Assessment

Brown says testing is a “method of measuring a person’s ability or knowledge in a given domain.” He also clarifies assessment as an “ongoing process that encompasses a much wider domain.” I found his explanations helpful. He was able to make clear distinctions between the two, which are commonly used interchangeably.  Teachers are constantly assessing and testing for knowledge. At times it is overwhelming how much “testing” is imposed upon students. However, I can appreciate an assessment that is used to drive and inform instruction. Brown discusses practicality of tests. I found that section interesting. It reminded me of the ACCESS test we give students once a year to measure their progress in their English language development. I find that the test, which takes an entire week, is extremely long but yields extremely important and informative data. It gives me information to help in determining proficiency levels in specific domains and it helps me in planning for instruction. According to Brown, the time it takes to complete is impractical (which I agree). I do believe it is reliable, and valid. My only problem is that there is a social studies portion where students must identify symbol of the U.S. and for that portion I believe it is a bit unreliable. Are they measuring listening comprehension or knowledge of culture? They know this test is being taken by CLD students who are probably from different cultures. I would expect questions to be of subject matter that all would already be familiar with. As far as classroom assessments I tend to make my own. I ensure reliability I tend to use rubrics. I also use digital portfolios, conference notes, self assessments, traditional tests, observations, and many informal observations. I think what is most important though is that your assessment informs your instruction. If you give assessments and tests for the sake of testing it is a waste of everyone’s time, especially if it is not a valid, reliable, or authentic assessment.

Curriculum, lessons, & materials

This weeks reading really got into the in-depth thought processes that go into what you do in a classroom. I felt that Brown did not speak enough about assessment. I think that is a very important aspect of curriculum design that helps to inform your future instruction. It deems more of a focus especially with CLD students. You have to be careful if your assessment will measure their mastery of the content or their language. I felt the lesson plan example was good for a basic universal lesson plan. Something I always have to seriously consider is the range of proficiency levels in my classroom and how to reach each one. It requires some serious thought for instruction and assessment. And being a teacher in a bilingual program, we have to create our own materials all of the time because if you don’t take a critical look at what the district provides you may miss that it is not appropriate. Many of us have found after evaluating our textbooks that there is a lack of diversity, it is not authentic; language is a direct translation and may not make sense. So, I have spent a lot of time making my own material. However, the great thing is I put my stuff out there for others and many others have created materials and are willing to share. I have gotten some great ideas by collaborating with others on blogs and websites.

Research Progress Report

My original question I wanted to answer through research was...Do skills from L1 transfer to L2? Which do? Which do not? What about interference? After consulting with Dr. Seloni I took her feedback and changed my question to... How do teachers teach literature skills in L1 and L2 in content based classrooms? I will look into teacher training, 3-4 main issues or key arguments, and debunking some myths. Being completle honest, I have not acheived much yet. However I have found some relevant articles/references. One is as article from Language Learning and Technology entitled Computer Assisted Second Language Vocabulary Acquistion by Peter J.M. Groot. I specifically refers to what transfers to a certain degree in it's beginning. Another article is the Transfer of Comprehension Skills from native to Second Language by James M Royer and Maria S Carlo. It is taken from the IRA's Journal of Reading from March 1991 volume 36 no.6. It speaks directly towards what I am interested in looking at. And lastly I found Reading-Writing Relationships in first and second language by Joan Eistherhold Carlson and Patricia Carrell in TESOL Quarterly V.24 Issue 2 p. 246-266 from the SUmmer 1990. It seems a little off topic but may be helpful. I wonder if I can find anyone who is a member of the IRA and has access to the professional articles because they have many great ones but I would need to pay to access them and the ERIC database seems to be experiencing difficulty.

