English Language Learners (ELLs)

Anti-Racist, Anti-Bias Classrooms: Teaching Emerging Multilingual Students

October 12, 2019 by Sarah Plum(itallo) Leave a Comment

This post is dedicated to Elsa Mendoza de la Mora.

Elsa Mendoza de la Mora was a loving wife, mother, and friend. She was a beloved educator, colleague, and principal. The first El Paso victim to be laid to rest, Elsa was remembered by a colleague as always fighting for what she wanted, having a passion for teaching. As I reflect on her life, I recognize the innate gifts Elsa had as an educator and a leader. Gifts that connected her with students, staff, and the community. Gifts that were ripped from her, her family, and the community that loved her – in the name of white supremacy.

Elsa, a multilingual Mexican American, acutely reminds me of how precious the students and families are that I serve. When I considered how I could contribute to this series of posts talking about racism, I considered the experiences that I have had as a teacher of multilingual students that have roots in dozens of countries across the globe. All too often multilingual students are overlooked and underserved; this is the work of white supremacy.

Before I begin, I’d like to explain the terminology I intend to use throughout this post. I do not use the term “English Language Learner” (ELL) or “English Learner” (EL) intentionally. While these are widely used terms in education, these are terms that center whiteness and are deficit-focused. Not speaking English fluently is NOT a deficit. The students that these terms attempt to describe are, in fact, emerging multilinguals. Students may already be fluent in one or more languages – this is an asset. I use the term emerging multilingual or multilingual to honor a students’ first language(s) and acknowledge their inherent strengths.

When I consider what’s important to me as an educator, these three areas come to mind (and in this order): relationships with students, relationships with families, and instruction. With that in mind, these are the my most important takeaways to ensure anti-racist, anti-bias language development.

Relationships with Students

Relationships are key in centering anti-racist, anti-bias education and language development within your classroom or school. When relationships are formed, challenging conversations or situations that may follow become easier and more productive to navigate with trust.

Be persistent and intentional in establishing a relationship but let students guide the way at their own pace. Emerging multilingual students, especially when new to a setting, often listen and observe first. This is often called the “silent period” but I prefer to acknowledge this as a time of taking in one’s new surroundings in an intentional way. Ensure that your student knows you are interested in them by greeting them warmly (in their first language), speaking to them often, and listening attentively when they do communicate, no matter how brief. Persist in this, as it is important that – no matter how long they listen and observe – they feel welcomed.
Be explicit in the value you hold for a student’s first language and culture. Through words and actions, ensure that students know and understand that you value their gifts as a multilingual. Avoid praising a student for their acquisition of English without praise of their multilingualism. Honor all contributions made socially and academically, through whichever language it comes. Ensure that all students hear and see this appreciation for multilingual students as it is critical modeling that is necessary to establish an anti-racist, anti-bias classroom.
Be intentional in nurturing peer-to-peer relationships. Language is never a reason that a student shouldn’t be able to develop strong peer relationships. Regular classroom routines to build community, such as classroom circles, should be made accessible and inclusive of all languages spoken. Consider adding visual supports to these community-building routines, as well as utilizing translation technology. In the past I have taught students, monolingual and multilingual, how to access Google Translate on classroom devices and supported them in initial communication with peers. Technology has advanced significantly and it is now possible to utilize speech recognition within the app on iOS and Android devices to hold entire conversations.

Relationships with Families

Trust between families and schools is paramount to creating safe, inclusive spaces for thriving learners. This trust takes intentional work and time to build, but is a part of the foundation of an anti-racist, anti-bias classroom.

