BA Podcast 001 – Challenging Our Beliefs

Hello ESL Family!

I’m incredibly honored to join the amazing folks at VoicEdRadio!  I will be hosting a new podcast for ESL professionals.  Introducing  “Boosting Achievement. The ESL Podcast”

Listen Here!

Here is what you will hear in Episode #1

Welcome to the Boosting Achievement ESL Podcast. I’m your host, Carol Salva from Houston, Texas.  In this podcast, I’ll be chronicling my journey of learning as I attempt to discover the best ways to support language learners… and the teachers who teach them.  

My credentials

What’s my philosophy on ESL?  First, I realize that “English as a Second Language” is outdated so I will use EAL (English as an Added Language) but this term is still what will help us reach more teachers in searches, especially new teachers who are looking for support.

My philosophy for helping students acquire English is to figure out and focus on the strategies that give you the biggest bang for your buck.  I like to imagine the Pareto Principal applies to teaching. We probably get 80% of our gains by 20% of our effort.  We will be looking for those most impactful strategies!

Philosophy on Podcasting- get out there & investigate + reflect.

Alan November & BLC Conference

What a typical show will be like.  Modeling my frequency after podcaster: Derek Rhodenizer

#OnEdMentors


BOOSTING ACHIEVEMENT, THE ESL PODCAST will be a mix of my solo ramblings, guests (consultants, teachers & students).

Big Idea for This Week: Challenging Our Beliefs

Especially during Back to School Season.  Don’t lower your expectations just because so many students are struggling to understand you right now.  Collaborate with like-minded professionals.

Misstep this week:  I should have allowed even more student talk. I shouldn’t talk so much just because most of the class is not fluent in English.  Beginning of the year requires even more turn & talk so students have a chance to process.

One big win! Turning the Social Contract into a Kahoot for language practice. Then getting up and switching partners several times to practice the speaking like this.

        

Also Great this Week:

Special THANKS to Rola Tibishini at All Saints Catholic High School students for the amazing padlet you created for us!  See it here: https://padlet.com/rolat/Houston

\   

Highlight Tweet!  Big thanks to Kirsten Foti, M.Ed from Dallas/Ft. Worth for this great post:


I think that is quite enough for Episode 1.

Thank you for listening/reading!

Stay awesome,

Carol

Join me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MsSalvac

Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/SalvaBlog/

In Defense of Grit for SIFE. (Plus Week 3 Book Study Resources)

Sigh.  Grit is getting a bad wrap. I was so excited about it and now haters are tweeting ugly tweets at me. Some colleagues are, however, being constructive and are making good arguments.  If you teach newcomers,  you might be dismayed because many of our kiddos are the grittiest kids in the building.

Grit has been a hot topic in education since the release of the book Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. In it, she explains that it is not a person’s IQ that predicts success in life. This thing called grit is what really pushes people to continue working toward success.

Her TED talk has been viewed over 8 million times and her research is being leveraged by educators around the world.  In her talk she even goes so far as to say that we all REALLY want our own children to have this grit but no one is quite sure how to cultivate it.  WOW! And as teachers of newcomers, we often see students that already possess it!

I tweet and write about grit in hopes that teachers realize what is possible for SIFE (Students with Interrupted Formal Education).  Just two weeks ago I highlighted Emily Francis in this post on what is possible for our students with an interrupted formal education. Emily is FULL of grit. She needed it to rise from under-schooled & non-English speaker to become one of the Teaching Channel’s Fab5 ELL teachers.

Well, now I am getting tweets with people telling me that I am putting the blame and responsibility on the learner.  (yikes!)  I can see where this criticism of grit narratives has merit.  I understand this argument as “If grit is the answer, then the people who are not succeeding must not have enough grit. Or they aren’t using it correctly. And/or teachers are off the hook, let’s just get everyone very gritty.”   Great points here.

I also have a new friend, Andrea Honigsfeld (author of ELL Frontiers – please read it, it is such a great book on tech for ELLs) who turned me on to a thought-provoking article written by Valerie Strauss for the Washington Post. I loved that Andrea sent this to me because it was sent in a constructive way. She asked my thoughts on it and she opened my eyes to some important things I had not considered.
Strauss makes a great case for rethinking our love of grit narratives and I need articles like this to inform my thinking.  Strauss challenges us to realize that kids of poverty already have grit. She explains that their home lives are full of grit and they don’t need more lessons about it in school.  She also argues that lessons on grit serve middle to upper class students more than our lower socioeconomic students.  Hmmmm. Also very good points! 

