Читать книгу EL Excellence Every Day - Tonya Ward Singer - Страница 6

I spend a lot of time in schools with large numbers of English learners. The range and depth of learning in these settings can be enormous. And yet, as most teachers know all too well, the challenges can also be enormous. Teaching English learners who have widely varying collages of interests, backgrounds, and language proficiencies is the most challenging thing a person can do. We need resources that clearly and quickly help us to meet these diverse instructional needs every day in every classroom. EL Excellence Every Day: The Flip-to Guide to Differentiate Academic Literacy is such a resource.

This guide offers a suite of practices and strategies that help teachers to maximize the learning of language and content by English learners and the rest of the class. Powerful instruction, however, cannot thrive without a solid foundation of mindsets and principles, which are clearly described and connected throughout this guide. Mindsets include viewing students’ differences as assets rather than liabilities, expecting excellence from every student, and continually reflecting on how students are learning as a result of instruction. Principles include engaging students to intrinsically motivate authentic learning, supporting the development of students’ academic conversation skills, and strategically differentiating the scaffolding of language and content learning. While these ideas could fit into several books, EL Excellence Every Day adeptly weaves them together in this highly practical guide for real and busy teachers.

Many new content and language standards have entered the scene, all of which place extra high language and content demands on English learners. The increased emphasis on using more complex texts, for example, means that we must sharpen and strengthen our teaching practices for helping students understand and use the language in challenging texts for constructing meaning. Language develops when students engage in learning activities that encourage the transforming ideas and applying them in new ways, engage students in meaningful dialogue with one another, and ask them to be critical consumers of information. This guide provides clear ways for designing and supporting such activities, and it describes how to formatively assess student work in order to know where students are and where they need to go with respect to language and content.

When we attempt to address the complex challenges of teaching diverse English learners across a wide range of grade levels, content areas, and students, there are no simple solutions. But over time we can and must build up unique solutions for each of our settings, based on research, reflection, trial and error, and expert resources. Fortunately, EL Excellence Every Day is an expert resource that helps us to clarify the challenges and sculpt the solutions that are needed across a variety of classrooms.

—Jeff Zwiers