Reply to What does having a high percentage of English learners in a class mean in practice?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I teach in a school which has about 60% EL population.  What does this mean?
Amazing kids from all over the world, who are eager to learn, caring, interesting and funny people.  Many of them are smart enough to speak 2, 3 or 4 languages. 
 
My kids who aren't as gifted linguistically, those who can only speak English, are not put on computers so I can "catch everyone else up".  Nor are they given a book to read while I "catch everyone else up".  In fact, the students who are only able to speak one language are often just in much of "catching up" as my bilingual and multilingual kids, if not more.  Yes, even the white, middle income kids need remediation.

I think we need to stop saying our bilingual and multilingual kids need remediation and insist that every single student become proficient in at least two languages in order to graduate 8th grade.  And then let's test the kids whose first language is English and see how they perform on assessments after a year or two in Urdu or Spanish or Polish.  My guess is everyone else would have to sit around waiting while the "I only speak English" crowd has to catch up.

But, to the OP's question, it means that your child will have friends from different places, who speak different languages and what a rich school environment that will be!  I put my own child in a heavily Spanish speaking school.  She's now fully bilingual and headed to college on a full ride scholarship in her field of choice.  We Americans need to stop understanding "smart" as a 1600 SAT and a top ten university and need to start understanding smart as learning more than one language.  [/quote]

You've done a great job of outlining the [I]positives[/I] of having a large cohort of EL students in class but by leaving out the downsides it sounds like propaganda.

Seriously, what are the tradeoffs for the diversity and richness these ELs bring to class? Great Schools says white students are getting 10/10 on assessment tests at this school while hispanic students are 4/10 - are you really saying teachers don't spend more time helping EL kids catch up and close a gap that large? I'm not even implying that's a bad thing, I'd understand if that's the reality but I'd like to understand what that looks like. You sound more knowledgeable than anyone else in here so I'd love it if you could share more.[/quote]

In my school, every teacher has an ESL certificate, so we all have training to help kids with language learning.  We also have  an ESL teacher who pushes in and helps those kids specifically.  But really, I personally feel very strongly that all kids deserve a significant amount of small group time, not just kids who are struggling.  Yes, my lowest group might be seen in a small group 4 days a week, I still try to ensure my higher kids get seen 3 days a week.  And yes, it helps that the reading specialist also pushes in daily and can help see groups.  But my kids who only speak English truly are not sitting there bored or doing tons of independent work.  Every kid reads independently for 15 minutes each day, but all abilities are doing that.  
I think the misunderstanding here is that K classes ALWAYS have a huge range of kids.  I've had kids who come in who don't know the difference between letters and numbers, kids who are 5 and not potty trained, kids who don't know how to hold a book.  And every year, I have kids who come in reading at a first or second grade level.  That's in schools with high levels of multilingualism and those with very low levels.  My lessons are scaffolded to get at all learners.

Here's an example:  It's writer's workshop time in February.  I'm doing a lesson on how to write a note to mom or dad.  I model what the letter could look like.  I give the sentence stem "I love you, _____."  The kids decide who they want to say that about and they all turn and talk with their partner.  John says, "I love you, Dad."  Jose says, "I love you, Mom."  Then, we all count the number of words in one of those sentences.  I write 4 lines on the board.  Amy comes up and writes the word "I".  Abed comes and writes the word "lov".  (he forgets the e, but this is kindergarten and that's developmentally appropriate.  Alejandra comes to write the word you, but is really struggling.  I write the letter Y and she traces it.  Kids learn to write the first letter of a word before they write more, usually.  And Carl comes up and writes Mom.  When they sit down to write themselves, yes, some struggle.  And my kids who are flying in writing?  When I drop by their table and see they have a perfect sentence with a cute picture, I ask them, "What more would you like to tell your mom? Can you write more?  What would you say?"  They tell me and they get started on writing more.  I make a note of the 3 kids who are writing more and the next day, I pull them over for a small group conference on just that.

Kindergarten teachers are masters at differentiation and while I do believe that a very small percentage of teachers are still just teaching to the middle or to the lowest group, this has not been my experience.

I think when you have large groups of kids, living in poverty, also trying to master English, and you have large class sizes and underfunded schools, that's where things get dicey.  But I really encourage you to embrace your multilingual school.  At least, give it a shot.  You might find that it's not propaganda at all.  My classroom has kids who speak English, Spanish, Polish, Urdu, and a few other languages.  By year's end, 90% of my students are at or above level.  As the mother of two very high achieving kids, I made sure my high achievers (whatever language they speak or whatever their economic status  is) have the opportunity to excel.  You might be surprised how many other teachers feel this way and make that happen, too.
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