3 ANALYZE STUDENT LEARNING TOGETHER: Prioritize a goal in Section IV. Plan any “ENGAGE” task in Section IV. As students engage, film one pair in conversation or take notes on what they say and do. Choose one or more questions from the “OBSERVE” questions to focus your observation. Collaborate to compare videos or notes and analyze together with these questions:What do we notice students saying and doing relative to our goals? Do we agree on what we see? What trends do we notice in the data?When there are successes, what instruction do we infer helped students reach this goal?When there are challenges, what instruction will we provide to help students build on what they know to excel at higher levels?
4 SOLVE A STUDENT LEARNING CHALLENGE: Together you’ve identified a challenge or your students’ experience with academic literacy or language. You now want to collaborate to plan instruction you anticipate will specifically address their needs. Here’s how to use the book in this process:Identify a challenge you want to solve together and discuss the strategies you anticipate will help students thrive.Flip to the sections of this book that are most relevant to your challenge and identify at least one specific strategy or lesson you will all try in the coming week.Collaborate to plan how you will use that strategy and/or to observe as one teacher tries it with a class.As students engage, watch to gather additional formative data.Meet after trying the plan with students to reflect on impact and adapt your approaches together.
To deepen your collaborative approach, please read my book Opening Doors to Equity: A Practical Guide to Observation-Based Professional Learning (Singer, 2015). It will give you all the tools you need to facilitate peer observation inquiry, a powerful approach to collaborating to plan, teach, observe, reflect, and refine teaching together to solve any learning challenge you prioritize.
Reflect on Chapter 1
Who are the ELs in your teaching context? What are the diverse assets different ELs bring to your school? What do you know, or want to learn, about their language proficiency levels, home cultures, and prior educational experiences?
What are the six verbs in the core pedagogy for EL excellence every day (p. 10)? Which are most central to how you now teach? What is one essential you want to learn more about or make a higher priority?
How will you use this guide? Will you read it from cover to cover or flip to the sections you need as you need them? Will you read it alone or in collaboration with other colleagues? What do you most look forward to in this guide? Dig in!
Chapter 2 Essential Mindsets
iStock.com/asiseeit
“How teachers perceive their students and themselves in relation to them, determine, to a large extent, what the educational experience of students will be.”
—Noma LeMoine (2007, p. 6)
Mindsets Matter
I start this book with mindsets because they matter more than any strategy.
Seriously.
I can teach at a high level, actively engage students, and use awesome strategies, but none of this will make any difference if I do not value my English learner (EL) students and believe they will succeed.
A Call for Humble Reflection
It’s really easy to say I value students’ backgrounds and have high expectations for ELs. In practice, however, it can be a challenge to consistently live this value in daily teaching. You can be a wonderful, compassionate person dedicated to the teaching profession and, like me, experience a disconnect between your ideal and your reality.
If I am honest and humble, I can reflect honestly that when I started out teaching (in a core classroom in a Title I school with many EL students), I lowered my expectations to meet my students where they were. When I attempted high expectations, my students failed because I didn’t have the strategies and tools to bridge the gap.
Lowering expectations was not a conscious decision, but one I realized through day-by-day attempts to engage students with more scaffolds and easier tasks.
Many in our profession call this the “pobrecito syndrome.” We love our ELs, and we want to protect them from failure. So we lower the bar.
Problem is, a lower bar sets ELs on a different path entirely—a path on which they don’t access core curriculum or build fluency in the academic language or higher-level thinking tasks. A low bar leads to ELs going through years of schooling feeling like adults don’t believe in them.
I share my story of lowering expectations because I want to invite readers into humble reflection. As humans, we have brains designed to make snap judgments based on whatever information we have. We all have biases. It’s part of being human. Most biases are implicit, as in beneath the surface of what we think and unintentional. We don’t choose them. Learning our implicit biases is hard. It is also a superpower we can develop with humble inquiry.
One of the toughest challenges with understanding implicit biases is that they don’t always align with our beliefs and values (Staats, Capatosto, Wright, & Jackson, 2016). This is where humility matters. Accepting that we carry biases that contradict our own values is part of the journey.
Three Essential Mindsets
Let’s unpack the three mindsets that will help us achieve our vision for all students to succeed. The following mindsets are the focus of this chapter and foundational for excellence with ELs:
1 Value English Learners’ Assets
2 Expect Excellence From Every English Learner
3 Reflect in Inquiry About Your Impact
In this chapter, we dive into these mindsets one by one. For each, I offer the vision, the possible sticking points, questions for humble inquiry, and actions you can take to live the mindset. You can read this chapter in sequence or choose one section at a time as a focus for collaborative reading and reflection.
Value English Learners’ Assets
VISION: Ensure ELs (and all students) feel affirmed and valued as members of the learning community. Build trusting relationships with ELs that foster safety and belonging, which are foundational to academic risk taking. Value students’ home cultures, languages, and life experiences. Help students make intentional connections to their background experiences and home language(s) to deepen their learning.
Why This Mindset Matters
The purpose of this mindset is to ensure every student feels valued and a sense of belonging at school. A sense of belonging is a core psychological need (Maslow, 1943) and impacts student motivation and academic achievement (Goodenow, 1993; Walton & Cohen, 2007).
Without a sense of belonging, human brains go into fight-or-flight mode. Zaretta Hammond (2015) describes the impact of a perceived threat on the brain as an amygdala hijack: “When the amygdala sounds its alarm with cortisol, all other cognitive functions such as learning, problem solving or creative thinking stop” (p. 40).
In other words, a student’s sense of belonging in a classroom physiologically makes or breaks the learning process. Valuing ELs to foster their sense of belonging in your classroom community is more important than any strategy in this book.
“We