There is actually A LOT of criticism of teaching grit.  Here is one more. Andrea sent me this article Paul Thomas wrote for Alternet where he explains that  grit will never be the answer to overcoming poverty and racism.  He writes that instead, “the key to increasing the success of those students now languishing on the wrong end of the achievement gap is to address the inequity of opportunity they face in their lives and in their schools.”  Their plight is more of a systemic issue, according to Paul. 

Do a search on it, and youll find even more great arguments against teaching grit. And I can see their points, many of which can’t be disputed.

If you are like me, you might be thinking, ‘Ugh! Just when we thought our SIFE had a silver lining to their stories of hardship!’  

But here’s the thing.  

As a teacher of newcomers (many of which are SIFE), I’m not teaching grit as the answer to all of their problems.  I’m not.  I’m pointing out that they may already have it and I’m exposing them to the research that shows that it is a predictor for success in life.  I want them to have this knowledge as part of a repertoire of tools and metacognitive strategies that will hopefully spark intrinsic motivation about what is possible for them.  It is a character trait we can all use,  they should know all there is to know about it. Heck, they can go off and find some more research to help us all learn more about it.

Strauss is right. Our kids don’t need long lessons on how to be gritty.  But my newcomers definitely need to be aware that those middle and upper-class families desperately want this character trait for their children. Just letting them in on that little fact is powerful for their mindset. And while we are sharing research with our students, lets go ahead and use the Paul Thomas article as well. Our recent immigrants are well served when we give them the real facts about inequities.  I teach high school students who need to know what they are facing.  We can balance all of this with some great social justice lessons where we highlight heroes like Martin Luther King Jr & Nelson Mandella.

We want our youth to know that there are many of us working to change the inequities.  We want them to know that their teacher is working to optimize their learning experience across the building. But we also want them to know their own abilities to improve.  And that they can be agents of change themselves!

Nope. I’m not ready to give up on grit.

And I’m not the only one that thinks we can use grit to our advantage if we are thoughtful about how we use it.  The following is an excerpt from October 2015 Classroom Q & A article in Education Week Teacher written by Larry Ferlazzo:(follow him BTW. If you only follow ONE person on twitter, it should be Larry.)

So, when I talk about helping our students develop grit, it’s with the idea of encouraging them to apply qualities that many already have – the difference is that I want to help them develop intrinsic motivation to apply these attributes to academic pursuits.

Encouraging the use of metacognition, learning strategies (sometimes greater effort will lead to de-motivation if we don’t know how to adjust what we’re doing – and that could include asking for help), and the positive attitude of a growth mindset (particularly teacher feedback focused on effort instead of intelligence or ability) are important ways teachers can support students using grit and resilience in the classroom. Applying these concepts in our classes will reinforce what researchers  David Yeager, Gregory Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen have defined as “the fuller formula for success: effort + strategies + help from others.”

At the same time, however, I am wary of pushing the “grit narrative” too far, as some have done already by proclaiming what I call The Let Them Eat Character strategy.   It is in the self-interest of many in our society to use the “all it takes is hard work” mantra as a public excuse for perpetuating political and economic policies that thwart the dreams of many because of their race or economic class (see The Washington Post article, Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong).