Be knowledgeable about the supports offered by your school division/district as well as community partners. Does your division/district have a central office department dedicated to emerging bilinguals? Whether or not it does, what supports are in place for families enrolled in the division/district? Are there in-house or external translation services provided? Programs for families to provide them with the necessary information and access to support for their children as they start school? Who do you go to if you need additional instructional materials or guidance to provide the best possible learning experience for a student? What community organizations can provide you or families support if your school division cannot? It is our responsibility to know how to advocate for ourselves, our students, and their families.
Be bold in honoring families as their child’s first teachers. Cultural perceptions of the role of family versus teachers in a child’s education can vary. It is important to, from your first interactions, position yourself as a partner in education with families. Communicate your desire to learn from families – their knowledge about their children and how they best learn is invaluable to you as an educator. Their funds of knowledge (entire book available here) are priceless. Their cultural and linguistic heritage is an asset. This is not a one time communication – it must be a continuous communication in word and deed. Look for opportunities, big and small, to seek their support and guidance in the educational process.
Be intentional in building an extended classroom community. Families should feel welcome in their child’s school and in their classrooms; they should feel welcomed by other families, too. You are the gateway to building that community. Ensure that school-home communications are multilingual, as well as in-school events. Modeling the importance of multilingualism to every family, regardless of language status, is key in building an anti-racist, anti-bias school community.

Instruction

Quality instruction for emerging multilingual students is a right, but it is often not a reality. Insufficient knowledge, supports, and materials often sustain inequities that are deeply rooted in white supremacy within our systems of education.

Be relentless in your pursuit to provide differentiated instruction. We can differentiate by content, process, product, and learning environment – one or more at a time. In the pursuit of an anti-racist, anti-bias classroom we must walk the road toward equity with intentional instructional decisions. We must consider the barriers to participation and success criteria for each and everyone lesson – and then we must remove them via differentiation. There is a way. There is always a way. Below is an example of how you might differentiate a reading mini-lesson.
- Choose evergreen read alouds, intended for use throughout the year with multiple comprehension strategies, that are available in multiple languages. You can acquire copies in multiple languages by requesting it from your administrator, division, community organization, local public library, crowdsourcing, or seeking it out on YouTube. Ensure that students have an opportunity to either read (if they are able to in their first language) or listen to a text before/during an English-language read aloud.
- Provide reading response opportunities that match the skill being taught to English-speaking peers. When a student has an opportunity to develop their literacy in their first language, their capacity to develop literacy in English widens/deepens. This could mean using the same question stems but using a translator app (or embedded technology in Microsoft Office suite, for example), or visual prompts, or “turn-and-talk” with a peer using an aforementioned conversational translation app.
Be critically reflective and analyze how your classroom serves your multilingual students.
- Go through your classroom library. Do you have multilingual texts? Do you have multiple races, ethnicities, religions, gender identities, sexual identities, and abilities represented? Are they represented in ways that go beyond tokenization?
- Is your teaching culturally responsive? Do you integrate your students’ culture in meaningful ways throughout your day, month, and year?
- Are you actively supporting students in maintaining or obtaining literacy in their first language? Do you share with them what the research tells us about how strong multilingual students are?
Be a learner. Model for your students what it means to be a life-long learner. When you fail, name it. When you do better because you know better, describe it. Be vulnerable in your pursuit of an anti-racist, anti-bias classroom. When our students see us rising to a better plane, they are more willing and better equipped to do so themselves. They will ask the questions that lead to better relationships; they will be willing to apologize and make things right when they harm. And yes, that all starts with the explicit instruction we are delivering in our classrooms – social-emotional, civic, and academic.

By no means is this an exhaustive list of ways we should be supporting our emerging multilingual students, or in developing an anti-racist, anti-bias background. I encourage you to continue your learning on this topic, as I will continue to do myself, as we owe it to our students, their families, and ourselves to do so.

This work is never over.

This post is from a blog post series on racism. If you would like to read some other posts related to race and its intersectionality with the classroom, click here.

My Name Matters: A Challenge for All

July 18, 2017 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 11 Comments

Each year, usually in the back-to-school season, I see a trend on social media. I’ve heard it in conversations in the teacher’s lounge and even in the Dollar Spot aisles at Target. I’d wager a guess that you’ve heard it too at some point.

It’s name-shaming.

I’ve written about it before (The Top 3 Reasons Name Shaming Harms Students) and spoken about it on my social media accounts (such as this video). I’m not satisfied, though, with just talking about it… I want to DO something about it. I decided that this back-to-school season is a perfect time to launch a simple, yet important challenge that absolutely anyone – in anyone school! – can do.

