>> Hello everyone and welcome to our webinar today.
We're very pleased to share with you today
work that is being conducted under
the U.S. Department of Education's Investing
in Innovation Grant Program,
a program administered under the Office
of Innovation and Improvement.
The program has funded 172 grants
that operate in 50 states and the District of Columbia,
and they are working with over 2 million students.
The I3 Program aims to develop and expand practices
that accelerate student achievement
and that will prepare every student to succeed in college
and in their careers.
Among our students in grades k-12
in our schools are many students
who are learning English as a second or additional language
while also learning the academic content
that they need to achieve.
There are approximate 4.8 million English learners in our public schools
and they comprise about 10%
of all students in grades k-12
and so with that in mind our webinar today
is one of particular interest to many schools
and teachers, and districts.
My name is Annette Zaler, I'm a facilitator together
with my colleague Mahiri Silva at West Bat
for the I3 Grantee Community of Practice
that focuses on English Learners.
The two grantees today will be sharing their work
and discussing how they work to improve
English learner students achievements
working together in collaboration
with their participating school districts.
Our presenters today will discuss two projects,
Leading with Learning or LWL
and Teaching English Learners
Early Mathematics, or TEAM.
For Leading With Learning Pam Speesher
is the project director from West Bax
and she will be presenting together with Fabian
who is also working on the project
as the district's co-faciitator
and coach for Fresno Unified School District.
Then as the second grant we will have presenting on Teach English Learners
Early Mathematics the team project Madeline Jetter
who is the project director,
California State University of San Bernardino,
and Deborah Bogala who is a teacher
at Harvest Valley Elementary
School in the Roma Land School District.
Both projects provide models for improving teaching
and learning practices
and also improving educational outcomes
for English Learning students through powerful
teaching and professional learning.
Their approaches engage teachers
in careful observation
and examination of English Learners
learning needs and also careful observation
and examination of the outcomes of the instruction.
So they are both supporting teachers
in very important ways
and engaging in professional learning.
In their presentations today some of the questions
that you will hear addressed
are what does high quality professional learning
for teachers of English learners entail?
And what happens for English learner students? What do we observe?
Teachers take on high leverage pedagogical practices
and professional practices focused on the English learner
and how are these approaches strengthened by collaboration
within and/or across schools?
So we'll be looking across both of the projects.
They are both addressing these kinds of issues.
Before we start and have the presenters begin to speak
let me just note again
as you saw on the first slide that the webinar will be recorded
and it will be available as an archive for later viewing
on the I3 website and you have the links there.
We also want to note as before that live
captioning is available
and a link to that was available earlier.
Also we are welcoming your comments and questions.
Please enter them in the chat box.
We'll be stopping after each presentation very briefly
and answering some questions then,
and the presenters may also be answering some of the questions
or reacting to comments in the chat box
as they present.
We're going to also reserve some time at the end,
about 5-10 minutes at the end for a broader discussion
of the presentations
and for the cross-cutting themes
that are seen in the two presentations.
So with that,
let me start to introduce you
to our agenda again
and we'll begin as mentioned before with Leading
With Learning with Pam Speesher and [INAUDIBLE]
Fabian and then we will stop briefly for questions
and then we can go onto the team presentation
with Madeline Jetter and Deborah Bagdala.
So, Pam, would you like to begin?
>> I would love to. Hello everyone, good morning or good afternoon
depending on where you are in the country.
It's a huge honor and pleasure to be with you today
to share some of what we're doing in our project,
to hear from one of the people
who is doing the heavy lifting on the ground
to make a positive difference
in the lives of our students
who are learning English as an additional language.
So thanks so much for letting us share.
Again I'm Pam Speesher, I'm a project director for our I3
grant project called Leading
With Learning and for those of you
who aren't familiar with the I3 grant program,
Annette described a little bit about it
but it's a really wonderful grant opportunity
because it promotes true partnership
between the grantee and their partner districts.
And our partner districts
are Fresno Unified School District
and Sacramento City Unified School District in California,
and it also promotes partnership with the private sector
which has really been fantastic.
We've learned a lot through our collaborations
with our private sector funders
and you can see who they are on the school there.
And I want to say, the part that Fi and I are gonna talk about
is broken into two parts.
The first part I'm just gonna provide
a very brief overview of what Leading
With Learning is so you can wrap your brains around that,
and then the second part
is basically an interview
with Thea Fabian who is one of the coaches.
She's a district person,
she's a coach of teachers in the project
and she also co-facilitates the professional learning.
So without further ado I'm gonna get started but I did want to mention
that the overview is probably gonna seem very fast
and so if you have additional questions
I want to invite you to our website.
There's a screenshot there, it's Leading with Learning.
You can just Google it, or you can contact me if you have questions.
I'd be happy to speak with you.
