Читать книгу EL Excellence Every Day - Tonya Ward Singer - Страница 27

Any teacher can use this book alone, and the impact amplifies when you use it with a colleague, a team, or a whole school community. Reflect on the entry points listed above and determine your goals together. The following approaches are four great ways to use this book in collaboration with colleagues:

1 LEARN MINDSETS OR STRATEGIES TOGETHER: The first four chapters are great for building background together in essential mindsets and strategies. Choose a relevant section or chapter and use the following sequence:Read.Discuss. What’s most effective? What do you already do? What do you want to try?Collaborate to plan ways to apply at least one specific strategy to your teaching in the coming week.As students engage, watch to gather additional formative data.Meet to compare notes on impact and adapt your approaches together.

2 PLAN LESSONS TOGETHER: When planning literacy lessons, choose the chapter in Section IV that best fits your goals and choose strategies within that chapter to integrate into your teaching. When planning any lesson, use Chapters 3–7 as flip-to resources for strategies to engage and support ELs.

3 ANALYZE STUDENT LEARNING TOGETHER: Prioritize a goal in Section IV. Plan any “ENGAGE” task in Section IV. As students engage, film one pair in conversation or take notes on what they say and do. Choose one or more questions from the “OBSERVE” questions to focus your observation. Collaborate to compare videos or notes and analyze together with these questions:What do we notice students saying and doing relative to our goals? Do we agree on what we see? What trends do we notice in the data?When there are successes, what instruction do we infer helped students reach this goal?When there are challenges, what instruction will we provide to help students build on what they know to excel at higher levels?

4 SOLVE A STUDENT LEARNING CHALLENGE: Together you’ve identified a challenge or your students’ experience with academic literacy or language. You now want to collaborate to plan instruction you anticipate will specifically address their needs. Here’s how to use the book in this process:Identify a challenge you want to solve together and discuss the strategies you anticipate will help students thrive.Flip to the sections of this book that are most relevant to your challenge and identify at least one specific strategy or lesson you will all try in the coming week.Collaborate to plan how you will use that strategy and/or to observe as one teacher tries it with a class.As students engage, watch to gather additional formative data.Meet after trying the plan with students to reflect on impact and adapt your approaches together.

To deepen your collaborative approach, please read my book Opening Doors to Equity: A Practical Guide to Observation-Based Professional Learning (Singer, 2015). It will give you all the tools you need to facilitate peer observation inquiry, a powerful approach to collaborating to plan, teach, observe, reflect, and refine teaching together to solve any learning challenge you prioritize.