Bolstering Lesson Engagement and Language Development for ALL Students
Recently, nearly 300 teacher leaders and administrators from across Santa Cruz County gathered at the Cocoanut Grove before their school doors were even opened for the year, in order to learn ways to build lessons that engage students in academic conversations. Dr. Kate Kinsella, who is known across the country for her work to improve achievement of immigrant youth and long-term English Learners, spent the day energizing her audience with strategies for engaging students and holding them accountable for using academic language in classroom conversations. Participants were shown methods for dramatically increasing the quality and quantity of verbal and written engagement each student experiences through targeted instruction and structured accountable responses.
Too often our students, especially those at the secondary level, are perfectly content to be passive learners, while allowing their teachers to do all of the talking. Building strategies that engage students and hold them accountable for speaking, listening, and participating in academic conversations is paramount to our students’ future successes. Teachers and leaders were encouraged to structure rigorous, active and accountable contexts for learning and using academic language every day, in every lesson phase. Providing these opportunities routinely helps students to feel more competent, supported, and up to learning across content areas.
If given a choice, most of us would chose to use casual conversational English such as the word ‘normal’, rather than a more academic work such as ‘predictable’. Short, simple sentences have become the norm for many of our students, especially with the increase in texting as a way to communicate. Finding ways to push our students to take part in classroom interactions and to use more complex language and sentence structures has become more and more important in today’s competitive, global society.
Research has shown, only 4% of an English Learner’s school day is spent engaging in student talk. And, only 2% of an English Learner’s day is spent discussing focal lesson content, and rarely speaking in complete sentences or applying relevant academic language (Arreaga-Mayer & Perdomo-Rivera, 1996). The statistics are similar for all of our students. Yet, the expectations for students to read and write academically are becoming increasingly more rigorous. If students are going to be successful at reading and writing academically, they must be provided with multiple, structured, opportunities throughout the school day to speak academically. Research has also shown that for students to develop extensive vocabularies, they must be able to connect new words to things they already know, they must have multiple opportunities to use the words, and they must have meaningful ways to use the words in reading, writing, and conversations.
Teachers were shown how sentence frames and routine word practice activities can provide students with opportunities to practice with the language they will need for writing and reading complex texts. Equally important and taught were procedures for listening attentively and conversing with partners. These procedures are practiced and monitored in order to ensure the correct use of the target language. Students are taught the 4 L’s and are held accountable for Looking at their partners, Leaning in towards their partners, Lowering their voices so only their partner hears and Listening attentively. Then, they are provided with a variety of opportunities to use these skills while practicing the use of the new vocabulary.
As Dr. Kinsella points out, educators can have a positive impact on building their students lexical skills IF we insure that; 1) all students are being taught to read well, 2) all students are encouraged/motivated to read widely, 3) teachers employ effective strategies to directly and explicitly teach the most important vocabulary words in a given selection or chapter of text (especially pre-teaching), and 4) teachers structure opportunities for all students to explore and apply new words in their reading.
Teachers who participated in this professional development will take these ideas back to their classrooms and begin to plan and practice what they have learned over the course of the year. In order to help assure that these practices successfully make it back to the classrooms and positively impact student learning, staff from the Santa Cruz County Office of Education will provide follow-up support and coaching which can include the support for such things as lesson development, peer observation, lesson reflection, and/or looking at student work as a result of instruction.
Recently, nearly 300 teacher leaders and administrators from across Santa Cruz County gathered at the Cocoanut Grove before their school doors were even opened for the year, in order to learn ways to build lessons that engage students in academic conversations. Dr. Kate Kinsella, who is known across the country for her work to improve achievement of immigrant youth and long-term English Learners, spent the day energizing her audience with strategies for engaging students and holding them accountable for using academic language in classroom conversations. Participants were shown methods for dramatically increasing the quality and quantity of verbal and written engagement each student experiences through targeted instruction and structured accountable responses.