All right, so just to get started we went into this project
with this burning inquiry question
that we really wanted to figure out, and that question was how do we create
the conditions for high quality
teaching and learning experiences for our children
and youth who are cultural and linguistically diverse?
Particularly our English learners?
And when we say conditions we mean
not just high quality materials for teachers to use,
but how do we create the infrastructure,
the support structures that promote a sense of agency
and empowerment for all people
in the system form students,
to teachers, from coaches, principals,
district leadership teams?
How do we do that?
And so that's the adventure that we embarked
upon and we're gonna share a little bit
about where we are now.
We're in our final and third year of the project
and we certainly have learned a lot through our partnerships.
I'm gonna just give you a little overview of the project,
what is this thing we call Leading with Learning?
What do teachers do when they learn a different project?
And how are the approaches that teachers
are learning and coaches are learning,
and principals are learning,
how are these approaches strengthened
within schools and across schools?
So those are the questions
that I'm gonna attempt to very quickly address.
Let's see, so what you see before you now, there's a lot of text on that
[INAUDIBLE] I apologies,
I'm violating all sorts of Power Point protocols and principles
but just to give you sort of an overview
of what the teacher's course looks like,
it's a two year course
and these are 10 full day sessions
over the course of the two years.
It's preschool through 6th grade
and it's whole school.
So all of the teachers
in school have to vote basically to participate,
which kind of shows readiness
and a willingness to embark upon this adventure
and the other critical thing too for us
is that we start in this project
with two or three schools
so that there can be some cross-school collaboration.
We have our teachers working together across schools,
and then the idea is to expand our two additional schools.
So we ground the teacher's learning into two interdisciplinary units.
The first one is basically Social studies,
ELA, ELT using culturally responsive texts
and getting into things like close
reading of complex texts
and effective questioning and writing,
and then the second unit
is an interdisciplinary science
ELA and ELB unit focused on environmental science
where the students learn about ecosystems
and the keystone species within them.
And then they learn high leverage pedagogical approaches
within those units that they can go and try out in their classrooms.
And then in both years there's the requirement
because it's a course for teachers to go and try things.
We call these focused application tasks.
So they go and try things out and then they come back
and try to share what happened with their colleagues.
The first year's sort of inquiry light and in the second year
it's much more systematic
and we go through
what we call an inquiry for equity process
where we use a series of protocols
to really get deeply into the reflection
about student learning and teacher practice.
So that's sort of an overview
of what the teacher's course looks like.
Now I don't know about you, but in California,
and I think this is the same nationwide,
our teachers are trying to learn,
and manage, and implement multiple sets of standards.
So they've got their reading language arts
standards, their ELB standards,
their next generation science standards
and so we kind of frame
all of the teaching of learning
and professional learning
around these we call them four big areas
of classroom advocacy for English learners.
So you can see on the screen what they are.
And these should not be necessarily new things to people
but we're really trying to reinforce them
because we know how important they are for English learners.
The bottom right hand box might be new to some people.
This is I think one of the things that makes our project unique.
This is really building students' language awareness,
kinds of getting into analyzing the language
in complex texts with a focus
on how it's making meetings
and this happens through discussion.
So it's discussion based language analysis.
And in California--oh,
Thea has remarked that our core materials
that we use in the teachers course of course are standard
so we get really deeply into supporting teachers
to use the standards to drive their instruction
so we do a lot of standards analysis,
we model lessons
that are aligned to the standards
and address the standards, and in California
we also have--which I believe
is still the first in the nation
and only in the nation, English Language Arts,
English Language Development curriculum framework
which really guides
these integrations of standards.
And just very briefly, our model extends beyond the teachers' course.
The teachers' course is really what ground everything
because we know that in order
to really make change we've got to really focus
significantly and substantively on teaching and learning.
What happens in the classroom, right?
So what you see here is our comprehensive
model which includes our teachers' course,
our coaches' course
which is its own set of learning tasks
and that's blended so it's face to face and online.
We have online TLCs.
We have a principals' course for our principals.
Our school site leaders in their work,
and then we work with district leadership teams
to really reach across departments
and share the responsibility
for the success of English learners
and create scaling
and sustainability plans
to make sure that this work continues and expands
after the two year period where we're there.
And in our project we really view coaches as the key levers of change.
So the coaches are not only co-facilitating--most
of the time they're co-facilitating
all of the teacher professional learning
and then doing the in
between session learning that is so critical
and really is what gets implementation going,
but they also have their own course
and they also serve as a thought partner
and support person for principals.
And so what we're gonna do now
is I'm gonna stop talking about
what the project is,
kind of that context grounding
and we're gonna interview a coach
who does the work in the ground
so you can get a taste of what this looks like.
So I'm gonna be asking Thea to address these questions from her perspective.
What do coaches do in Leading with Learning?
What is their role?
What are their responsibilities?
From her perspective what happens for English learner students
when teachers are implementing these practices?