I fear this blogpost has officially become way too long. But part of the reason I blog is to synthesize my own thinking. So I have just a few more things to say on this.
One, I am ALL about growth-mindset.  Grit is one thing, if you have friends in education that don’t agree with growth mindset…find other friends.
My main goal as a teacher is to help my students develop intrinsic motivation so they can take off and learn without me.  For SIFE and newcomers, just knowing about all this grit stuff helps them develop their ideas about what they bring to the table.  PLEASE give your students credit that they come to you as critical thinkers and we can give them more critical thinking opportunities around this and other topics.
Here are a few resources I suggest for further study on motivation (which is where I see grit being important)
  • Drive by Daniel Pink – not exclusive to education but you’ll learn what really motivates people and that is like gold for any educator.
  • This “Best of Posts & Articles on ‘Motivating’ Students”  by Larry Ferlazzo.  He has interviews with Dan Pink and many other posts that are specific to working with ELLs. SO many! greatness.
  • I just picked up Larry’s book Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers to Classroom Challenges He has a lesson on grit in this book and I trust it is something appropriate for our demographic based on the excerpt above and other resources by Larry.
  • I also want to get Navigating Common Core with ELLs. This one is also by Larry Ferlazzo. I think I need it. I don’t even teach Common Core! But I know I can generalize here…We all have content standards so I can apply the learning to my reality.  My big reason is that I hear that he includes a lesson on resilience! Excited to see how he makes the idea powerful for students who are likely already resilient.
  • Last week bought Alan November’s Who Owns the Learning.  Got it signed by Alan himself! I have followed Alan for years and just attended & presented at his Building Learning Communities conference in Boston (#BLC17).  Alan was the one that turned me on to Dan Pink many years ago.  It is why I try to inspire students with lessons that offer autonomy, purpose and mastery.  With today’s tech, and a solid PLN, we can ensure that our ELLs own their learning!

Thanks for taking that Grit vs. No Grit journey with me. Writing this certainly helped me think through some things and I obviously still have a lot to learn on this subject.  I’m excited to do that learning with my PLN!  Join me on Twitter if we are not connected there already!

Thanks for reading!

Carol

************************************************************************

WEEK 3 BOOK STUDY

You can find a lot of resources by visiting our Book Study Landing page.  Check out Emily’s notes on last week – Week 3! She is one to follow as she is giving the world the cliff notes on this book!

Boosting Achievement Week Three Questions (Part II in the book)

3Q1)  p. 33 Watch the video with the QR Code or at bit.ly/Tech4SLIFE. Hamsa taught his teacher a lot that day. Did he teach you or reinforce anything for you?

3Q2) p. 34 references Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on “grit”. In her talk, Duckworth describes grit as passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Most SIFE have persevered through something. How can we help them realize the strength, the perspective and the advantages they already possess?

3Q3) p. 33-34 Passion. Persistence. Motivation: many of us have activities that put us in “flow” just like Hamsa from the video. We can all lose track of time working toward a goal when we have a passion for it. Maybe it is running, or crafting, or blogging about education.  If you can relate to this, reflect on it.  Share your “flow” activity and why you think you show so much grit when working toward the goals of it.

3Q4)  p. 38 & 39: We often say that every child brings gifts.  These pages outline a few specific advantages of having newcomers in your classroom. How can you share this message with your staff, with your parents, with the world?

3Q5) How are you planning to leverage growth mindset?  Do you have ideas for  your students with limited education?  How can we leverage all of this to build the growth mindset of the rest of the class, school or community?

3Q6)  p. 40 -44: Breaking down the walls of your classroom: Our SIFE need more than grit and skill building if we want to grow leaders. How do global learning experiences level the playing field for SIFE? How do they propel them beyond grade level expectations?

3Q7) p. 45-47 The idea of a Social Contract (vs. “Rules for my Classroom”) is included in this part of the book. How does your classroom culture impact the mindset of the students.

3Q8) If we are trying to encourage a growth mindset, real SIFE, migrant or newcomer success stories are perfect resources. We can use them as mentor text, read-alouds or for units of study. Examples are bit.ly/FJimenez & bit.ly/EmilyFrancis.  Please share other success stories you know about to our padlet here: bit.ly/SuccessPadlet

What is Possible for S.I.F.E? Plus Week 1 Book Study Resources

Yes, the book study is starting! Questions are at the bottom of this post and this post ties directly to Week 1!

For the next 5 weeks, I will publish a post that will have new content for anyone serving English learners and will also offer more information and resources to go along with our Boosting Achievement #ELLChat_BkClub book study. I will include specific book study information at the end of each post (scroll to the bottom for specific questions).

What is Possible for S.I.F.E?

Imagine that a non-English speaking student arrives at your middle or high school campus.  This student has little or no literacy in their native language because they lack formal education.  This young person has social emotional needs because they have had to endure war, displacement or a life of mobility. Their age dictates that they must attend school with peers regardless of their limited educational background.  Your district has no “newcomer center” or the center is full so they will be enrolling at your comprehensive middle school or high school.

These students are known as SIFE (Students with Interrupted Formal Education) and their educational background may be minimal at best.

If this scenario seems overwhelming, we have good news.

