Lots of talk about school reform continuing, in spite of the huge column inches devoted to health care (where medical care is feeling the pinch of data driven reform), and the economy (making me wonder why if “market based solutions are still the answer for education, why were they so bad in the financial industry). I guess I’m just looking in all the right places to find stories. First, NPR is doing a series on what makes a teacher qualified. It’s interesting, pointing out that the only reason programs like TFA may show promise is because traditional teacher education programs are so bad. OUCH

In More Thoughtful: My Senator Died: What Ted Kennedy Meant to an Educator we go back in time to the era before NCLB to see what made it seem like such a good idea. It is important to remember that for urban school districts serving poor/minority students, there was no magic nirvana before NCLB, and there was a reason that it looked good. As dessert on this topic, Tom Hoffman does a beautiful job of summing up the history of alliances in urban school reform in a nice little post that says a lot in just a few words.

Some interesting reading on the policy front, The School Issue – Preschool – Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? – NYTimes.com, which shows how the theories of Lev Vygotsky, a favorite in my school of ed, are being used to teach students life and school skills in the early years. I’ve taken Larry’s advice and started to follow some blogs at EdWeek, and inaugurated this by leaving comments at Learning the Language: Resource: Research Brief on RTI for ELLs, and Inside School Research: Making Education Policy: Is Research in the Mix?, where I opine on why many educators don’t have a lot of faith in research studies.

Two different ed bloggers on two very different topics at almost the opposite ends of the political spectrum had me scratching my head. Both used volume to make their point devoting a series of posts, some of them lengthy, to the topic at hand. I’m wondering if it hurt or helped their point.

First, Scott McLeod looked at research from Moe and Cubb on his blog Dangerously Irrelevant about implementing technology in education (pro), and some posts pointing out that teachers unions maybe slowing this process. By the last post, Larry Ferlazzo pointed out that the authors are well known for studies hostile to public education and in favor of vouchers. The conversation became interesting at that point. I understand why Scott did a whole series of posts, he does that when he is trying to feature a particular book, but I thought it was too much space on a topic that I tune out on. If I’m going to read something from someone I disagree with in general, at least make it short, and pithy.

Next, Tom Hoffiman did a whole series of posts on Common Core standards and how they did not compare well to international ones (which they were supposed to be benchmarked to). I get his point, but I’ll admit to skipping through a lot of those posts. I bring it up here, because Tom did solict  feedback on his approach. One of the things I love about reading Tom’s blog is how it goes from topic to topic, like useful tech info,  Tuttle SVC: How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked, to commentary on school reform, Tuttle SVC: The Wacky Broad Prize. This last one was really short and sweet. The length of his pieces also varies quite a bit. I normally love when he digs in on a topic, but this series was just too much for me in total.  I did have my favorites in the series which were the final summation, and a shorter one wickedly titled, Let’s Run this One Through the Deflavorizer.

Another interesting piece on so-called “learning styles” and how they are hogwash came from The Answer Sheet – Willingham: Student “Learning Styles” Theory Is Bunk in the Washington Post (which I got from Learning Styles Theory Is Bunk (Education – Change.org)). The comments were turned off there, but I’ll add my two-cents worth here.

The article is largely about what doesn’t work about “learning styles”, but Willingham’s comments seem to suggest that using what is often referred to as “multiple modalities” still may be a good idea (for a variety of other reasons). Summarizing:

1. There is no one to one correspondence of a student to one learning style, students have a variety of preferences that are influenced by a number of factors, like background, interest, etc.

2. Learning styles are promoted as celebrating differences, but instead attempt to place students into easily dealt with categories.

3. There is benefit to varying delivery of instruction

I think he did a good job in the article in making a potential difficult subject comprehensible to a lay person like myself. But, he got some really rude comments. I think this is because teachers prefer to read about “actionable” research, in other words, how does this work in my classroom. Because he was not clear until the comments section that delivery instruction in a variety of ways is still a good idea (for different reasons), reading the article alone, a teacher is left to ponder, “well, should I just do lecture and written tests then?” I think this is why learning styles became popular. It gave people a concrete approach, and all you needed to do was fit the kids in a pigeon hole. I know of a number of other reasons to use visual and auditory support in my class, over half my students are language learners (the sort of background issue alluded to). I also appreciate that this is a complex process that is not easily reduced to slotting students and going through a check list of activities.

All the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival can be found here.

Once again, thanks to all of you who participated!

Karenne Sylvester relates an excellent, and brief example of teaching idiom in Business English Idioms – The ball’s in your court appearing at How-to-learn-English. She even manages to include variants for auditory, visual, physical (kinesthetic) learners. Not content with this, she includes an “encore” with this post, The Business of Twitter – an English for Special Purposes Lesson residing at Kalinago English where her business students discussed business plans for twitter to develop their language skills. Brilliant!

Mathew Needleman shares some home-truths about making movies in How to Get Started Making Class Movies delivered at Creating Lifelong Learners.  It can be tedious getting to the final product. After seeing some of Mathew’s students’ work, you’d probably agree it’s worth it. The bad news? Another of Mathew’s home-truths, making movies is like playing Carnegie Hall, you need to practice. Not content with cinematic creativity, Mathew Needleman deconstructs and reconstructs Comprehension Strategies Posters V.3 on Creating Lifelong Learners, taking boring old clip-art and making it pop visually (and make more sense). Even if you aren’t stuck with Open Court for reading, these are great.

Drew analyzes How to Make a Good Impression in the IELTS Speaking Test ~ English Trainer carried on the English Trainer blog, with some really frank, and easy to follow advice that students may not be aware of, but need to know, to put their “best foot forward”.

Darren Elliott explains what he does in teacher development – Assessing Speaking contributed at teacher development blog. He does a great job of analyzing some of what he does (formal speeches) in contrast with the type of oral communication they are likely to encounter. He then asks for folks to share how they assess speaking, so do Darren a favor, and keep the conversation going by sharing what you do.

Edu-tainer relates how he introduced Role-playing Games in the classroom #1 on Edu-tainment Canada to teach two otherwise surly Korean teenagers English. He definitely wins the wise use of minimal materials prize for that hat-trick.

Myscha Theriault explores Spelling Activities: Twenty-Seven Ways to Practice in Style at Myscha Theriault in a post that will help you take spelling activities from the boring, “write the word 10 times” to something meaningful and engaging.

Ann S. Michaelsen creates a full unit on Teaching Hamlet putting in an appearance at Teaching English using web 2.0. It looks short and sweet, but it’s packed with meaty details in the links. Take a bite!

Larry Ferlazzo takes a look at chatbots, online applications using artificial intelligence that students can use to practice conversational English with. He analyzes and lists the best of them at The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… shared at Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…. The skivvy? Most are only good for fun and not suitable for replacing human-to-human conversational practice, except the last one. Nice job making sure folks read the whole article Larry!

In a post aimed at EFL students, One Language provides suggestions for Literary Choices for Students of English as a Second Language published at the Learn English blog. The article has a nice helpful and encouraging tone as it leads student through some of the entry-level choices to English literature.

AtlTeacher relates a project from Mr. Mayo (a recent “Totally Wired Teacher” winner) in Performance Assessment: Creating Films shared at Awesome Resources for Curious Teachers. The project had a small group of students in an after school group, creating stop-motion films to show what they had learned.

Seth Dickens shows how to connect classes in difference countries by pairing students up with Skype Calls for e-Twinning in L2 showing at DigitaLang. The post does a good job going through the overall setup and preperation. Another helpful part was the analysis of both what went well, and what he would have done differently.

Nik Peachey describes an activity for improving English pronounciation in Poems for Pronunciation putting an appearance in at Nik’s Daily English Activities. This is Nik’s blog aimed at EFL/ESL students. He goes through the steps for getting a poem, and recording it to practice pronounciation complete with screenshots (helpful for students and teachers alike). The activity has potential for oral fluency practice with middle grade ELD students. Hat tip Nik!

Michelle Klepper sees an application for a white elephant gift of 20 Questions for both struggling readers, and language learners in 20 Questions. What’s really nice is that she provides some activity plans for how to implement this tool to maximize the learning. Not content with that gem, she then outlines how she had students create Amazon Book Review 1st Post as part of doing book reviews. I like how she focuses not just on the thinking, but the actual steps and how long it took. And the final entry in Michelle’s triology chronicles implementing Language Arts Stations in an eighth grade class with a large number of ELLs and SPED (special education) students. Once again, very thorough in describing the setup, the implementation, and what worked, or didn’t. All of her posts appear at Ellclassroom.

There is thinking outside the box about how to teach English, then there is David Deubelbeiss’ brilliant, but not to be taken literally, The 7 Sensational Sins of Great English Language Teachers appearing at EFL Classroom 2.0 – Teacher Talk. Resist not the temptation to sin, and be a better teacher for it.

Mary Ann Zehr recounts how Seattle Plans Overhaul of ELL Programs–With Stimulus Funds reported at Learning the Language. This is a really interesting use of stimulus funds, and is news worth learning more about. Keep sharing Mary Ann!

Deven Black asks, “What were they thinking?” in Vice Versa showing at Education On The Plate about the scary and foolish things that can happen when Special Education meets ESL students. I used the post as a springboard for my own experience with ESL students not getting special education services when they probably should in Stupid ESL and Special Ed Tricks.

BUT, there is still time to add your submissions to the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival is coming up on May 31st, so don’t delay, get those submissions now before you miss your chance!

We are looking for posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work. Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

Photo Credit: Dead End Black and White on flickr.

When she arrived from Ecuador two years ago, Juanita, who barely spoke ten words of English, was placed in a special education class. Today she is a sixth grader who speaks English well but she is still in a special education class. Her teacher and I are wondering why.

Juanita is a real person, though that is not her real name. She is charming, funny, friendly and hard working. Aside from the remnants of her accent she seems like any number of other girls in our inner city middle school. Juanita smiles easily, tells a good joke and occasionally gets a little cranky. Her classwork and grades are not spectacular, but they are not terrible either. They are on the level of a middling general education student.

A month after he came to the US with his parents Robert was enrolled in kindergarten in a multi-ethnic, mixed income suburban district. This district has a policy that all students born outside the US must be placed in ELL classes, no exceptions.

Blanket policies are rarely a good idea, even if that policy would have helped Juanita. Here’s why.
Robert was born in South Africa to British parents. English is not only his native language, it is his only language. He speaks it with better enunciation and grammar than the school aid who insisted she had to enroll him in the ELL class.

I wanted him to share because I’ve had the opposite situation come up where students who are ELLs are not tested for Special Education services because we want to give them time, but what happens when you wait too long, which I shared in a comment at Education – Change.org: Arne Duncan to 8-Year-Old Woodrow Wilson: “No College for You”:

Clay, I’m usually with you on this, but I’m sorry, when my students end up coming out of second and third grade not reading, they’re screwed. We have a sixth grader like this, cannot read, and is working on decoding at age 12. He should have been identified LONG ago for services. He may go to college one day, but it’ll be a minor miracle if he does.

What’s all that other stuff about where I’m disagreeing with Clay? Well, actually when you get down to it, I wasn’t. Clay was discussing how Arne Duncan had said there was no chance for a kid who can’t read at 8 years old going to college, to which Clay pointed out President Woodrow Wilson (and a President of Princeton) did not learn to read until he was 12 years old. But, at the heart of Clay’s post (and the really good comments there) and what Deven says clearly is that you really can’t use the same yard stick to measure all kids and blanket policies that do NOT treat our kids as individuals will fail them in the end.

My proposal would be that you use what data you have (which will include both summative testing, and observation) to help these kids, but ask questions, and try to get quality data (not like testing a student new to the country in English as happened to Juanita). I have found EL students muddling along through school at the two lowest proficiency levels (we have five in California with the top two being passing) on state testing. Sometimes the adults in charge take a look at the kid and just say, well that’s because he is learning English, just give him time. While it is true that not all kids learn at the same speed, sometimes that is a sign that more is needed and it doesn’t take much to figure out if you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

Sitting on our school’s student study team (the team tasked with looking at individual students who are struggling), the test scores can tell us a bit, but it’s the questions we ask each other about the individual child that tell us more. If an ELL child has low test scores, the next thing to look at is to look at their CELDT scores (a test of English acquisition that all California students take to see how they are progressing). If they start out behind on the standards test, they could be progressing in knowledge, but it won’t show because they are still behind grade level. The CELDT tells us some more about how they are doing on things like listening and speaking in English. The test stays the same for a 2-3 years, so a flatline score is a sign that something is not going right. Ask yourself, are they getting English Language services that are addressing their specific deficit, or are they learning something they have already mastered.

But, it’s the subtle questions that can really point to a problem. California’s default model for ELLs is to put them in a Sheltered English program. Parents are asked once a year what how they would like their children to be educated, in a bilingual or sheltered program. Most opt for sheltered. This means that we are not doing assessment in the child’s home language if they’ve been in the country for more than a year or so. One of the most important questions to ask a parent when we have a student who is not progressing both in academic testing and in English acquisition is  are they maintaining or losing their knowledge of their home language. If they aren’t learning English, and they are losing their home language, they are, overall, losing language. This is not a good thing. Do the kids have signs of attention problems like a wandering focus? Do they have an inability to retain information after it is taught to them? Is this true in BOTH English and their home language? If you are answering yes to these questions, they could have a processing disorder, and should be tested. If they are in primary, and they have few home language skills along with below age-level English, that can be a sign of a language disorder (like PDD-NOS or Austism Spectrum Disorder). ASD is really hard to spot in Language Learners, but it happens.

I think all these cases teach us the danger of making assumptions where we either ignore data, over-rely on data, or look at the wrong data, instead of looking at the total picture, and the total child.

What will we be getting? A teacher laptop for all classroom and resource teachers, along with digital projectors, and document cameras.

Why does this help with English Language Development? While this is far from one-laptop per child, I think it’s a necessary first step. We have teachers with broken VCRs and no DVD player. The district has sprung for Discovery Streaming, but for most teachers, the only way to show it is if I burn a dvd for them, or they have the kids huddle around a computer monitor. We have Inspiration/Kidspiration (another district-wide purchase), but teachers can only hand out paper copies, and can’t do class “webs” for thinking and sharing ideas. Since the classrooms have 1-6 outdated desktop systems, the computer is something that kids go an do by themselves in small groups (which is good), but there is no opportunity for teachers to share online images, and sound files to illustrate concepts (don’t know what a galaxy is? here’s a pic from NASA kids).

I also think that giving teacher a laptops of their own will be a big game changer. The flexibility of laptops cannot be underestimated, it gave me the ability to experiment and use technology in ways I never dreamed of. It will give them the ability to use computers for their lecturing in a way that will make it more visual and engaging. Since based on my observations (dropping in classes, etc.) they seem to give students independent work time, and not just play sage on the stage, I don’t think this will let them continue with outmoded practices, but instead make the amount of lecture time they engage in really count. Many have already used technology, like tvators (all of these are currently “dead”), to supplement their lectures (locating supporting images) and having that available on the fly is something they value. This tells me they already have some good instincts about how to use technology to improve instruction.

The next part is what I’m really excited about. Another order with digital recorders, cameras, and camcorders for each class should be next. This will let them document, and share student learning that is authentic. They can photograph illustrations, demonstrate concepts, show their oral listening and speaking skills, and it can all be saved to review their progress.

What would I like to see them do with it? How about using Inspiration to talk about stories they read, and record book talks they have about it too? How about demonstrating concepts, and narrating what they come up with, then sharing it with the class? How about showing videos as an into or building background? What about sentence lifting on the projector with color-coding of different elements? Why not show images and visuals of ideas and concepts that are being taught?

Will all my dreams come true? Probably not, but it’s a step forward, but scary because now I have to talk tech with the folks I work with, and make it work for them.

I did a five minute demo/discussion on Diigo, but since I didn’t have a computer ready to go running through the door, so it was mostly talk, but folks asked some good questions and were engaged.

edubloggercon » Palm Springs 2008 Agenda

This is the agenda page for Edubloggerconwest 08 which I “highlighted” in Diigo as part of my demonstration.

edubloggercon » SocialBookmarking is my stuff for a presentation on Diigo. Since I had to move to the second venue, down the hall, only a few participants followed, in addition, I had been testing a new USB Webcam with mic the night before, and it had taken over my audio system in one of those nasty ways that did not let me play audio from a YouTube video on Diigo. I show examples of what I did with it, and those who saw it, got a great feeling for the possibilities. I also showed off some capabilities to others more informally.

I participated in and took notes on the next session:

edubloggercon » ProjectBasedLearning

which included Sylvia Martinez (Generation Yes) and Jane Krauss (recently published “Reinventing Project Based Learning”) There is a blog post here from Gail:

» Technology and Project-based Learning BlogWalker

Over lunch, I discovered two other folks there who were experts in areas related to my next presentation on Language Development

Bruce Gale is a clinical psychologist who works on social skills with ADHD/ADD/ASD/ODD children, and is using animation is fascinating ways with his L.U.N.C.H. School Year Program.

A coworker of my friend Jose Rodriguez, John Rivera works in LAUSD on doing trainings on Universal Design in teaching. He shared how he is trying to transform teaching so that differentiation is not added after a lesson is planned, but is built in as a lesson is being developed. He shared these resources:

CAST: Center for Applied Special Technology

Tools & Activities: Teaching Every Student

And, Gail has some of the UStream sessions on her blog, thanks Gail!

» Streaming from Edubloggercon BlogWalker

On a more frivolous note, I share I’ll have an aria with that Angel Hair pasta…
about our dinner at Cafe Italia.