And then finally what happens for teachers
and leaders in general through this project?
So I'm gonna pass the ball over. Oh, Thea has the ball, great and Thea,
I'm just gonna let you share
and then I may jump back to some of these questions
at some point
but please share your wisdom with us.
>> Okay, that sounds great. Can you hear me all right, Pam?
>> Yeah, I can hear you.
>> Okay, excellent okay, so in this slide we see a document
that we use frequently in our project
called the Student Discourse and Learning Inquiry
Tool and this has been a great guide for us
to have rich conversations with teaching teams with admin,
with other coaches about what we want to see
in those four big areas for advocacy
for English learners that we'd like to see in all classrooms.
Important to note is that this is a conversation piece.
This document helps us to look at student behaviors
that really help to highlight
what students are doing
when there is abundant writing
and rich conversations around complex texts
when there's text oriented, talk about language,
that piece that's new to a lot of people.
When there is that culturally responsive environment,
and when there is observing students
closely and providing that planned and just in time scaffolding.
So this document was really important to always come back to and talk about
what we were seeing in student behaviors
in the whole process of this project.
This document is one of the many, many writing samples
that we collected throughout the course.
This writing reflects a week
of learning around a rich,
rich story called the Spider
and the Fly
and this was a rich, interactive,
real-life process
that highlighted the development
of understanding story structure
and the specific language
that belongs to stories
and the students in this case
were re-telling the story
and the writing that they were able
to do reflects the conversations
that they had around the text over the time
and so you can see a lot of pieces of the language
that they actually picked up from the language
that they were discussing of the actual writer of the story.
And then here is the printed out language
from that same author's retelling of the story.
You can see in this text that the student
is utilizing a lot of the same language
of the characters in the story
"come up my winding stairs."
If you're familiar with the story,
it's in a more archaic form of English
that we worked on with the children.
Come hither.
The story also begins with a really good orientation.
The retelling orients us to where it's happening,
introducing the characters,
then we get retold the story
and then near the end this little author
is able to capture a nice resolution to the story.
So in this retelling she's really captured that unique structure
that stories have.
And then I love the expression on this little girl's face.
Really important to this project
is to bring in the joy of learning
and really empower the students with a sense
that they are intelligent learners and contributors
and they are writers and the joy
that we see in students
when they're able to really master this language
in this case of storytelling,
but we've also done this through weeks on processes
and unit planning and science informational texts
and other types of texts.
We really want to capture this joy
and collaboration with peers
in the language development process
and the writing development process.
Okay, so this slide is really important. In the framework our vignettes
are highlighting aspects
of what is called the teaching and learning cycle.
And if you're familiar with this work it involves
five phases of inter-related work
in order to help scaffold students
into developing very well written academic text.
So in phase one we have building the field,
which means building really rich content knowledge
and that could be for example in our science projects
building very specific scientific knowledge around
what we're going to be talking about.
Phase two, exploring the language of text types,
I'll just stay with science.
We would look at how science writers
put together their texts
in terms of purpose, structure, and language features.
In phase three, joint construction of texts.
This is where teachers facilitate the development
of texts that are derived
from all of the students' ideas
of what they want to put in the text
and the teacher
guides the students to writing texts
that really exemplify the purpose, structure,
and language features that are appropriate
in that disciplinary writing.
And in four we have independent construction of texts
where students put together their own texts
that demonstrate this ability
to put together a text with a purpose, structure,
language, features and rich content.
In phase five we have reflection
on the texts that we've written
and that involves student-led discussions,
teacher led discussions,
rich conversations with teacher
and peers about what was done well,
and maybe some points of improvement and revision,
and the important thing about this
is that the goal is student autonomy
with writing high level
academic texts in different disciplines
we know that we have texts that are privileged in school
and we want to make sure that we give all of our students
all of the opportunities possible to master the reading
of these disciplinary texts and the writing of them.
And this point illustrates something really important.
We take an additive approach to learning language.
So for example when we speak of students' abilities in language
we always say first,
what are the students able to do?
Students come to school with rich knowledge
and rich language abilities
and it's just that the language that's privileged in school
is not necessarily the language
that they come with.
So through this project as coaches,
as teachers, as administrators,
as district leaders we developed a sense
that what we're doing in school
is we're adding to what children are already able to do.
They're usually able to say I don't like the spider.
My favorite part was the fly.
She said no, it's scary.
And we're working on a registered
continuum to advanced students
through being able to master the specific language
of the text type that writers used.
In this case it's a story but in other cases
it will be different types of writing.
So this additive stance
is really important in our approach
to seeing students
and really understanding what we're doing.
And this is me with the students in a classroom
at Raoul Elementary School,
and we are working on developing
this writing and conversations around the text.
And you can see that some of our notes form the class
and kids interacting,
we have a lot of charts
to refer back to information
that we've discussed and in organizing
our retell of the information.
