Success With Ells

By Author: allan
Total Articles: 366
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1.Creating Space for Collaboration
Margo DelliCarpini and Amanda N. Gulla Collaboration between ESL and English teachers is an idea that has periodically been discussed in this column. While school administrators and teacher educators have generally called for interdisciplinary teacher collaboration, the question of what form these collaborative efforts can or should take remains unanswered for many educators. As Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Margo) and English (Amanda) teacher educators we realize the importance of collaboration between ESL and English teachers, and we have initiated a number of projects in our programs that help teachers acquire the skills needed to make space for collaboration in their professional lives. One of the projects that we have developed is a collaborative methods course where TESOL and English education teachers meet together, learn together, and collaboratively plan a unit. Replica IWC Watches

2.Project Background
As a response to the many requests we received from English teachers who ...
... were struggling to find ways to meet the needs of the ELLs in their classroom, and ESL teachers who were struggling to find meaningful content for the ELLs in the ESL classroom, we developed a course for preservice and in-service teachers that would bring educators together and build skills in context. ESL and English teachers meet together, under our guidance, to develop learning experiences, assignments, assessments, and a YA literature unit that would target the needs of ELLs in the English classroom while also providing content that ESL teachers could focus on in the ESL classroom. The project was met with a great deal of excitement on the part of the graduate students who were signing up for the class and from our colleagues who would hear us planning and talking in the seminar room over sandwiches and coffee. We would like to share some issues that emerged in these collaborative projects that have immediate relevance for practicing educators. Franck Muller Replica

3. Collaboration in Context
Collaboration does not happen naturally in most secondary schools, and while collaborative models are the norm in many organizations, secondary level education in the United States is not usually one of them. Because functional models of interdisciplinary teacher collaboration are the exception rather than the norm, one question that we have had to answer not only for our graduate students but also for ourselves has been: What exactly is teacher collaboration?