It is true, due to events in our world, this demographic is growing in public schools around the globe and they need special attention for their circumstances. But these students can not only survive in regular secondary schools, they can thrive! And our pedagogy can grow to better serve the entire class because of researched based strategies we will employ to address their needs.

All we need to do this week is realize what is possible for these students.

Check out the Foreword to the book.  **Do not skip the foreword**  It is written by Tan Huynh.  He is arguably one of the most influential educators sharing on X (Twitter) and his story will frame what we can expect from this book.  It will also likely move you on an emotional level.  The questions at the bottom of this post align to his writing.

In addition to the book’s introduction, we can look around our world today.  Let’s just reflect on just ONE of the many examples of SIFE who are having success today.  This story goes a long way to help our mindset and that of our students.

Emily Francis

Emily Francis was a SLIFE student who entered high school in New York with a 6th grade education from Guatemala.  At 15 years of age, she was a recent immigrant, a non-English speaker who was far below her peers in literacy and content learning. She was also helping to raise her siblings because mom was working all hours to support 5 children on her own.

Today, Emily lives and works in North Carolina as an ESL teacher (yay!).  She is a sought-after keynote speaker and is now an author.  Her book “If You Only Knew” is a beautiful book to use with your students.  Among other accolades, she was the Teacher of the year for W.M. Irvin Elementary in 2015 and Teacher of the Year for Cabarrus County in 2016.  Incredibly,  Emily is an ELL #FAB5Squad Teacher for the Teaching Channel. 

Just a few of her press appearances & mentions here:

2018 update!  Emily is on the Ellen Show!

Emily is an amazing example of how our Students with Interrupted or Minimal Education CAN overcome obstacles and they CAN succeed in life. They can, in fact, become some of our most important leaders.  Please check out Emily’s blog if you’d like to know more about her journey.  You can also listen to a recent podcast where she is interviewed by Derek Rhodenizer on Beyond the Staffroom.

Here is a 3 min video of how I met Emily & her students:

If you are reading Boosting Achievement, you can skip to p.41 to read about it. It is also detailed in this blog post.

Next week we will look at who our SIFE students are and what basics we should know to help serve them.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Week 1 Questions & More Resources

To support teachers of these students, Anna Matis and I have written Boosting Achievement; Reaching Students with Interrupted or Minimal Education.  It outlines best practices for serving Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (sometimes referred to as SIFE or SLIFE).  It is full of practical techniques that are resulting in success for SIFE and newcomer students in my current classroom. It is the result of our combined years of teaching experience as well as professional ESL and ELA consulting.

 

During Week 1, you may want to listen to Tan Huynh’s interview on the Rolland Chidiac Connects podcast. He wrote the forward that we are reviewing this week and he tells his story at the beginning of the show.  Tan is another ESL education leader so his perspective, coming to America as a refugee, is another important narrative for us to consider.

WEEK ONE QUESTIONS:

Participants are free to deviate from the following questions and post reflections, #BookSnaps, add insight and advice to the group over the current section.

WEEK ONE  Where we Are, Forward and Introduction

1Q1) Roll call: introduce yourself, name, role, grade levels, country/state etc. Are you a returning participant or a new to this group?
1Q2) What makes you interested in this book/topic?
1Q3) How is your school addressing the needs of SIFE (students with interrupted formal education)?  What are your desires for systemic solutions.  What are your concerns?  What are some things that you are proud of in terms of supporting SIFE?
1Q4) Please reflect on the forward by Tan Huynh (@TanELLclassroom). Tan is a leader in ESL education. What are your reactions to his story? His thoughts on the book?   How does his story inform what we do as teachers?
1Q5) Carol writes a reflection about her first experience with a large group of refugees. She has several years of experience as a specialist with a background in ELA, Bilingual Education, ESL and Special Education.  She was still worried that she would fail these learners.  How can teachers overcome self-doubt?
1Q6) Without romanticizing the situations of SIFE, every circumstance has something that can be used in a productive way.  One example is brain research showing that there are possible cognitive advantages when a person is not immersed in technology for years.  What are your take-aways from the work of Nicholas Carr & Jane Healy (found on p. 11)?

1Q7) As you flip through the Table of Contents, what section are you most looking forward to discussing? Why?

Thank you to everyone reading this blog.

I’m inspired by how many educators want to spend time reflecting on our SIFE. I feel strongly that as we get better at serving them, we get better at serving all students.