>> Thea, could you go back to that slide and just talk very briefly
because I mentioned earlier
that we really position coaches
as key levers of this positive change in school districts
and could you just talk a little bit
about how the coaches in this project coach teachers?
>> Yes, of course. So one of the reasons that I'm doing this in a classroom
was I was working with this fabulous teacher
by the name of Marceline at Raoul Elementary in Fresno.
She's a wonderful 1st grade teacher
and it's amazing the work that she puts in with her kids,
and in learning these new processes
a lot of what we do is we go into classrooms
and we will plan with the teachers
and sometimes the teachers
will be executing instructions,
and in this case
I'm executing a weeklong development
of this interactive read aloud process.
We have called it Spiral,
and it's actually around a five day process
and so the teacher,
you can't see her in the picture
but she's sitting very close to me
and so are some other teachers
and what we would do following these sessions
is we would go out and we would have rich conversations
about what the students were doing.
What was happening? What were they saying to each other?
What were they writing?
What did you see in their interactions?
What was being developed?
So this is the format of the intensive
coaching aspect of the project
where we have this constant back
and forth conversation and sometimes
identifying practices and sometimes
the teachers are doing it and sometimes we're planning together.
And then this is one other example.
We have really so many examples from our project
because there's so many areas to look at,
but in this case this is a cohesion
analysis of a response to literature
and some of the aspects
of the writing are pointed out
that help to create cohesion in this analysis.
So in this case the writer's talking about Gonzalo,
a character in the story Seed folks,
how he feels proud of this equation
that he's put together,
and the equation in this case
is something about the meaning of life.
And all of these aspects that are highlighted
are linked together
and it's how the writer makes connections
and creates cohesion in the texts.
So this kind of work, especially around cohesion helps
the teachers to understand
maybe going beyond vocabulary and understanding
how language works to present coherent texts
and this is work that we would do with the teachers
in the intensive coaching
and that we would support them to do with their students
and understanding
how English works in academic texts.
And then we have this little box pointed out.
This is an area of our four big areas
for classroom advocacy groups.
Advocacy for Ls that people are not very familiar
with are ELD standards,
and especially our part two
standards point out the specific language features
and structural pieces,
and purpose of texts
that really need to be mastered in school
that are not evidenced to students
and require some explicit and implicit teaching.
So this links to the purposeful planning with teachers.
This is a figure from our framework
and we have framing questions
for all students
and we also have additional questions for Ls.
Our framework has so many resources
that we utilized in this process
that really point to questions
we need to ask ourselves when we're planning
for high leverage instructions.
So we've been able to pull numerous documents
from our framework to guide our work
and to be a constant support
to us in planning this work.
And then at the bottom here we have analyses the text itself
to determine what it affords.
A lot of our work involves text analysis
and preparing teachers and coaches on how to analyses texts.
And again we would analyses texts for content, for themes,
but we would also analyses texts
for the purpose, the structure,
and the specific language features
that we want to work on with students.
And then we would always ask the question,
what do my students need and how do I know?
How is this that I know that?
And that reflects a constant attention
to assessment for learning,
the assessment that happens while teaching
and learning are in progress
so that we gather as much information about our students
as we can to inform our practice.
This is a snapshot of two little pictures
of a couple coaching sessions.
These are just our coaches' form Sacramento and Fresno
and one of the great aspects of the project
is that we were able to collaborate
with these coaches
and leaders from Sacramento
and that really informed our work
and bring in a constant dialogue about ideas
to improve instruction in both
Fresno Unified and Sac City Unified.
Pam, did you want anything else before questions?
>> I don't think so, I think we might have gone over
a little bit on our time so
[INAUDIBLE]
that was a beautiful explanation of what you do as a coach.
>> So we actually should probably move on to the next presentation
and perhaps if there are questions
they might be addressed in our later discussion.
Unless Pam you see a question
there that you wanted to address more immediately?
>> There is one about people are asking where these materials might be.
On our website one of the things
that we're trying to do to disseminate this work
is I've started a blog.
So we have some blog posts that give little stories
about what's happening with some white papers
and also just some examples,
and the other thing
that was asked are the keystone pedagogies
linked explicitly to specific teacher competencies.
They're not explicitly linked to teacher competencies
although I think that's a great idea, we should probably do that.
They are very explicitly linked to California's ELE standards
and common core reading and language art standards
as well as the NGSS.
So in our lesson plans
we make very explicit connections to the standards.
The teachers understand
how the keystone pedagogies
are enacting and support students' development
of those standards.
>> So thanks so much Pam and Thea, that was really very interesting
and we'll look forward to discussing further
toward the end of our webinar session.
I'd like to turn it over now to the team project,
to Madeline Jetter and Deborah Bogdala.
Are you ready to pick up, Madeline?
