Make it FUNctional! Curriculum Guidance for Teachers of ELLs/ALLs (VirtuEL Conference 2018)
by Sarah Ottow, Confianza Director
On Saturday, June 23, 2018, I was thrilled to be a part of @VirtuEL, an online professional learning conference dedicated to English learners. Carol Salva and Tan Huynh have organized this now annual event that allows educators across time and space connect to improve their practice. You can find the archived videos from all of the presenters.
I presented on the topic of curriculum guidance for teachers of ELLs and ALLs. If you're curious what that means, check out the video below.
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All right. Good morning everyone. My name is Sarah Ottow, and I wanna welcome you to VirtuEL. I'm so excited to be here this morning.
It's morning for me. I'm on East Coast time. I've got my coffee here in Boston area. Hello to wherever you are in the United States or internationally. I just wanna thank Carol and Tan for having me and this incredible group of educators here with you today. I'm also really excited and wanna give a shout out to two of the other contributors that I also do some work with in my organization. And that's Emily Francis. Woo. And Sarah Saeed. So woo hoo hoo to you as well. I'm so excited. I wanna get right in here and get oriented here.
So if you're curious about some considerations for looking at curriculum and wondering what the what the considerations are for you, whether you're a content teacher, a language specialist, whether you're an instructional coach, whether you're a trainer of teachers, or whether you're a leader, or a coach, you're in the right place. So let's dig in.
I'm gonna do my screen share with you and I'll come back and talk to you later about some of the resources and answer some questions that you might have. But for now, I'd like to share with you my presentation and dive right in. Great. So, here we go.
We're gonna be talking about how to make it functional. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean both fun and functional, operational for our students and also for the teachers. That's the most important thing. Curriculum can be challenging, and planning and designing meaningful, instructional learning experiences. And of course assessment.It is complicated stuff, and I wanna share with you some practical tips for what I do in my work, and my team does. What I did as a teacher, what I've done as a coach, and hoping really that you can walk away with at least one idea to bring with you. So with that, let's get going.
So this is a little bit of my team. I'm so lucky to have been able to start a consulting organization, called Confianza. We've got eight coaches. We're working out here in the east coast, across the US, and more internationally. We're also loving our contributors. As I mentioned before, we've got Emily Francis and Sarah Saeed here at this conference today, plus many other talented, talented teachers, and teacher leaders, and professors sharing with us to expand our content to bring to you.
We do a lot of that with our free articles online and also through our long-term professional learning partnerships. That's what we do. We coach, we do online, blended, face-to-face, professional learning workshops, courses, all about impact, all about making sure that our students advance in terms of equity, language, and literacy. You can see that at the top right here.
Try to reconceptualize ELL so it's not just about the students, 'cause it's not. It's about us. What do we need to do to support them? Well, I'll tell you what we need to do.
We need to first think about how we need to have an equity-based mindset, right? That's the first thing. And then we want language and literacy in every classroom. It doesn't matter if it's pre-K all the way through 12th grade, any classroom at all in any school. And I won't go down too far in terms of our content, but you can see here our seven major areas that we have courses and our workshops that support our professional learning partnerships.
And speaking of partnerships, these are some of the other organizations that we partner with. And I'll be sharing with you some of the fantastic resources from several of these amazing collaborators that we're fortunate to work with. All right, I wanna just say one more thing. If you're interested, I'm gonna be following up and sharing a tool that kind of puts this whole presentation together. You're welcome to join our mailing list. It's really easy to sign up at ELLstudents.com. And we send out lots of fantastic work that our contributors design and also let you know about some of the events that we have. So please consider doing that. We can stay in touch. I'd love to hear how things are going.
Confianza is a cultural concept that means mutual respect and trust. And I was just listening to our keynote talk about how it, you know, it all starts with relationships and that's what our work is all about. My dad always taught me, "Kids don't care what you know until they know that you care." You know, and that's really what it's about. We can have all the fancy curriculum, and standards, and strategies, and programs, right? But that's not gonna get us anywhere unless our students know that we actually really care about them. That's undeniable. So I just wanna start with that and let you know that that's all that my whole career has been built on as a teacher and as a coach, and now as a consultant.