Meet the My Name Matters challenge.

Our challenge goal? To end name-shaming in any of our spaces – whether it’s in our schools, homes, or on social media.

The challenge has two steps:

Honor your students’ names by learning to pronounce and spell them correctly.
Take steps to eliminate name shaming in your own communities by speaking out.

I, of course, want to provide you with tools to be successful in this challenge! I have some suggestions and thoughts about how to work through each of the two steps below.

Honor your students’ names.

It is so important that we honor our students’ names by pronouncing and spelling them correctly. There is an article published by NEAToday that discusses the lasting impact of mispronouncing students’ names, as well as this must-read from Cult of Pedagogy.

It’s important… we want to do it… but how?

You’ll want to begin by getting your class lists and identifying any names that you’re not certain of pronunciation. This may be names that have multiple pronunciations, or names that you are not at all familiar with. Next you can:

Make contact with the students’ family, introducing yourself, welcoming them to the classroom community, and inquiring as to how they pronounce the student’s name at home. You may want to explain that the purpose of your phone call is to make sure your student feels welcome and valued by you pronouncing their name correctly.
If you’re not comfortable with asking a students’ family how to pronounce their name ahead of time, be sure and ask the student how to pronounce their name upon meeting them. Be sure and repeat the name back, checking it against their own pronunciation – you may not get it right the first time, but you will get it right with practice!
Contact previous teachers and ask how they pronounced the students’ name and compare notes – this is a good stop-gap measure if you’re unable to contact the family and want to try to pronounce the students’ name correctly prior to meeting them. Err on the side of caution, though, as your colleagues may not necessarily be pronouncing it correctly themselves!

Remember: keep at it until you get it right, and if you make a mistake – apologize! Make sure your students know that it is important to you to honor their names and that you’ll keep at it until you do.

Don’t be a bystander.

The saying goes: when we know better, we do better. We know name shaming is wrong, so we’re going to stop doing it ourselves. But… can’t we strive for more? I think we can, and I want to end name shaming TOGETHER.

So don’t be a bystander! If you hear or read someone that’s participating in name shaming, say something.

Confrontation and disagreement can be difficult and certainly uncomfortable, but we can’t accomplish our goal of ending name shaming without doing the difficult work. Here are some suggestions for conversation starters/responses when you encounter name shaming:

“I know ________ may not be a name you’re familiar with or would name your own child, but I bet ________’s family really like that name. I know I would feel hurt if someone criticized my name or my child’s.”
“I don’t think it’s right to judge ________’s name. Names are personal…. ________’s name means something to him/her and their family. When we make fun of it, we make fun of them. That’s not something we should do.”
“It might be difficult to pronounce ________’s name, but I can’t imagine what it must feel like to constantly be called by a nickname you didn’t choose or have your name mispronounced. Have you thought about writing down the phonetic spelling and practicing it?”

It begins with us.

Name shaming is one of many issue facing our students today. Ending it begins with you (and I!) deciding not to accept it in our spaces. It’s one small, necessary step we can all take to dismantle inequities facing our most vulnerable student populations; each step we take propels us forward with increasing momentum.

5 Reasons You Need The Reading Strategies Book

July 23, 2016 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 1 Comment

I’m excited to team up with my colleagues from the Teaching Mosaic to share with you what I’ve been reading this summer – please head over to Tamara’s blog to check out all of the other fantastic posts from my “peeps”!

Chances are, you’ve seen or heard about The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo. It might’ve been on a colleague’s book shelf, discussed in a staff meeting or PLC, or come across one of your social media feeds. If you’ve already bought it then you’re already in on what I feel is the single best professional resource for teachers, EVER. If you haven’t, then read on (and share with a friend) for the five reasons YOU need The Reading Strategies Book.

1. You teach readers.

This is the most obvious reason you need this text – you teach readers! If you (like me) teach readers – of any reading level – you need this text in your arsenal of resources. Veteran teacher, first year teacher… it matters not! This text has something for every teacher of readers in any school in any location. It doesn’t matter if you use a basal, balance literacy model, or anything else – this text is adaptable and compatible.