>> Yes, thank you. I hope you can hear me okay.
>> Sounds good.
>> Great, so thank you I'm Madeline Jetter from Cal State San Bernardino
and I'm the project director
for Teaching English Learners Early Mathematics,
or TEAM, and I'm here with Deborah Bogdala.
She's a teacher at Harvest Valley Elementary School
in the Roma Lands Schools District
in Riverside County in California
and she's a participant in our project.
So after giving a short overview of TEAM
I'd like to focus on the work
that our teachers do in lesson study collaboration.
So I'll describe our model for lesson study and my co-presenter
Deborah will share an example of her work
with her team of first grade teachers and lesson study.
We'll also discuss our learnings form the project
and from lesson study.
Okay, so TEAM, or Teaching English Learners Early Mathematics
is a four year professional development partnership
supported by an Investing in Innovation Grant
with additional funding
from the WK Kellogg Foundation,
also Heisin Simons,
Toyota USA,
and the David and Lucilla Packard Foundations.
We're wrapping up the second year of our four year project.
We are a partnership between my university,
Cal State San Bernardino,
the Riverside County office of Ed,
the Roma Land School District,
New View School District,
and also Roma Land Head Start
and State Preschool Programs.
We count about 70 education participants.
These are classroom teachers, some coaches,
and some classroom aids,
and also the school principals and site director.
So our project focuses specifically on improving the learning
of mathematics for English learners
in the early grades for several reasons.
First in our partner districts and in our state,
California we see that English learners
are most concentrated in the early grades.
Also the math achievement gaps
that open in those primary years
tend to persist throughout the schools years
and research by Greg Duncan and others
has shown how early skill in mathematics
is highly predictive of later success in schools.
Finally California began implementing a new set
of rigorous mathematic standards in 2014
and we saw a need to support educators
in making needed instructional shifts
to meet those standards
also while giving their
English learners access to those standards.
So with all that in mind our focus in TEAM again
is to improve the math achievement
of English learners in the early years
and we've implemented three main interventions
in order to do that.
So first of all, all of our participants attend
an 8-day summer institute that focuses
on math content with attention
to best practices for English learners
and then in that photo on the right
you can see a small group of our teachers
in the summer institute.
Second we do interactive note booking.
So each team teacher is issued
a class set of composition books
so that students can keep interactive notebooks during math time
and the intent here is to capture a record of their learning
and for the student to reflect on that learning.
And then in the photo on the left there
you can see how some 2nd graders
are using their composition books
to record the work they're doing with Tenner Frames.
So thirdly, let me go back for a second here.
So the third employment of our project
that I'd like to focus on actually is the lesson setting collaboration
that our teachers engage in through the academic year.
So with that, some more on lesson study.
So lesson study is a method of teacher driven
inquiry that aims for incremental improvements
to instructions through collaboration
and lesson study
has some features that research has identified
as characteristics of high quality professional development,
namely it is ongoing,
it's connected to practice,
and it's connected to specific content,
in our case mathematics.
Lesson study has been gaining attention in the United States
ever since Stigler and Hiebert came out
with the Teaching Gap in 1999,
and they describe the Japanese practice of lesson study
and really credited that practice
with the high quality of Japanese instruction.
So I'll describe what happens in a typical cycle of team lesson study
in the next few slides.
So this diagram shows how teachers
collaborate to study, plan,
teach, observe, and reflect on a lesson.
So an entire cycle takes place
over three in-service days
and our team teacher to complete two cycles of lesson study
in each project year.
So that's six days total engaged in lesson study.
So I want to describe each phase of inquiry
and how it can support teachers
in reaching their English learners.
And you'll notice me highlighting the most relevant points
in each phase as I describe them.
So first in the study phase, teachers examine curriculum resources.
They often review progressions documents
that lay out the expectations from one grade level
to the next
and an important part of this phase in lesson study
involves determining student needs.
So teachers often include formative assessment
to help them better understand what their student's needs.
This might involve assigning a performance task,
examining student notebooks,
or another assessment chosen by the group,
and based on this work the teachers
set their goals for their inquiry.
Next in the planning phase teachers select the lesson content
and they design their lesson.
So teachers often learn a great deal by trying out a tack
before they give it to their students.
So by seeing how many different methods their colleagues
can find to solve a math problem teachers
build their own ability to anticipate
and respond to student approaches,
and this turns out to be such a crucial element
of planning instruction.
Also as part of the lesson planning teachers
decide what evidence of student learning they'll look for.
So some lesson study
teams choose one or more focal students
and they follow these students' progress
throughout the lesson.
Those focal students may be chosen based
on language proficiency
or other reasons chosen by the group.
And our team teachers typically spend one full day
on the study and planning portion of the lesson studies cycle.
So those first two ovals that you see here.
So next in the teaching phase,
one teacher from the team teaches a lesson
while the other team overserves the live lesson.
