One of my biggest thoughts was about vocabulary, because learning academic language is imperative in every subject. I started making sure students worked with the vocabulary multiple times in meaningful ways so that it stayed with them.
That year, I also took a class through the AFT’s Professional Learning program, which changed so much for me. It explained how school populations were changing and growing. After this class, I couldn’t get enough information, being the big nerd I am. I was amazed and excited. Within a few months, I enrolled to get my master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). I graduated with more knowledge about what students need — but not how to help them. As I kept teaching, I realized other teachers had the same question: How can we help our ELLs be successful?
This summer, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in Project ELITE, another professional learning train-the-trainer program developed by the AFT and ELL research giant Diane August. We spent a week digging into research about how to tutor ELLs, but there was so much more. We learned how to create better lessons and why certain readings and lessons were extra challenging. For example, sentence structure is one of the biggest challenges for students. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out the basic meaning of a sentence. I realized how important it is that teachers do scaffolding, using questions and techniques to bring students to the same level, in some very simple ways, which led to my biggest takeaway: Be humble. No one is an expert. You can research and learn. You can incorporate new things, but we must remember that no one is perfect. You need to be willing to be humbled. This is the best way to help our students.
For example, during the ELITE training, Betsy, one of our wonderful AFT national trainers and course instructors, asked a question. We all answered — in one word. Betsy replied with, “How can we expect students to be good writers if we don’t model how to give good answers in a complete sentence?” I was like, “Whoa!” I think I blinked several times thinking how simply mind-blowing it is that this small change could impact our students. We have to realize these students soak up what we do. We model and they follow. One of the easiest things I learned from the experience was modeling by answering in complete sentences both orally and on the board. Now we need to remember to model best practices, which will help students so much.