I’ve spent some time considering which angle of addressing language learners needs I should start this series of blogs off with. As it is close to the start of a fresh new school year in Australia, and in a week, teachers will be back in school beginning their prep for their newly assigned classes, I decided on this take.
Let’s look at how you can set up your classroom for success as you get to know your students, and understand their needs. It will be perhaps a week or two before you begin to identify what level of language acquisition students are at. Very often, I have found teachers already considering their distribution of assessments long before they truly know how to support their students. This would be around week 3 or 4 of the new term.
Consider implementing the following practices in your classroom in the beginning of the year. These come to mind for me as often, when teachers call me in for coaching (usually around assessment time when it may be a bit late really), I look for the establishment of these routines and practices first.
Firstly, establish oral language work, where ample opportunities are provided for students to talk about their learning. This supports all learners to reflect on their learning, activate or align to prior knowledge, and provides teachers with crucial feedback on their teaching.
To do this, consider how you set up your classroom and your routines while teaching. I’ve always arranged my classroom to ensure students can easily shift seating from facing me for whole class instruction, to shifting seating for pair work or group work. Once students are used to this set up, you can incorporate short talk sessions that don’t interrupt the progress of the lesson. I always keep a strict time limit on these sessions – sometimes just 30 secs even (its amazing how much students can cover when faced with the energetic pressure of limited time). I rarely go beyond 3 minutes unless it is a group task that has very clear guidelines and expectations that demand it.
For the language learner, including beginning learners, this opportunity to reflect on learning with peers is crucial. I often reiterate to staff that they are not the only ones in the classroom, and they do not have to solely take on the burden of addressing the needs of a highly complex class – students learn from their peers too.
Secondly, establish a note-taking process in the classroom. Language learners need multiple reviews of their learning for it to stick. Too often, I have done walk-thrus in classrooms and found students stuck in some part of learning. I never just give students an answer, but support them to know how to find it themselves. My first response is often to ask students to refer back to their notes, scaffolds or exemplars and they have none to show. I worked in the last few years in a highly digital environment, and found when the lessons were not set up for this, students couldn’t refer back to the lessons and notes leading to this point.
Teachers, on the other hand, constantly complain of how many times they have to repeat information to students. Set up the classroom routines to ensure students know how to review their learning. This goes a long way to building the metacognition students need to address their assessments, and ease the teaching load.
Share your thoughts!