2. You differentiate (or want to).

Most professional texts help you differentiate reading instruction in theory. This professional text helps you differentiate in practice. In my humble opinion, there’s no more important of a subject to differentiate than reading. Reading is the key to success for our students, and if they do not receive what they need – not what the average of their classmates need – they will not experience the success they deserve.

Jennifer Serravallo has laid out this text so that you can easily target your students’ needs and differentiate in multiple settings. The text is laid out first by goal (such as fluency or identifying main idea in fictional texts), then by strategies specific to supporting that goal. The strategies are organized by a range of suggested reading levels to help you further select strategies that are just right for your students. You can also see whether a strategy is limited to a particular genre, or applicable to any genre. This organization allows you to differentiate not just within a students’ reading level, but with their strengths and weaknesses in comprehension or particular genres as well. With this text, having mixed strategy groups and the flexibility to move students frequently is a breeze.

3. You set reading goals with your readers.

Research tells us that goal-setting in reading is increasingly important. One of my personal goals as a teacher of readers is to improve my practice when it comes to supporting my readers. The way I’ve chosen to do that is focusing on setting specific reading goals with each of my readers — and following-up to refine and select new goals as appropriate.

Serravallo is a proponent of goal-setting, and makes it easy to use The Reading Strategies Book as your primer for your students’ goals. Her table of contents is setup by reading goals, which makes it easy to select an area of focus with your reader and follow-up with a teachable strategy. You can then track students’ progress toward their goal as they integrate each strategy into their own reading behaviors.

4. You love attractive, purposeful anchor charts.

Raise your hand if you’ve searched anchor charts on Pinterest or on Google in the recent past. Raise your hand if that past was this week. Or yesterday. Or today. My hand is held high! I am a total sucker for an attractive, purposeful anchor chart – the real key being purposeful. While I love my Mr. Sketch markers and anchor chart supplies something fierce, I love my students’ ability to repeatedly refer to an anchor chart to scaffold and support their learning even more.

The vast majority of strategy lessons that Serravallo includes in The Reading Strategies Book are accompanied by a sample anchor chart for you to co-construct with students. This text is literally like having a completely organized, research-based Pinterest for readers at your fingertips. Serravallo gives you great suggestions for how to make them your own, and how to adapt them for a variety of learners (including English Language Learners like the students I teach). These anchor charts have been some of the most powerful I’ve ever had in my classroom – and students do refer to them long after you’ve completed the mini-lesson.

5. You want explicit, easy-to-implement strategies.

I love professional reading. I own a lot of professional texts. I have not, however, read them all cover to cover. What I love most about Serravallo’s The Reading Strategies Book is that you don’t need to read it cover to cover (though I have because I just love it that much). This text is made for teachers, by a teacher, to be used daily as a tool. This is not just summer reading, this is everyday reading that you put into practice!

At our twice-a-week PLCs, my team (including our administrator), often pulled out The Reading Strategies Book and utilized it to drive our small-group and whole-group reading instruction. We talked about what worked and what didn’t, what students needed which strategies, and what we need to emphasize as a whole grade level. This is an incredible text to use as a team – and it gets results.

Ready to get started?

This text is easy-to-read – you will not fall asleep, I promise! It gets straight to the point, explains each strategy, offers teaching ideas, prompts you can use with your students, “hat tips” for further reading (I loved these), and often a visual to pair with the strategy. I can’t say enough about how easy this text is to use – and how much it is used. This will not take up real estate no your bookshelf – it will take up permanent residence in your teacher bag!

Buy The Reading Strategies Book (or ask your administrator to!) – I bought mine on Amazon for about $40. (This is not an affiliate link – I don’t receive any kickback for sharing about this awesome text, I just love it that much!)
There is a wonderful Facebook group for users of the text that you can join here.
You can follow Jennifer Serravallo on Twitter here.
You can download a FREE study guide for the text here.