Final Reflection

Personal Philosophy and Major Learnings

                For the final post of the class, I would like to reflect on my developing understanding of teaching English language learners and how my personal philosophy has developed and reinforced. The most rewarding part of the class has been realizing that the key elements that make great instruction for ELLs has been the same principles that I have been taught over the course of my teaching career and use in the classroom. The components that should be incorporated with ELL students, I believe, should be used with all students. It is just good instruction and can help any student with their learning.

                I did learn the stages of a second language acquisition and the characteristics of each stage. This knowledge was new to me and now I know why it is so important to know where ELL students fall into the stages. I also appreciate and found very useful the different resources we created or obtained during the course. Create the spelling guide for parents and the graphic organizers were useful and already used in my own classroom.

                Finally, this class has helped me deepen my philosophy of teaching English language learners. I believe the students deserve the best instruction we can provide them and it is our responsibility to incorporate the following elements in our classrooms:

                -objectives

                -nonlinguistic representations

                -feedback

                -self-reflections

                -graphic organizers

                -cooperative learning

                -differentiated assignments, assessments, and homework

                -instruction driven by assessment data

                -Classroom Talk

                -Developing background knowledge and vocabulary

                -higher-order questioning and thinking skills

                -hands-on activities    

                -engaging and interactive lessons

Running Records

Personal Experience

                For the personal experience of conducting running records, I wanted to practice with a different grade level then I normally test. I pick a first grade classroom that is very diverse and has multiple English language learners. I conducted the oral reading fluency for the whole class and also conducted the nonsense portion for the ELL students using DIBELS. I kept track of errors to be able to do an analysis on the miscues for meaning and syntax.

                The whole experience was very different compared to testing and analyzing fifth grade data. The younger student made many more errors than the older students. Some of the ELL students were difficult to understand at times because of their pronunciation of some of the words. Endings were a common error among the ELLs and differentiating between the different vowels also was very prevalent in the results.     

In Class Observations and Instruction

                The in class observations with our guest speakers was also very enlightening. Many of the same findings from my personal experience were the same as the ones observed in class. The pronunciations varied greatly depending on the individual students. All the students also had the same errors with ending sounds and vowel combinations. A lack of background knowledge was visible in the observations for class. Students did not have the vocabulary to support their understanding of the text, which interfered with their fluency.

Recommendations

To build background knowledge and vocabulary, a teacher could use picture cards with the word and the picture on the card. A lesson would need to be done to explain each word, its meaning, and examples. If the word can be related to a word in their culture, that would be very helpful. Practicing segmenting words would help with the ending sounds. Students need to practice reading the whole word and segmenting and blending can help with this. A vowel lesson on rule and practice with lots of repetition will be very valuable for the vowel errors.

Homework

             Homework and independent assignments should be used as a tool to reinforce and practice the concepts developed in class. Allowing student the time to apply their knowledge and extend their learning will allow students to develop the concepts and skills taught in the classroom.

 Homework should never be new skills never practiced in the classroom. It is much harder to teach students to undo bad habits developed through faulty practicing, then to teach the concept right the first time. It is also important that all homework is meaningful and not just assigned to give homework. A student can demonstrate their knowledge of a concept by doing five to six problems. For example, it does not take thirty problems a night for a student to demonstrate what they know. If a student goes home and practices a skill wrong for thirty problems, they will develop bad habits. Less is more in this case.

Meaningful homework should be differentiated for all the students and allow the students to apply their knowledge they have already developed. Teaching fifth grade, I believe that all students should be reading every night. The text should be at their independent level. Students also need to have a purpose for reading. Completing reading logs every night based on a skill learned in the classroom will set this purpose for the students. For the ELL students, the reading log can be composed of graphic organizers to help organize their information. Visuals on the graphic organizers will also help support their understanding of the different reading skills. The key to all of this will be to model what is expected from the students and what a proficient reading log looks like.

Along with reading, student can have a variety of problems that are from any of the other subjects, but all the problems need to have an example for how to complete it and should never be more than five or six problems for each topic. At a fifth grade level, students should not have more than an hour homework, which included the thirty minutes of reading. The objective for any homework sent home is to apply their skills and demonstrate their learning. Most of my students do not have access to a computer, but for the ones that do, I encourage using it to support their learning. Students have an account with the math program my school has, which allows them to practice their skills online. Technology can be a wonderful tool if students have access to it.  

Students need to have feedback about their homework nightly. First thing in the morning, I will grade the homework and discuss any issues or how to improve on each assignment. Students also get to track their progress on a homework chart that charts their points and each night students give themselves an effort grade. Self monitoring one’s own learning is very powerful.