Social Responsibility and Releveance

This chapter began with one of my favorite quotes by Gandhi, "You must be the change you want to see in the world." This is so trueand as a teacher you have the opportunity to be an agent for change and to pass on these crucial words of wisdom to live by. There are many reasons people go into teaching and this was mine. Everyday I strive to be the change I want to see in the world and hopefully be a good role model of this for the students I have every year. I hope they in turn apply this and can make a positive impact in the world. To do this though, you have to have the ability to think critically and question the status quo when appropriate, so you can be that change. In terms of education and educational reform, I always ask myself, "Whose interests are being served?" And when I think of the Common Core State Standards, I know it is the private sectors interest being served under the mirage of a few good reasons. Teachers as a whole have not risen and questioned who came up with these and what philosophies of education do they fall in line with. No, the majority of teachers have merely taken them and started blindly implementing them. This ties in very nicely to Chapter 11 of Kumar, "The insistence of English only in the classroom 'rests on unexamined assumptions, it originates in the political agenda of dominant groups, and serves to reinforce existing relations of power." (p.254) Our classroom mirrors society and we must prepare students to be critical thinkners and to realize the impact they can make. I will end my reflection with another excerpt I loved from Brown, "You are not merely alanguage teacher. YOu are much more than that. You're an agent for change in a world in desperate need of change." (p.520) My question is how can we as teachers be agents for change in educational reform or policies within the districts in which we work? For example, in a district wide meeting Friday, they discussed implementing standardized quarterly testing, which does not account for our CLD students and matching the differentiated instruction they recieve to the assessment. I voiced my opinion in a room full of monolingual first grade teachers. I was met with silence and confusion as to why I was opposed to this and didn't just go with the flow. What are the right avenues to take when we want to make a change in our schools?

Integrating Language Skills

“It’s like dividing water; it flows back together again.” p.225 Language skills, such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing all go together hand in hand. We know from Krashen’s stages of second language acquisition that the first skill to develop usually is listening, followed then by speaking, reading, and writing. However, they are all interwoven and interconnected. I had parent conferences last week and this was a fact I was relaying to parents. As their children progress in their reading we will probably see their writing improve as well. I explained it worked both ways. We also discussed their child’s abilities at the moment for speaking and listening in English and how these are also connected. As their listening improves, so will their speaking. I know there are still many institutes and schools that offer classes whose focus is on an isolated language skill, such as reading or listening. I understand their purpose but I don’t think it’s possible to isolate a language skill. They must be integrated. If you are working on listening skills, how would you assess comprehension without speaking or writing? Is it possible to isolate language skills? And if you do, is that going to be best for the student or is it all context dependant?

Teaching Writing

“It is simply not possible to get a whole class of student writers from Point A (wherever they start out) to Point B (perfect, error-free papers) by the end of one writing course. It may not even be possible to get one student writer all the way to that elusive Pont B. This insight has led me to teach and think and write extensively on realistic and effective ways to “treat” error in student writing.” (Ferris p.91) When I read this statement, I felt relieved. To be honest, I often become very frustrated with teaching writing, native language or not. I use to expect, like Dana Ferris, for students to reach Point B and if they didn’t then I felt I did not do my job well enough. I took it as a reflection of my teaching. Over the past few years I have stepped back and had to change my thinking when it comes to writing. I realized I was product centered. After realizing that and seeing it in myself, I know that is not the teacher I want to be. I have tried to be more process centered and help the students focus on limited aspects of their writing at a time (really master them) and to learn from their mistakes within the focus at that time. “So what are teachers to do to help their student’s bridge that gap between what is possible, and what is expected of them?” (Ferris p.95) I really liked suggested principles and practices. I feel I have been more in line with those recently. From Brown, I also liked their principles for teaching writing skills. I thought it was great that they mentioned connecting reading and writing. I have noticed that when I help them make the connection, they learn to think about how to approach writing in a better way. However, I feel they missed stressing the importance of a teacher’s frame of mind when teaching writing. How you feel about it, what you say, your expressions, your expectations, your critiques/questions/criticisms all affect how your students will perform and feel about writing.