So all the teachers observing the lesson
then collect data as agreed by the group
in their observation protocol
and for us this usually takes place
in the second day of a lesson study cycle.
So the really key question that teachers try to answer through observation
is what do we see students doing,
and what do we hear students saying to develop key habits of mind
and show their understanding,
and this really focuses teachers
on what students are actually learning.
And then finally in the reflection phase the group reconvenes
to examine their data,
identify student learning and misconceptions,
and generalize their conclusions and determine next steps.
So if time allows, teams will make adjustments to the lesson
and then teach and observe
the revised lessons a second time.
They might teach the same lesson
to a different group of students,
or they may teach a different lesson
based on the needs revealed in the original lesson.
So again team teachers complete the full cycle as I described it here
over the course of three days
and in each project year teachers
complete two cycles of lesson study across six in-service days.
So I've got a team participant here,
Deborah Bogdala and she's here
to describe her experience
through an actual cycle of lesson study with her 1st grade team.
So I'll hand it over to Deborah now.
>> Good day everybody, okay to start off our day
our group which usually consists of six to eight teachers,
we work on developing our norms
for the lesson study in order to insure that our day
will be as productive as possible.
Our duty for lesson study will change with each lesson
such as being the facilitator, recorder, note taker.
We discuss possible topics
to conduct the lesson study
based upon classroom assessments
and historically what concepts students
may have had difficulty understanding.
Once we narrow our focus we review the state standards
relative to the concept we wish to study.
We look on our University of Arizona Progressions document
which explains why standards
are sequenced the way they are,
point out cognitive difficulties
and pedagogical solutions.
We read articles relative
to the focus of our lesson study
which gives us more background before planning.
We then use a backwards mapping method in order
to develop our lesson sequence.
We determined the flow of the lesson based upon our objective
and start with a number talk usually,
and number talks were developed for classroom teachers
to engage students in mental math
through grappling with interested mathematics problems.
Target vocabulary is determined through planning,
taking into account the EL proficiency
level and how vocabulary will be utilized
within the context of the lesson.
We develop anchor charts, gather manipulatives,
prepare sentence frames,
station rotations within the blended learning model,
strategies to use with students for language development
with a goal to develop their CALP,
which is the cognitive Academic Language Proficiency,
or formal academic learning which includes
the listening, speaking, reading,
and writing about the subject area content material
because as time goes on the language demands
become more cognitively demanding.
Also, an important component is a journaling
which is incorporated into every lesson.
Enrichment activities are developed as well,
and differentiation of the lessons
such as use of various sentence frames
and also
differentiated online programs.
Okay, then what our group had agreed upon to study
was 10 frames and equality.
Our previous experience and research confirmed
that children in elementary grades generally do
not see the equal sign
as a symbol
that expresses the relationship
is the same as.
They usually think that the equals sign
means that they should carry out the calculation that precedes it,
and the number after the equals sign
is the answer to the calculation.
We knew that it was important to cognitively plan
for the lesson to determine students' understanding
of 10 frames and equality.
The cognitive planning process
is basically the act of mentally
anticipating the right way to reach a certain goal
which is the crux of your planning
for a successful lesson.
>> And by the way, the photograph that you see there--this is Madeline--is
from their actual lesson that they taught in the classroom.
>> After the initial lesson and allowing the students to practice
and discover in pairs using the same game cards
but their own set of double 10 frames it helped
to keep them on track during the activity.
Some students watched others,
and others copied until they understood the concept.
Some students needed more guidance for questioning strategies
posed by the teacher
at their level of English proficiency.
Some needed to go back to a 5 frame
to get a better grasp of the concept
before returning to 10 frames and double 10 frames.
I also noticed that the use of the manipulatives contributed
to their meta cognitive processing as well
as allowing them to work it out
on their own or with a partner
before teacher posing guiding questions
if necessary.
This lowered their effective filter,
making them feel more at ease.
What I noticed was that the students using the counters from the double
10 frame for the equation 9+7,
then some of them discovered that by rearranging the same counters
to first create a 10,
then adding the left over counters
to the second 10 frame they made a new equation
which helped them to understand
the concept of equality, i.e.
9+7=10+6.
With some they were able to grasp
the concept through the discovery
and manipulation of the counters,
some trying several times.
For some I used their primary language of Spanish to question them,
which assisted their comprehension
and again lowered their effective filter.
With others I varied the use of language
to the level of English proficiency
within their zone of proximal development
with a knowledge that ELs are learning a new language
as well as a new concept.
Using clear, explicit language
when the new concept was introduced and identified
the instructional objective helped the teacher stay focused.
One thing I learned is that we much remain consistent
in our use of target vocabulary,
allowing our EL student to experience it
in multiple modalities and manners
within the context of the lesson.