And of course what we know to be true in schools, no matter what role we have. So keeping that in mind, that's key to our work. And with that, I just wanna connect to the love. I mean, gosh, if you're here today, instead of sleeping in, perhaps, or going on a walk, or going out to brunch, you know, you have a lot of love in your career, and I really just wanna thank you for that because that's incredible that you're coming to this fantastic event that Carol and Tanna put together and that you're putting in the extra effort. And I realize that a lot of you don't have professional learning, really, opportunities at your school and district. And I understand that, you know, I've been there. And that's one of the reasons that we try to bring in a lot of free stuff, you know, on our sites and also with our partners. So I'm with you, and I really just wanna thank you again for being here. Whether you're catching us live or you're coming back later.
So with that said, you know, here I am, Ms. Ottow, back in my days of teaching, thinking about how it's not just about teaching them, but again, how do we reach them? So when I go through this set of considerations about making it functional for academic language and, of course, not just making it culturally responsive, but linguistically responsive as well, I want you to think about this idea of both teaching them and reaching them and how we have to do both, right? It's that heart and the head together. So let's get into it.
We're gonna make it functional, right? It's really about curriculum guidance for teachers of English language learners. And what I'm gonna talk about in a minute, which is academic language learners. In 20, 25 minutes, I'm not gonna get in super depth 'cause it's a short amount of time. But what I wanna give you is some tips to think about. I'm gonna call them pro-tips 'cause it comes from the work that I do every day with my team. And again, take what works for you.
Another way to think about this is, as I said before, both linguistically and culturally responsive planning. 'Cause of course teaching is great, but the best teaching comes with thoughtful planning. So we're really gonna focus on the planning today. Or another way to title this, kind of tooling around with the titles, is designing learning experiences with the end user in mind. And gosh, if you don't know what end user means, I'm talking about if you're using your iPhone, you're the end user. But whoever designed the iPhone, that's the backend. Those are the software engineers, designers, so on and so forth. We wanna make sure that it's as user-friendly as possible, that everything we're doing is not as surprise to our students. That it's fun, that it's functional, and that of course it advances their learning. And that's what we're gonna talk about here.
One more thing I wanna discuss very briefly, actually two more. The first is how we've got this idea of language, right, on the left, and then we have content on the right. What's beautiful about where we're going in the field of English language development is that we know more and more that there's an overlap. And this overlap is no longer just in the domain of the ELD specialist. It's really about providing the tools and therefore the responsibility to all educators, whether they're content specialists, instructional coaches, right? Even I would extend that to instructional leaders. It's no longer just the role of the ELD teacher to be responsible for and plan and teach for academic language.
And so this sweet spot in between is what we really like to call, that's where ALLs live. Okay? So ALLs that's really all students, right? Those are academic language learners. Those are academic language learners, that's any student learning language. So if we can think about starting here in this middle ground, it literally is the shared place where we can come together, whether we're coming from content on the right, or language on the left, and think about what all students need.
And again, I'm not gonna be able to share with you kind of every little piece. That would be more and more appropriate for English learners or academic language learners. But the takeaway is to think about how you can use this as a bridge, right? Using academic language as a bridge for thoughtful planning. And what I love about it, too, is collaboration. Don't have to do this alone.
And the the other thing, real quick, that I do wanna just remind you of is I hear this all the time and I do work for WIDA Prime, I train publishers, I look at instructional materials, correlation all day long, looking at with my team, correlating, looking at different kinds of instructional materials that you can purchase.
Guess what? Instructional materials does not equal curriculum. Instructional materials does not equal curriculum. Curriculum is putting together instructional materials in a way that makes sense for your local context. Curriculum is a way of providing a sequence of learning experiences around themes, around common concepts, providing student tools, relevant, meaningful assessments, all sorts of things that one kit, I would say, probably can't provide that exactly how you need it for your students.
So we wanna be careful that when we buy a program that it's not really the end all and be all. It can be a support, it can be a resource, but it's not really going to provide what we consider an actual curriculum. So just really considering the difference between those two here.
All right, we're gonna move through four pro tips for curriculum guidance. The first one goes to what I was just talking about, systematizing, systematizing and collaborating. What do I mean by that?
I mean, let's think about when a student, the end user, is going through their school day. We don't want them to be an ELD doing one thing that's totally different, if at all possible, from English language arts, social studies, science, we could add math to this, visual arts, on and on. We wanna try to find common themes across. And this is an example of project that I'm working on with a partner school out here in the Boston area. And we're really using what I'll share with you later, these social justice standards to create quarterly themes that are more than language and more than one content area.