Stay awesome,

Carol

Your Walls as a Co-Teacher

Effective uses of environmental print in your Newcomer, ESL or Reading classroom?  Here are some ideas that worked well for us this year.  The 3 minute video at the bottom of this post shows many of these ideas in action.

I am writing this post because I have realized that alone I can’t teach my students all the English they need.  But I’ve also realized that my walls are an excellent co-teacher!  Read on to see what I mean.

Key to all of this is that you create these with your EL (English Learner) students.  Update them as needed with your class based on who they are and what their interests are.  Then use and reuse them with your students all year long.

Some ideas for WHAT to post:

Social Contract

A social contract is created at the beginning of the year to set classroom rules/norms.  A social contract is KEY but it is not created by me. The rules are discussed and agreed upon by the students once I have explained that I can help them learn English VERY quickly with the right classroom norms.  Everyone needs to feel good, honored and safe.  Students discuss how they want to be treated (by me and each other) and how they think I want to be treated.  Native language is fine during the creation of the contract but I write it in English using comprehensible input, students sign it, and it is updated and referenced all year long. It is one of the first pieces of text everyone is able to read.  Flippen Group offers great training on Social Contracts.

    

Banish I Don’t Know Poster

This anchor chart is the 2nd piece of text we create together. It is critical for newcomers to have a way to respond when they don’t know the answer or need assistance.  (This is actually a great thing to implement in any classroom, for every type of student.)  For non-English speakers, we begin with three responses that students learn quickly.  If called upon, no one is allowed to answer with “I don’t know” or shrugging of shoulders.  They can use the anchor chart for responses like “Could you please repeat the question?” or “May I ask a friend for help?”

We add to the chart and reference it all year long.  As new students come in, we highlight the top three so they can begin participating the moment they are ready.  This anchor chart is chorally read a great deal in the first days of school and we review/use it all year long. This, by the way, is Step 1 of Seidlitz Education’s very popular: 7 Steps to a Language Rich Interactive Classroom.  I highly recommend the book & training for any classroom, not just ESL.  It changed my life.

Shared Writing & Reading

There are many ways to do this.  Here is how I do this in a short, whole group manner: Class discussion of a shared event, then allowing the students to brainstorm ideas to be included in a quick write (as I scribe a bulleted list).  Then I model the quick write which we read together as I make it.  Finally, students copy this piece of text. Everyone is able to read it because they co-created it.   This has been very effective to accelerate writing and reading for new ELs. Marcia Taylor of the Center for Adult English Language Acquisition has written a great piece on Language Experience Approach here. This is the technique I am adapting for my class.

Some ideas for HOW to use what you post:

It’s worth noting that I don’t have my own classroom.  I am one of those teachers that travels with her supplies and teaches in other peoples’ rooms during their conference periods.  You might think anchor charts and environmental print would need to fall by the wayside if you don’t have your own walls.  Nope.  I quickly realized that I needed to find a way to respect the wall space of the host teacher (constant struggle, working on it) but also have environmental print accessible to students.  Some anchor charts stay up but some come up and down all year long. (I put a few hooks in the rooms and I use clothes hangers with clips. Post-it chart paper is pricey but worth it if you can get it.)  Here are a few ideas of how to use these:

Create Them WITH the Students

So yes, I create a different “I Don’t Know” poster with/for each class.  I create a new poster for each class of anything we are doing because the experience of creating the chart is what makes it comprehensible for my newcomers.  It also gives them voice and ownership.

Chorally Read Them, Students Read & Re-Read them for decoding

Emergent readers need multiple exposures to English print. The act of decoding text and recognizing sight-words can be learned in context with your co-created text.  We should explicitly teach the importance of multiple exposures, phonemic awareness, and sight-word recognition.  No need to go deep into that, just be sure the learner knows WHY he is re-reading.

Re-Read them for Higher Order Thinking Tasks

The University of Texas has a great post about benefits of re-reading familiar text.  They include it as a powerful method for foreign language teachers but some of those same principles apply to re-reading our own co-created text in the ESL classroom.  I will often revisit a quick-write and work with the class to analyze what we have written and how we can improve it.  Other activities can include comparing/contrasting posters from different classes on same subject.  Also comparing our English version to their native language version is worthwhile.  There are many ways to revisit text.  Several are in that UT link above.