For instance, using the words
fill up the 10 frame seemed
to create the situation
where students wanted to grab more counters
to fill up the 10 frame
so it was important that we stay consistent
in using the term rearrange.
Okay, so my learning from the lesson study,
well one of the items,
sentence frames supporting discourse in writing,
students can practice with various structured language
practice activities and strategies
what they want to say before verbalizing
to a partner using the sentence frames
which they can then use when writing with scripts
as well with scaffolds they're learning such as in the first part
I and just etcetera.
Visual and manipulative tools:
research has shown that when the children are encouraged
to make sense of the mathematics
by using the manipulatives
as tools to solve the problems
posed they were able to transfer
the knowledge to novel situations
and also to solve problems
posed symbolically which assisted
with the concept of equality
and use of the equal sign.
The importance of the group work, partner talk, the wait time.
So as you may know all students,
but especially English language learners need many
and varied opportunities to practice their skills
with assistance from the teacher
as well as independently.
During the initial lesson we provided students
with multiple opportunities
to respond and engage students
in choral response activities,
elbow partnering, and paired sharing.
This provided ELs with a low risk
setting for practicing new skills
while simultaneously providing the teacher an efficient way
of providing all students adequate practice.
Students then practiced the skills and strategies
they learned through student directed activity
such as peer tutoring and cooperative learning.
Explicit discourse markers
are particularly effective
if you pair them with visual prompts
such as utilizing the fingers
for their different learnings.
A second effective practice is to consistently use
targeted academic language to develop their CALP,
which is the Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency,
but allowing the students to use their BICS,
their Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills,
their informal language to make sense of what they're learning.
And the importance of cognitive planning?
The cognitive planning encompasses
the neurological processes
involved in the formulation, evaluation,
and selection of a sequence of thoughts
and actions to achieve a desired goal.
>> Okay, so I hope you can hear from Deborah's experience
just the level of detail
that goes into that reflection
and some of the specific learnings
that arise out of observing those students
and how students react to something
that a teacher might toss off without really thinking about,
like fill up versus rearrange.
And Katherine Lewis talks about teachers engaged in lesson study
developing the eyes to see students,
and that's really what we hear in a lot of our teacher comments.
So these are some of the comments that teachers
make about their learning and lesson study.
So what I thought students were learning
and what they are actually learning are two different things,
and teachers often don't see it
until they are in the classroom
watching their students this closely.
And then
[INAUDIBLE]
>> So we need to allow the students the time to discover,
come up with their own understanding.
It doesn't help the student
when the teacher directly teaches everything to the student.
And these are strategies
that I have learned through my involvement
with the team, grant facilitators,
which is headed by Dr. Jedder,
and I really do thank him for all of this learning.
>> Al right, thanks Deborah.
Right, and the other aspect of lesson study
I think it sort of gives peers
that freedom to experiment with something
and then observe the results.
So that learning about giving the time to discover,
the teacher may not have felt free to do
that without the setting of lesson study.
So that's been our experience
and so we're ready to open it up for questions, comments,
or connections that people saw.
>> Hi, this is Annette again. We have seen a couple of questions
that have asked more generally about
how the projects have been evaluated
and one that asked about any findings on student growth.
>> I can [INAUDIBLE]
>> Oh, go ahead.
>> Okay, I was just gonna say that one thing at the school level
that we've done in the Leading With Learning project
is that we've conducted several
writing walks across the schools
and the grade spans where we look at how the kids are progressing
in the content themes,
purpose structure
and language features of the writing
that has been worked on
and as kids are having the opportunity
to write across the range of text types
that are really important in school
and so that's kind of on a local level
and I'll pass the baton to Pam for more of the system's evaluation.
>> Yeah, so we are trying really hard to have a more nuanced
and comprehensive approach
to measuring impact and so in each of our projects,
in each of the I3 projects we have external evaluators
who are looking at impact
in terms of I won't speak for Madeline
but in our project it's looking at standardized tests,
growth on both academic standards tests
and English Language Proficiency
tests are felt for example
and internally--and
then of course lots of surveys,
and interviews and things of that nature,
and then internally within schools
we've been working with principals and coaches,
and district leadership teams
to really work on their processes,
and approaches, and tools for measuring progress
and growth in a more timely manner.
So as Thea was mentioning, one of our requirements
is for them to take field trips to other classrooms,
for principals to visit the school
and to kind of measure the quantity
and quality of writing,
and then also they have local assessment and data
that they've been looking at--reclassification data,
their benchmark tests data
and that's kind of a purpose of the project too,
to get more internal focus
on measuring impact
and growth to be able to do something with them
in a timely manner.
>> And this is Madeline, so in terms of our evaluation yeah,
we also look at student assessment data both
in mathematics in in English Language Arts.
In our first year we really have been
focused on using teacher growth
in hopes that the student results
will follow in the second
and later years of the project.
We also look at the notebooks themselves
as a measure of the fidelity
of implementation of the project.
