Читать книгу EL Excellence Every Day - Tonya Ward Singer - Страница 31

It’s really easy to say I value students’ backgrounds and have high expectations for ELs. In practice, however, it can be a challenge to consistently live this value in daily teaching. You can be a wonderful, compassionate person dedicated to the teaching profession and, like me, experience a disconnect between your ideal and your reality.

If I am honest and humble, I can reflect honestly that when I started out teaching (in a core classroom in a Title I school with many EL students), I lowered my expectations to meet my students where they were. When I attempted high expectations, my students failed because I didn’t have the strategies and tools to bridge the gap.

Lowering expectations was not a conscious decision, but one I realized through day-by-day attempts to engage students with more scaffolds and easier tasks.

Many in our profession call this the “pobrecito syndrome.” We love our ELs, and we want to protect them from failure. So we lower the bar.

Problem is, a lower bar sets ELs on a different path entirely—a path on which they don’t access core curriculum or build fluency in the academic language or higher-level thinking tasks. A low bar leads to ELs going through years of schooling feeling like adults don’t believe in them.

I share my story of lowering expectations because I want to invite readers into humble reflection. As humans, we have brains designed to make snap judgments based on whatever information we have. We all have biases. It’s part of being human. Most biases are implicit, as in beneath the surface of what we think and unintentional. We don’t choose them. Learning our implicit biases is hard. It is also a superpower we can develop with humble inquiry.

One of the toughest challenges with understanding implicit biases is that they don’t always align with our beliefs and values (Staats, Capatosto, Wright, & Jackson, 2016). This is where humility matters. Accepting that we carry biases that contradict our own values is part of the journey.