The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accommodate sociocultural differences that affect learning.
This week was a high energy day in the classroom. I assume it was the weather that was keeping the kids locked inside, which made their energy levels go through the roof. High energy is not a bad thing though, it was just a day to be on my toes and try to harness their energy and use it towards their academic tasks. I noticed Mrs. Medos was doing just the same thing, while she assessed the students in a variety of ways today.
Other than energy, there is another large issue when it comes to testing the children of room 118. As I have discussed in past blogs, the children come from very different backgrounds considering linguistics, ethnicities, and sociocultural characteristics. Although they make the classroom very diverse, which undoubtedly benefits the students, it makes assessing them fairly a difficult task. Throughout my time in the room today the students were assessed in three different ways.
Firstly the students were assessed as a group verbally, Mrs. Medos asked them to sound out a number of words and took notes of which they struggled with. Their second assessment was to work on their own and write/illustrate a story. This task allowed her to observe how well the children can sound out words individually, and it was a written exam rather then oral. The final assessment was pulling the children out one at a time and asking them to sound out the words individually, to note which ones they had difficulty with on their own. Each of these three assessments showed tremendous flexibility to best incorporate the students, which I believe allowed Mrs. Medos to accommodate testing the strengths of each student.
This accommodation was never ending, not only did she provide a range of oral, written, group and individual assessment techniques, Mrs. Medos never punished the children for having difficulties with any task, and did her best to accommodate their needs in order to achieve success. I found this to be a connection with the teaching methods of Claude Goldenberg. Goldenberg suggested that you allow students to learn in their first language, and then they will be able to become more successful when they transfer that knowledge over to their second language.
One of the accommodations Mrs. Medos makes in her ESL classroom is allowing the children to converse with each other during both the group and individual assessments in order to help the struggling children understand the task at hand. Since her curriculum suggests that she does not teach the children in their native language, she simply allows the children to assist each other in their first language, during certain assessment situations. This is following the advice of Goldenberg. He explained how children often times struggle with their grades because they cannot understand the task, or they cannot communicate well enough to fulfill the requirements. “Imagine you don’t speak English very well. Your job is to learn what everyone else is learning, plus learn English”. I feel that Mrs. Medos is showing sensitivity to those issues, and is being very considerate when planning and executing her assessment practices.
That’s all for this week, check back again soon :-)
Courtney,
ReplyDeleteI think we had the same kind of week a couple of weeks ago because I definitely agree about the high energy you experienced. It seems that once we have a few days of sun, all of the students including the teachers get spring fever!
Aside from the craziness, I have to agree with the point you made about ELL and relating that to Goldenberg. In my service learning school, we do not have ESL classrooms. Instead we have programs that teachers and students participate in called Walk to Intervention. This program takes certain students who need special attention or focus on a particular skill in reading and English. Most of the students, as I mentioned in my Prompt #3 blog, are of Hispanic decent so we try to address these issues early from the kindergarten grade level. As Goldenberg stated, “more than fifty percent of elementary-age ELLs were born in the U.S. However, about 80 percent of ELLs’ parents were born outside of the U.S.” (American Educator, 10).
Within my kindergarten classroom, I could automatically hear that English, for most students, is not their first language. Tutoring them is somewhat a challenge because not only do I have to teach phonics and vowels but I am also forced to use the four years of Spanish I took in high school to translate for them. I know your classroom is very focused around the English classroom, being an ESL classroom, but I am also glad that you notice other aspects such as respect and diversity.
I wish you the best of luck in your service learning!
Courtney,
ReplyDeleteI thought your post did a great job describing how sensitive your teacher was being in regards to the diversity among her students. I think it is really impressive the lengths she goes to in order to test them in three different ways to really get a sense of where they are at with the material. I will definitely keep this in mind when I am teaching!
I thought your connection to Goldenberg was a perfect fit for this prompt. I had also connected this prompt to his theories. Although my particular classroom did not have any ELL's, you had mentioned that certain accomodations are necessary for struggling students to understand the task at hand. I felt that was true for students who might be able to speak a language, but cannot relate to a certain situation to understand a task.
Great job on the post, I enjoyed reading your connections!