Week 8 Reflection

The program in which I teach is a developmental bilingual program. We have a framework for language development which we follow very strictly to ensure that students are receiving the foundation of their L1 and progressing into their L2 at an appropriate pace. This framework breaks down the percentages by grade level of how much instructional time is spent in English and how much is spent in Spanish. Being that I teach first grade, it is 80% in Spanish and 20% in English. I teach their literacy all in Spanish. However, most of their Science and Social Studies (and some Math) is in English. So, naturally those lessons are focused around the content but with integrated language skills, which happen to be speaking and listening because according to our framework I do not develop their literacy in L2 at this level. I found Brown’s text related to teaching listening and speaking interesting for this reason. It is the focus of English language development in my classroom. His explanation of what makes listening and speaking difficult was especially helpful for me. It gives me a deeper understanding of why they may be struggling at times and what I can possibly do to alleviate this. For example, the redundancy issue. The situation he laid out where the two were speaking very clearly illustrated how many of us speak and it can make listening even more difficult is English is not your native language and you are trying to focus on getting the indented meaning of that conversation. One aspect of the reading I felt strongly about was promoting negotiated meaning by handing over a bit of control over the management of learning to the students. I try to do this with my students in terms of asking them what they want to learn about or if they were extremely engaged in a particular lesson I’ll ask them how can we extend this. I know this allows them to take ownership over their learning and they are more likely to be self-motivated in learning in these situations. If the interest is there they will try their hardest to understand, or at least that’s what I see in my classroom.

Thoughts on Brown Chapter 4 & 16 and Kumar. Chapter 3

Learners need to feel "invested" in their learning for any long-term retention of knowledge. They must feel an urgency to learn and take responsibility and ownership of that. The teacher must do several things in order for this transfer or sharing of responsibilty to take place. One thing the teacher must do is to make the learning meaningful to the student. I thought of this as activating prior knowledge and building background for them if they do not have sufficient schema going into the lesson. The teacher must also promote autonomy and encourage students taking initiative towards constructing knowledge and extending their thinking. Teachers should also be communicating different strategies to their students that they can use on their own to make meaning. For example, students should be made aware of cognates and to look out for them, how to learn from their mistakes, they should reference what they know from their native language to help them with their target language, using context clues, etc. Teachers should help develop students metacognitive abilities. I was left wondering about two things after reading however. The first thing I am pondering is, how valid are the points about learning styles? Recently, there was an articl eby a group of four psychologists, including professors from UC San Diego and UCLA, that reviewed historical data. That concluded that there is little scientific evidence to support the learning-styles theory and it remains a theory.This article can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/learning-styles-theory_n_981845.html They next thing I wondered about was the emphasis Brown put on left- brain and right-brain. This came up recently in a discussion for my graduate curriculum course. My professor for that class said that left-brain right brain theory is extremely inaccurate and over-emphasized. It is simply a metaphor that self-help books blew up and took literally and got translated into truth. Personally, I'd have to do more research on it only because it is still talked about and reference in education. What is the truth related to this issue? I found the following articles related to it but would love to know more. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die http://rense.com/general2/rb.htm

Week 4 Post

Kumar Chapter2 I felt truth in the quote, “the term method is a label without substance.” At times it feels so vague or as though it encompasses so much that it is hard to define. It is used so widespread and for so many different things. So, I can understand why there was dissatisfaction and why the postmethod condition arose. It almost seems like opting-out of the “alternative methods” that cannot realistically be applied to a classroom of learners for instruction. Everyone learners differently and many of the methods seem to be extreme for practical and realistic instruction. Brown Chapter 3 I connected with the section discussing the dysfunction of the theory-practice dichotomy. The author did a great job describing the relationship between theorist and practitioner. They described it as that of a producer of goods and a consumer. Also, theorists are regarded more highly than practitioners. I completely agree. I love the district for which I work but disagree with one of their “pushes.” We are told to teach the curriculum or from the “basal” with 100% integrity because it is research based and based on theories. However, as a teacher if you do not see it working and your students are not being successful following that model, why continue it? Teachers input and classroom research should be valued more. I was glad to read that newer work views teachers as researchers and encourage action research and classroom based research. I happen to do this in my classroom for reading instruction. I am trying to collect data to support a different approach to reading than the basal in my bilingual classroom. The next thing I was reminded of when reading was of the SIOP method. I thought of this while reading about Task based language teaching (slightly) and when reading about Content Based Instruction. Content Based Instruction also reminded me of thematic units/plans. Would thematic units fall under that?

