View Content #17346

From http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=31244

Teaching Across the Board
Margarita Calderón

One trend in many schools has been the use of push-in and pull-out ESL approaches to provide “EL services.” Realistically, when ELLs are pulled out for language, they miss out on learning content and on socialization with mainstream students. When their ESL teachers push in, the ELLs feel singled out and frequently withdraw from any meaningful learning during that intervention time. The programs also create other problems for teachers when schools do not allow quality preparation time for mainstream and ESL/bilingual teachers to meet and plan their co-teaching. Team teaching efforts become disjointed and ineffective.

When ELL learning outcomes become the focus, professional learning deepens educators’ content knowledge, pedagogical facilitation, and understanding of how ELLs learn language, literacy, and content at the same time. Student outcomes are contingent on continuous professional learning. Students and teachers benefit when schools and school districts commit to educator performance standards that delineate the knowledge, skills, practices, and dispositions of highly effective educators of ELLs. In fact, the whole school benefits.

Read the full article at http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=31244