Partner Read/Read the Room

Just getting up and walking around the room to read familiar text aloud (when they feel comfortable) is a good activity for emergent readers.  I always do this as a structured activity with sentence/response frames for the students to use.  (“I agree with this because…” or “I am not sure what this part means but I think…”)  My goal here is to have them practicing their reading but also using their new language to speak authentically about the text and the experiences.

As long as my students understand the brain-friendliness of re-reading familiar text and interacting with it in authentic ways, I have had no problem getting secondary students to do any of this.

Extension for at Home Reading

Students can take home their copied version for more reading.  I also take pictures of these and turn them into .pdf files so I can print them as handouts.  For some reason, my bad handwriting is more interesting to them than typed print when we are reviewing our shared writing.  Some students are able to copy the anchor charts quickly but other new ELs (English Learners) benefit from a printed copy for at-home reading.

For more on how to work with under-schooled newcomers, see our new book, Boosting Achievement; Reaching Students with Interrupted or Minimal Education.  Anna Matis and I wrote this book based on the work I have done with middle and high schoolers who are SIFE. If you are on Twitter, join us for a global book study that will begin July 9th!  Just follow the #Ellchat_BkClub hashtag to get the questions so you can join the slow-chat conversation.

Thanks for reading this.  Please stay awesome.

Carol

carolsalva1@gmail.com

 

 

Gamify Language Acquisition with Kahoot

Didn’t make it to SXSWEdu? Here are some highlights from what I shared daily from the Kahoot Activity Lounge.   I shared ideas on using Kahoot to promote authentic language production by newcomers (and all kids).20170304-113630.jpg
We caught the first few minutes of my presentation on video: 

So are you familiar with Kahoot? It is super easy to make an online quiz and students don’t need to create accounts to play.  You can even search the millions that are already made & play one of those.   Students LOVE Kahoot.  If you try it, you’ll find that students actually request that you review content this way.

So now… how do I use Kahoot to promote language learning?  Well, let’s remember that as an educator, my goal with language acquisition is to provide sheltered learning opportunities.  My two big objectives for this are to

1) Make Content Comprehensible

2) Develop Academic Language

Making Content Comprehensible

Visuals and gestures are high on this list of things that help a language learner comprehend your message.  For example, if I am telling my class that the earth is the third planet from the sun, I may get some blank stares from my students who are new arrivals.  It likely sounds like “The blah is the blah blah blah the blah.”  But if I point to this image of the earth and count over with my fingers 1, 2, 3 and then point to the sun while I say that… there is usually instant comprehension from anyone who is watching.

(Image from www.elisbergindustries.com)

Know what else?  Many of my native speakers benefit from this visual as well!  Most of my students are not auditory learners.  Take a look at that picture and tell me if that wouldn’t be helpful to any child who is learning that concept?  So here is what it looks like in the middle of a Kahoot game.

But look at this quiz. WHY would I wait to use this after I have taught a concept?  Why not use this highly engaging activity to TEACH this concept?

There are some amazing Kahooters out there creating “Blind Kahoots” that offer an example of how to build a lesson with Kahoot.  Stephanie Castle, (@castlestephanie) High School IB Bio teacher in New York, pioneered this concept and her Mitosis Blind Kahoot is a great example.  This is so successful with students that Kahoot now offers a template for creating your own Blind Kahoot.  Everything you want to know about this is here: The Art of Blind Kahooting

We know that our language learners are going to benefit from learning concepts this way. If you allow students to take a stab at the answer, and then pull the image back up before you go on to the next question, your Kahoot becomes a super engaging, interactive presentation with visuals and opportunities for more sheltered strategies by the teacher.  It is pretty great to have the undivided attention of your class while you bring everyone back to the image to explain why the answer is what it is.  Not only is this powerful for all your visual learners, it is a great opportunity to work in test taking strategies.  How many of our students are missing standardized test questions because they are not attending to the image?  Be thoughtful about your images and point out the power of attending to them.  Teaching the concepts this way has been working extremely well with my newcomer class.

