Gourmet dining may not be the first thing most teachers picture when thinking about differentiation, but to Carol O'Connor of Hoboken, N.J., the parallel is accurate.
"I had one 7th grader who liked my class because there was something different to do every day," she said to attendees of her Differentiation for ESL Students session at the 2007 ASCD Annual Conference. "He said it was like a restaurant with a big menu."
Such a "menu," O'Connor pointed out, means giving her students opportunities to select which learning styles best suit their tastes.
"So much of what we provide our students has to involve choice," she said. "I have a multitude of strategies that I can use, and I need them all because students all learn differently."
Strategies O'Connor outlined include
- Honoring what students tell their teachers. "When we ask kids how they like to learn, we need to honor what they tell us—if they like learning on the floor, we can try it. It makes no sense if we ask them and then make no adaptation."
- Collecting exit cards. "We can tell our students to tell us one thing that they learned and one feeling they have about what they're learning."
- Encouraging students to communicate. "One teacher I worked with had students write journals about their learning. This gave the teacher an opportunity to write them back and tell them what he thought."
Changing Strategies
Attendees at Brenda Ward and Linda Thompson's conference session, Strategies to Increase Achievement in Diverse Learners, came away wiser for their experiences.
"Lafayette, where I come from, grew from 4 percent to 14 percent ELL in the late 1990s," Thompson told the audience. "Like many Midwest districts, we are experiencing learning with a new population of students."
Such rapid changes have taught educators that new methods are sometimes required to reach students with different backgrounds and abilities. "Every good lesson starts with a plan," said Ward. "And some of what we've gone through are just good strategies for learning."
Some of those strategies include
- Thinking about where objects are physically placed in the classroom. "Kids memorize what they see," said Ward, "and when we physically move around the room, we want to have different strategies in different places."
- ThinkingVOAKally. "We use the term VOAK for visual, oral, auditory, and kinesthetic," said Thompson. "When we're working with ELLs, most of the time we present things visually, but we do a lot orally and auditorially as well."
- Asking ourselves what's most important. "Is what I'm trying to say really important?" asked Ward. "Do I need my ELL students to understand the entire ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, or can I take a piece of it and use it as background knowledge instead?"
Leading for Literacy
If too much change in too little time can be considered a source of stress, then many educators of ELLs are undoubtedly feeling the pressure in today's classrooms.
"Within the last 10 to 15 years, we have seen a paradigm shift in the instruction of our ELLs," said Maggie Pagan of Rigby Professional Development. "In the past, we pulled students out and gave them instruction through isolation; but now we have to look at the needs of our ELLs and use a broad range of resources to reach them."
In their Leadership for Literacy for English Language Learners presentation, Pagan and fellow presenter Erika Simono outlined ways educators can make a difference in the lives of ELL students. Among their points were the following:
- Accepting and embracing similarities and differences. "Celebrate the diversity that comes with having students of different backgrounds."
- Highlighting cultural uniqueness. "Think of diversity as cause for celebration; find ways to learn from one another."
- Thinking in the target language. "Knowing what you know about your students, how can you look at lessons from a language perspective?"
"Having eight ELLs in your class can mean having eight different languages," Simono said. "Making our schools successful [requires] strong leadership. Without strong leaders, we can't see the kinds of success we need to see in our students."