Chapter 1 - B. Kumaravadivelu

As I read through this chapter I began to reflect. What metaphor would I use to describe what the teachers' role in the classroom should be? I believe a teacher should be a facilitator and guide their students. However, with so many different teaching philosophies and beliefs it would be impossible, in my opinion, to say a teacher is like a "director" or some other moniker. Personally, I do not like the role of "passive technician." I wouldn't want to be a student in a classroom of the type either. It sounds very traditional and boring. I believe teaching and learning should be fun and interactive, collaborative and meaningful. As far as being reflective practitioners, I do see truth in that. Teachers need to reflect and think critically of what they are saying and doing. They need to examine if they are being efficient and effective. I found Zeichner and Listons quote interesting. They said that, “not all thinking about teaching constitutes reflective teaching. If a teacher never questions the goals and the values that guide his or her work, the context in which he or she teaches, or never examines his or her own assumptions, then it is our belief that this individual is not engaged in reflective teaching.” I agree with them. It is more than, “How did my lesson go?” It is deeper than that and utterly important. And the idea of teachers as transformative intellectuals I love. I find that I agree with a lot of critical theorist and pedagogists.

Brown: Chapter 1 & 2

I appreciate how Brown began the book by creating a context that readers could relate to. He set up the first chapter with an observation and view into a lesson in a classroom. This was a nice way to start and build conversations from. As far as the observation, I felt the teacher did something’s well and others things could have been executed better. For example, the audio dialogue on the CD. I was bothered by the sample the teacher chose to use. She chose a conversation with improper English and idioms. I would not have chosen a sample saying “Well, that’s what makes the world go ‘round.” Also, idioms are fine if you make a teaching point with it but to present it and not address it, I believe is a mistake. Then, the choral drilling that followed. If the teacher had a good speaking sample and made a point to instruct students to carefully listen to the speaker’s accents and try to emulate it that would be fine but she did not. She simply had the students repeat it two times without clearly stating a teaching objective. It felt as if the teacher was going through the motions. As a student, I would be bored and not understand the point of it if the teacher did not explain the purpose for the activity. I also felt certain parts of the lesson were very teacher centered. When she was explaining the “would rather” statements the students were not engaged at all. Then the parts that were student–centered, they were not provided clear instructions. It was admirable that she moved beyond the textbook and into collaborative work where they could use the knowledge and practice with it. However, the purpose and instructions for the activity were unclear. Obviously, I became frustrated with this teacher as I was reading this chapter. Something else that bothered me was the t-chart, where it was labeled “Would you rather see it?” It didn’t make sense. It was not clear. The teacher needs to model English correctly! Another moment that I did not agree with was when the teacher reverted to the L1 to explain. It does not help the students (in this case). The teacher should have rephrased herself, explained it differently, or provided a model in the L2. It was lazy of her. If the teacher makes a habit of reverting to L1 to explain, students will stop trying to understand in their L2 if it’s difficult because they know their teacher if just going to explain in their native language in a moment anyways. Also, when the teacher asked if they understood, her students clearly did not, but she moved on anyways. She should have done some further questioning to see if they understood or to see what part needed more clarification. Or she could have employed another formative assessment like showing a thumbs up or down to get a good read for their understanding. When reading about the history of language teaching I found I was able to make a lot of connections to things I had learned previously about affective filters, TPR, classical method, the natural approach, Krashens’ theories, the WIDA standards, and more. However with reading this chapter it was the background for the things I had previously learned. I found Gouin particularly interesting and sad that he was not as widely recognized. Unfortunately, that seems to happen to many bright theorists. They are overshadowed or society just isn’t ready for their way of thinking and way of seeing things. I can see how approaches seem to take some things from another, change it a bit, and create a new approach. It does seem cyclical. It’s interesting to read about. I can say that one of my language classes in high school was very much like the grammar translation method. It was the most boring thing on Earth. I am glad to read it “theoryless” but saddened that some teachers still employ this approach to their instruction.

About Me

Hello! My name is Nicole Gonzalez-Milligan. I am the first grade teacher at Bent Schools' developmental bilingual program in Bloomington. In our program we build a strong foundation in our students' native language, Spanish, and transition teaching so by fifth grade students are fluently bilingual. I am proud to work in a school where we value and respect our students native language and culture while introdcuing them into a new one. I got my bachelors at the University of South Florida in Elementary Education with a TESOL endorsement in 2008. I am now working on my masters at ISU for Curriculum and Instruction. However, I need this course to complete my bilingual teaching certificate.