Developing Academic Language

Making your content comprehensible and engaging for the class is a huge win. But for us, we are getting even more mileage out of our Kahoot lessons because we are intentional about building the students’ academic language.  We know that we internalize concepts more if we verbalize them.  I want my students feeling comfortable with the language as soon as possible.  I want all students speaking academically because it will cement learning and open doors for them if they get into the habit.  Therefore, I am a big proponent of newcomers reading in unison for practice with pronunciation.  Most language learners are very fixated on how they sound when speaking in their second language.  According to Stephen Krashen, we will get a lot further with our students if we can lower their anxiety about participating in class. (http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html)  If they feel comfortable pronouncing words like “homologous pair of chromosomes,” we have a better shot at getting them to use that language when we ask them to speak authentically about our content. This is why we always read the question stem and correct answer all together before we move on to the next question.

See these examples of what we would practice learning AND saying through a Kahoot on explorers:

All of my students are benefitting from the learning of content this way.  My newcomers are practicing complete academic sentences and also comprehending the content because I am teaching with visuals & gestures.  In that example, I made both “ship” and “vessel” correct answers so we could point out that new vocabulary for all students.

Marie Heath (@ELLatPISD) of Plano ISD recently gave me a great idea for a variation on this.  She suggests turning all of the questions into True/False statements.  Your answers could be changed to “I agree” and “I disagree.”  Kahoot allows  you to turn off the points so that it is not a competition but rather a springboard for discussion.  Marie’s idea is to use this “Agree/Disagree” Kahoot as an anticipatory set.  Jennifer Gonzalez (@cultofPedagogy) has a great blog post here about the power of the anticipatory set.   I love this idea because you are using the engagement of Kahoot to have students critically thinking, they are practicing the language and using it in authentic conversations.

 

20170304-111752.jpg

 

Practicing the new language will lead to more comfort USING the new language.  Here is a video of a day that I had EIGHT newcomers arrive in class and I wanted a way to review our social contract.  Kahoot to the rescue.  Newcomers practicing their new language on Day one: https://youtu.be/rt-P3t3BbHw

JUMBLE

Another feature that I know I will share is the new way to use Kahoot called Jumble. You are basically re-ording words or phrases so that they are in the correct sequence.   This is an example of the game screen for a jumble I am using:

The players have a screen that looks like this on their device:

They are to drag the colors/shapes into the correct order.  There are obvious benefits here for second language acquisition.  You have visuals and opportunities for oral practice as we stated earlier.  You also have the advantage of creating sentences that are aligned with your grammar goals.  And don’t forget that you can throw in sentences that are inspirational or meaningful to their learning.

This is a practice jumble I made for staff development: https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/6241fb11-6017-47e8-8c85-1195444210c6

Creating
What about your newcomer #ELLs creating Kahoots?? Yes! They can. Check out this blogpost on how:


Holiday Traditions Selfie Kahoot = Authentic Writing & Global Learning

I’m only scratching the surface of what we do with Kahoot to inspire students to use language authentically.  Below are a few other posts I have done about Kahoot.  Check those out our just start using the free platform.  I’m sure you will be inspired to think of even more innovative ways to facilitate academic conversations while you have the undivided attention of every student!

Happy Kahooting!

Carol

Kahoot with Brand New ELs + Skype with Krew

Heritage Learning with Day of the Dead Kahoot

News in Levels and Kahoot

TexTESOL State Conference

Get over to Twitter & follow #2016TxTESOLConf if you want some free ESL learning!  Here are highlights & links from my sessions.  I appreciate that there have been so many sessions regarding refugees and SIFE students.  I learned so much!

tesol-sife

Excited for the Region V TexTESOL Conference on Nov 12th.  I’ll be doing this session there as well.  Hope you’ll be there.  Here is that link: http://textesoliv.org/

Happy Learning!

Happy Teaching!

Reach out at carolsalva1@gmail.com if you have any questions at all.  🙂

Number Talks by Teaching Channel

I used to be so frustrated that I couldn’t do observations with other teachers as much as I’d like.  We always learn something.  The whole #ObserveMe movement is a fantastic idea, if you ask me.

So I’m thrilled when I get a chance to plug into the Teaching Channel and see a quick idea for ELLs in action.  Just like our language learners, I benefit from seeing an example!

number-talks-tc

I love this video from The Teaching Channel because these SECOND graders are speaking like scholars.  This is great for my high schoolers, for native kiddos, for everyone…for so many reasons!

Rock on Ms. Lacour!  We could apply this to any academic conversations.  I love the choral read – as she says in the video, it supports risk taking.  That’s the gold!