>> There are a couple of other questions.
There's one that asks about outreach
to parents of English learners
and to what extent parents are informed about the program,
and then also one about the teachers
and the degree to which teachers are bilingual
and any role of that.
I'll say that for reading learning projects one of the aspects
is that the schools began
to post the student work very visibly
within the halls of the schools
and they would invite parents to view this work
and have conversations.
Also the teachers were having a lot
of conversations with parents
about what the students were doing
because the work was changing
from what the students had previously done
or I should say work was being amplified in certain ways.
and then I'll also say that at the same time
that this project was taking place Fresno Unified
was rewriting their English learner Master Plan
and this involved a lot of rich community discussions
involving parents and families,
and we also use our district ELAC
or DLAC to inform parents
a lot of the changes that were happening
and giving them knowledge about the importance
of specific academic language being developed
and some of the processes that were happening in school.
>> And I'll just add that in our--this is Pam--in
one of our bigger units of study
the theme is family, community,
and identity
and in that unit we use
some culturally responsive text,
some culturally relevant text.
The culminating tasks that students are asked to do
in the unit have to do with things like interviewing parents,
celebrating their communities and their families,
and so the idea
is to promote this school
family communication and collaboration
and then somebody else also asked about
how many of the teachers were bilingual?
One of the interesting things in our project
was that of course in California we're kind of experiencing
a renaissance of bilingual education
which is very exciting
and this project in particular
I think appealed to bilingual schools
because a lot of the work that we were doing has to do
with culturally and linguistically responsive
reaching which clearly sits very nicely in bilingual programs
and the partnership was very rich
because we were actually co-constructing
a lot of the materials for bilingual classrooms
and then one of the principals pointed out
in one of our final principals core sessions
one of the results was that it created
greater communication and collaboration
between the bilingual teachers at the school,
teachers in the bilingual strand
in the school and the teachers
who were not in the bilingual strand
because they were working on the same approaches
towards the same goals etcetera.
So those have been some interesting learnings for us
but we're very excited about
our collaborations with our bilingual schools.
So Spanish, English, and non-English schools.
>> Yeah, and just one quick comment is that in that process
we worked very hard to raise
the level of academic language instruction in Spanish
because we are very much committed to the desire
to have our kids in our dual immersion programs
and bilingual programs perform
at a very high level in academic Spanish also
and that took a great deal of work,
but certainly worthwhile.
>> We have just a couple minutes left in the time remaining
and I was just wondering
if you could each briefly speak
to the point that each of them do involve
some sort of systemic change
in the collaboration among the teachers
and I believe collaboration within the districts
and I'm wondering if you just have brief comments
that you might make on the?
>> Well, so this is Madeline. For us it's really the lesson study
collaboration and that collaboration
takes place across sites
and in some case across districts
when teachers are working in grade level groups.
>> Yeah, so I think similarly--this is Pam--we build
into the model an infrastructure for collaboration.
So as I mentioned it's a whole school model.
So everyone sharing the responsibility
and then we group teachers by grade span so across schools.
So preschool through 1st grade is grouped together
and three or four schools working together,
2-3, 4-6 and so that's for teachers,
and then another systemic approach
is we in our network of principal courses
all of the principals from the Leading
With Learning schools get to get together
and visit one another's schools
and then work on common problems of practice,
areas for growth.
The coaches are coaches from across the entire district
so that makes it a district wide initiative
and then they work together across both districts.
and then finally our district leadership teams,
really that's I think an area of a lot of excitement right now
because I don't know of a lot,
but in my experience many district leaders
across departments don't necessarily work together
on the shared responsibility
and improving practice, and policies,
and programs for English learners
and we've actually created an infrastructure for it
where they engage deeply in discussions
about the work itself,
about impact and about how to scale
and sustain the work over time.
So those are some systemic methods that we've used in our project.
>> So much, and thank you everyone for your attendance today,
I particularly want to express our appreciation to Pam Speesher
and Thea Fabian with the Leading
With Learning project and Madeline Jetter
and Deborah Bogala of the Teaching English Learners
Early Mathematics project.
If you'd like more information about these and
about the I3 program please visit our website
and thank you very much.
Again a reminder this will be archived
and so you can go back
and listen to sections of it later.
Thank you everyone for your participation.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you.
>> Thank you, everyone.
For more infomation >> Russia Prepares Missile System for Delivery to India - Duration: 0:56. 
For more infomation >> Bill Could Make it Easier For Tobacco Companies to Target Indonesian Youth - Duration: 0:55. 
For more infomation >> 7 HERBS FOR SKIN & HOW TO HEAL SKIN CONDITIONS (ECZEMA, PSORIASIS, ACNE etc) - PART 1 - Duration: 6:03. 
For more infomation >> WHO Study: Smoking Bad for Environment - Duration: 0:58. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét