching older students to read?

Do you believe that every child can succeed?

Personal connections and a draft.

And remember to find Emily’s blog on her website: http://inspiringenglishlanguagelearners.weebly.com/

 

I hope to see you at the Region IV Bil/ESL conference on Dec 15th!

Save the date for our tech conference on March 1st in Houston!  I’ll be presenting with John Seidltiz on the 5 Keys to Using Tech with ELLs.  See http://www.seidlitzeducation.com/ for more coming soon!

And please follow me on twitter so we can be connected and learn more from each other.

Thanks to all who came and all who are sharing virtually!  You’re helping us change what’s possible for ELLS!

Hugs,
Carol

If you missed #WIDA2017, I have you covered.  I gave a session on what is possible for our newcomers and SIFE students.  I shared the video of Nabil, a student who had a fixed mindset about learning to read.  Once we shifted him to a growth mindset, he was much more engaged!  We can do A LOT with an engaged learner!

I also shared this document and we went over what features participants noticed.  I used the #QSSSA questioning strategy from the Boosting Achievement book.

I sang the praises of www.newsinlevels.com as a way to help emergent readers up their reading level as quickly as they’d like.  Because we know that the more you read, the more you CAN read!

The message of my session was… what CAN’T they do???  Our EL’s CAN do everything the other students can do.  They may take more time to do it, but there is nothing wrong with our students.  If we accommodate for them, the sky is the limit.  And the immigrant SIFE students can catch up!  They can catch up and pass native born students.  It’s all about what you want.  We need to help them see that it is possible.

Here is the handout I used to break down what all I was modeling and what we saw in the video.

WIDA SESSION DOC

We also played part of a Mitosis Kahoot.  It is a great way to practice speaking academic language and a great preview the ESL teacher can do for content classes.  Here is the full BLIND Kahoot & more on how to teach with Kahoot.  Your biology students will thank you! https://kahoot.com/explore/biology-mitosis-blind-kahoot/

Thank you for helping us change the mindset! And thanks to WIDA for allowing me to share & learn in Tampa this week.  Fantastic conference!

Reach out if I can help with any of this.

HUGS,

Carol

ALL students can learn??  Of course they can!….  How ’bout “ALL students can teach us!!”