This is identity, right? Identity is who am I and what is my community? Well we can do a lot of amazing things there. We can do things with language functions that go across content areas. We can create autobiographies, different kinds of performance assessments, whether we're in ELD class, but possibly also, we like to say across the curriculum. So not just having the silo of ELDs over here, math is over here, What if we connect it? What if we start with the end in mind in terms of the end user experience being more cohesive. I like to say linguistic cohesion across the content area.
And with that we also talk about getting students to really own their learning, which I'll come back to later.
Pro tip number two. This is what it's all about everybody, right? Investing in students' identities, not just having them be empty vessels that we fill with knowledge. That's not what it's all about. We're talking about constructivism. We're talking about building a strong learning community for our English learners. And we're talking about whether they're newcomers, long-term English learners, academic language learners, getting to know them, helping them develop their goals.
I'm sharing with you some examples here from one of our partner schools, the ENLACE Academy, out here in the Boston area. And at the end of the presentation I'll share with you a link to some of the amazing videos that we've been able to bring, showcasing their student and teacher work at Teaching Channel, one of our collaborators. So that's that piece there on the top. And I wish we had time to go through more of it, but again, I'm gonna leave you with some links to dig into later on your own.
Another piece of investing in students' identities, as I mentioned before, is having them own their learning. Say that again. Having them own their learning. Again, how do they know what's coming? How do they know where they're going in language? How do they know where they're going in content? Can we create student-friendly tools that go across content areas, that go across the school day, that go across their career in any given school so that they can really see, "Okay, this is why I'm here. Here's how I know that I'm moving along in my language acquisition."
Another piece of this is making sure that we have windows and mirrors. You know, we have different text experiences. We don't just have the classics, if our students are, say, Dominican. We wanna bring in different kinds of authors that reflect their own experiences and make sure that they're really invested in school. Why? Because we're investing in them. That's where it starts.
Next, highlighting language goals. Now this is really exciting because this is when the world of systemic functional linguistics comes to not just the ELD world, but as I said the ALL world. And this is when we're thinking about not just content goals, but language goals. And here is an example on the left where the language goal is interpreting, right? So we're looking at not just interpreting through analysis, but also claim evidence and reasoning, right? Really being able to say, gosh, I know that this is a function because. And we can use this same scaffold, we can use the same linguistic framing in every classroom. We can use it across the curriculum. And that's what this school does.
So I actually wanna pause here and show you a video that puts this into, that puts this into context for you. And this is from that video collection I was talking about that you can find at Teaching Channel. It's the ELL deep dive. And this is from the ENLACE Academy showing a common text structure that invests in students and provides an anchor for them to think about their learning and also to justify their thinking. So let's take a look at that.
In order to have students organize their writing in a clear, concise way, I have students use a Claim, Evidence, Reason structure. So our question, did world leaders make positive or negative choices during the Syrian civil war? In the past, students were writing, but they weren't necessarily elaborating to the point where they were really explaining what they wanted to say. All right, so why did you pick this one? Why is this one the strongest read?
And so when we noticed that, we introduced the structure of starting with a claim, moving on to some evidence, and then explaining why in your reasoning. And those all correspond to a different color. So our claims are blue, our evidence is red, and our reasons are green. And students know that because we have an anchor chart in the room that they can reference frequently. Their coloring just helps them to remember if they've already done one blue, one red, and one green, they need to go back and do another claim, evidence, reason. So it helps them to sort of build that structure over and over again, especially when they're writing a paragraph.
So first, Bashar Al-Assad chose to attack the Syrian people.
For all of these, we use different sentence starters. For example, their claim should always start with a sequence word.
So for example, according to my text.
For evidence, we use "According to the text," or "Based on the text."
This show that.
And for our reasons, we always use "This shows blank because blank."
This show that Rusev helped the government.
So what I wanna see from students is that their claim is pretty short, it's just a quick introduction of their idea. Red should be about a handful the size of their claim. And then their reason should hopefully be very long. We wanna see a really, a lot of green on that paper when they're writing. So, Aaron, do you wanna respond to Luisa's point?
Yeah, I disagree with you because according to the text, it said.
When they present their arguments during the debate, they'll read those, and then they'll place them on one side of the room or the other. They'll place it on the yes side or the positive side, or they'll place it on the no answer or the negative side. It helps them to see evidence accumulate for one side or the other. I love that you're focusing on the idea that these are his own people that he's been attacking. All right, awesome. So building it into that weekly practice has helped it just become a natural part of our class. Can also say building a debate structure in this way, I would suggest practicing on a topic that's more familiar to the students, and then moving up to sort of grade level content or more rigorous content.
[Sarah] All right, thanks to Matt and his fantastic work at the ENLACE Academy. I'm so lucky to have helped build this amazing school and I'm so inspired by this work. If you've seen me present before or if you're one of our partner schools, you know that we're always bringing in some of the just really strong, not just newcomer facing work, but school facing against systemic, systematic practices. There's no reason why not every classroom, even theater in this case, or math, not just this leadership seminar that you saw, brings in claim, evidence, reasoning. Every student needs to be doing that. What is that? That's critical thinking, right? That's what we want all kids to do.
And ELLs are no different. We've gotta get them up to that level of rigor, as Matt showed. And by the way, in that classroom, it's a leadership seminar for students with limited and interrupted formal education. Believe it or not, those were students filmed last spring when we were in there and moving into level two in their speaking and writing. But gosh, they're speaking in complete sentences, right? They're writing in complete sentences. Why? Because we provide the support for them and we provide the expectation.
But more importantly, I would say, we provide the motivation, right? We get them excited. There's "I can" statements. It's not just something that we do to them, once again. Kids are really involved in deciding what they wanna learn, how they wanna learn it, and of course measuring their progress. Something that I really recommend is getting clear, not just about your language goals and your content goals and the "I can" statements, but something that is called success criteria.
So if you can, try to imagine what are the questions and answers you want students to both understand and produce, whether they're listening and talking to you as the instructor, or more importantly, to each other. And this is an exercise that I did with a international school recently where we really thought it through, and then it helped them teach to that, right? We don't wanna keep it a secret, what we think we want kids to say, what the language is of, say, analysis here. No, we wanna make it super visible. We don't want it to be something that's invisible because then how will students know it?
We just heard Jenna talk about kids need so many meaningful interactions with a word, and I would also say phrase, you know, different kinds of language before they can make it part of their linguistic repertoire. So let's make sure that we do that, right, and let's make sure that we start with the end in mind in terms of getting clear about that success criteria and, of course, how students are involved in it so they have the scaffolds that they need. Finally, pro tip number four, this is all about assessment. And I always think about talking about this first or last, 'cause, gosh, assessment is the most important piece. We don't want it to be, again, a gotcha for kids. So we wanna think about, where do we want them to go at the end of the unit, right? And how are they gonna be able to assess themselves? So peer assessment, self-assessment, all critical.
And something that we like to call at Confianza, and we helped the state of Massachusetts with and the curriculum development that I'll be sharing with you in a moment, is a language snapshot. So snapshots of language throughout a unit. Not waiting 'til the end, but looking at a pre-assessment of, if we're saying analysis language for example, how did we know that they know that in the beginning? What do they know? What words and phrases do they know, using analysis language, right? For example.
And then throughout the unit, using some kind of portfolio to document student growth. A lot of the teachers that I work with like Seesaw, they like having kids in, you know, input their own speaking and writing language samples, which I think is, again, fantastic because it promotes student ownership. However, there's lots of other ways, right? Using student journals, language, you know, language journals, language notebooks. But having a systematic way, I keep using that word systematic. That's really, really important.
If we want students to succeed, we don't want them to be doing different things across the school day. We want them to be cohesive and see the connections, both in terms of language and in terms of content, as well as in terms of the systems that we use to help them own that. So that is pro tip number four. We're rounding to the end. Oh my goodness, time is flying.
I'm gonna review with you very quickly these resources and again, encourage you to sign up, 'cause I'm gonna send out a little summary and put this together in a tool for you to stick in your back pocket, or your Google Drive, whatever you like, and go back to kind of as you're planning for the school year next year, if you're doing some curriculum work, like I am with teams over the summer, or if you're on your own, you know? I think there's something hopefully for everyone here. So let's just quickly review these resources.
The first one is from the Massachusetts Department of Education. I was involved as a consult on this really exciting unit design project that brings in a lot of these pieces that we're constantly coming back to. The social justice standards that I mentioned before, I can't get enough of them. And as a teaching tolerance certified trainer, I'm always bringing that stuff into leadership work, into classroom work, and gosh, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The social justice standards. There's a lot there that's ready and free to use in your classroom. The resources and tips that we have, that's sort of our blog. It's a little more than a blog, 'cause it's resource, it's research-based. It's connected to current evidence-based practices.
And like I said before, both Sarah Saeed and Emily Francis have helped us with that growing library, as well as our team and others. And then finally the ELL deep dive video library. That's just fantastic. I'm so super lucky to be the consultant on that project and have brought them to both Lawrence to see the video and many other videos like the one you just saw, as well as my old district in Wisconsin looking at dual language classrooms there. And so we're just thrilled about trying to keep filling in the holes of what might be missing on that, that resource bank of videos.
So what I'd like to do now is stop sharing so that I can get you back here and I can look at you 'cause I'm really kind of a face-to-face person. So let's see if I can get this. And here we go. Hi, again. Hey, I hope that was useful for you. I can't wait to look at the comments in a moment and see if there's any questions. This is the time to put in any questions that you might have that you'd like for me to go a little deeper on since we do have a couple more minutes.
So here's some of the resources I mentioned. If you go to that website for the Massachusetts Department of Education, you're gonna be able to download this entire resource guide for free. And it's called the Next Generation ESL project. And while it was designed for unit design and lesson design with functional academic language, kind of WIDA meets understanding by design, it's actually great for content teachers too. And that's what I'm trying to explain to you is I really use this, we use this in our curriculum guidance work with all teams because there's something for all, right? There's something for academic language learners and English language learners.
And then the other piece I wanna point out is that resource from Teaching Tolerance. That's just a place if you're not familiar with it, just spend a little time, sign up for their free newsletter and resources. They have incredible things like, this is what I mentioned before. The social justice standards. And in several districts right now we're building units cross-curricular for English learners and academic language learners alike, 'cause we are all academic language learners, around these four themes, identity, diversity, justice and action. And identity and diversity is essentially prejudice reduction.
But justice in action, that's collective action. And that's looking at anti-bias education, which is a whole nother YouTube live that we should do another time that I'm really passionate about. I'm super excited to do more work in that area to empower schools to, you know, to fight against prejudice and bias. So with that, you know, there's a lot of ways that curriculum can bring in a lot of the pieces that we want to have. Like social emotional learning, as I mentioned, bringing in students' identities, having them assess themselves, look at their own growth.
It doesn't have to be something separate. It can be embedded in what we do. And I think that's the most effective way that, as I said before, it's not just gonna be only a program that we buy, it's what do we infuse into it to make it our own for the students that we have. So let me take a look at the comments and see what we've got here. A Jeffrey Robinson. Hey, great. You like the wall organizer? Yeah, so the language and content objectives with the three tiers of vocabulary, that's something that ENLACE does across the whole school. And some of the other schools that we're working with are doing similar things so that kids aren't doing a cognitive leap, right? They're not moving from one class, to another, to another, with a different system. It's the same system from classroom to classroom, which is a research-based, brain-based strategy.
Ah, Damaris is in the house. Yes, she's a Fab Five Squadster from Teaching Channel ELL Deep Dive. I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for your comment. I love sharing videos from Teaching Channel. Yeah. And the color coding. I know, isn't that brilliant? Another brain-based strategy for all learners. Brain, the brain loves color, unless you're colorblind, but that might not be as effective. But yeah, those little tips are really helpful. Jenna, systematic and consistent. I know we can't say it enough, right? It shouldn't just be in one classroom, or occurring in isolation. It's great to hear your connection on that. Thanks for the validation.
Oh, thanks Valentina, nice to have you here. I see Kelly, nice to have you and everyone else who's listening either live, good morning again, enjoy. Can't wait to watch other presenters while I have the rest of my coffee. And if you're joining us, you know, on the archive, I wanna thank you for finding us and please, hopefully there's something here for you to support your practice or the teachers or educators that you serve. So with that, oh, we got one more.
Yeah, Laura's saying she just finished her first year. Oh my gosh. Three different grade levels. Yeah, finding those systems, that's what it's all about. Gosh.
So I really, again, wanna thank you for all your comments and for, again, all the love, you know, the passion. It takes a lot to continue your professional development. I know I say myself that I'm never done learning. I have so much to learn always. And as you can see from my book collection, I'm always reading and learning from my colleagues and from the teachers like you that I serve.
So I'll just stay on for another minute, see if there's any other questions or comments here. I think you've seen the schedule for the day. If you're like me, you wanna see all of the sessions at once and you can't. So luckily they are archived. And so we'll be sure to get that archive link for you so you can go back and review everything at your leisure.
And thanks again to Tan and to Carol for putting this together. It's especially Youtube Live. Before I usually use another platform, but this was fairly, you know, fairly easy, and again, hopefully very useful. Or at least something, one or two, or maybe five or 10 things you can take with you back to your practice on Monday, or for the next school year.
Thanks everybody. Have a great rest of the weekend.Description text goes here