Co-Teaching: Cause to Change an ENL Teacher's Perspective

Here is the process I worked through during the last few years:

1. Noticing which teachers are dedicated to their craft and asking the principal to place my students into those classrooms

Just as there are inclusion classrooms, there should also be designated ENL classrooms. There should be discussions that the ENL teacher initiates with his/ her principal as to why their best interest would be to identify one classroom as the one that holds the ELL students year to year, assuming there are a small number of ELL students at each grade level. If the ENL teacher is in a building long enough, he/she will become aware of individual teachers who not only place most of their effort daily on their skills, but also are genuinely invested in their students’ all-around well being. They may even be the ones to seek you out first when an ELL is placed in their room.

The teacher most open to co-teaching may not necessarily be the one that would make the best fit for a designated ENL classroom teacher. This stems from the point of view that to create better language lessons in a co-teaching model there must be a better content lesson to base it on. This is the reason why we should aspire to do business with the teacher who is talented in what he/she is already implementing and accomplishing. Unfortunately, these teachers are not necessarily looking for someone new to disrupt the good things they already have in place. However, as I looked at it, it had been the recent role of the ENL teacher to transition to the integrated ENL model of co-teaching, and to begin that journey by settling with working alongside anyone less than a high caliber teacher would be considered a step backwards.  Managing to work with an accomplished teacher could only better what I did as a professional while catapulting the education of my ELL students. 

2. Using the time spent sitting next to my ELLs to progress by observing and identifying the processes by which these teachers gain student success

Having the time to observe a talented teacher as he/she teaches is a luxury; however, we, as ENL teachers, have that time during what we presently look upon as a negative teaching experience. Many of us ENL teachers have complained that some teacher’s ideas of co-teaching are having us sit next to our ELLs and assist them while the content teacher teaches. Though not the co-teaching method I had in mind, I chose to view such a scenario as an opportunity to study the content in addition to the approach to which she made it accessible to learning acquisition. My co-teacher implemented conversation partner activities (no more than 3 in a group) prior to explicit, independent writing procedures and wove them into hand-picked literature meant to appeal to a third grader’s interest.

Additionally, I noticed the dynamics happening periodically between her and the other third grade teacher, who was equally as talented.  One planned the ELA lesson (my teacher), one developed the Math lesson and the third created the Science lesson.  All reported back on what was working and what wasn’t working in a very informal manner. They would make succinct comments on the lessons to each other during minutes of stolen time.  A quick head appeared in the doorway as students transitioned to another subject, as TAs were monitoring activities, or through hallway discussions on the way to specials. Additionally, they always ate lunch together to continue their collaboration. Later, I found that they also edited and commented on the material through e-mails, Google Docs and Google Slides.  It was trial and error with instant feedback. My next step was to get in on those conversations!

3. Demonstrating how language is a foundational point of view that needs to be considered and addressed in most lessons with as much face-to-face time as you can negotiate.  

This was the time to demonstrate that I was the expert and provider of a foundational skill that needed to be considered within their content lesson. As I observed on the sidelines, I could identify language skills that the curriculum lent itself to.  The idea here was to provide a language objective based on the content and show how well it could fit in with what is already working well in the classroom.  With an understanding that good teachers are not closed to suggestions but short on time, the window to present my ideas in an effective way was narrow.  By already being in the classroom I mirrored how the other teachers collaborated as explained previously.  For example, when students conversed with their partners or worked through a group activity, I began to find these minutes to make my suggestions, and I always tried to use the key phrase,” language skills”.  In addition, conversations were modeled first by the teacher, through a fishbowl activity or by a pair of star students; however, I noted that most students, especially my ELLs, needed a more explicit script.  I mentioned this quickly to the teacher, saying that most are hesitant to begin speaking due to the lack of language skills necessary for them to get there.  I brought a list with me the next day with some sentence starters and sentence frames for her to glance at.  As the students broke up into pairs, I oversaw my ELLs.   I provided them with sentence starters and coached their non-ELL partners into a choice of responses to acknowledge their understanding of what was just said.  As the conversation piece evolved, the teacher added these sentence starters onto a target resource sheet that all students used and kept in their binders.

More and more short conversations between the teacher and me began, some actually initiated by the teacher.  A point to make to the teacher in keeping with the language skill philosophy is that as the students can verbalize their answers in a grammatically correct way, their ability to write them in the same way increases. With the opportunity to collaborate on the spot during real time teaching, my co-teacher began to understand how to look at her lessons with a similar perspective. Eventually the lesson would be shared with me ahead of time via Google Docs, Google Slides and e-mails.  The classroom became a very approachable working environment with a respected professional relationship between the teacher and me.

Another example was how the new vocabulary was being taught. The teacher already had an engaging activity where students used a colored scale to represent shades of meaning. Its success was embedded in the idea of starting with a BICS synonym for a new word and end with the target word that intensified the meaning. My contribution came from an article I had read on the need for students to hear how to use the word in context and practice using it themselves by putting the word in their own sentences. The teacher and I had a quick discussion about it as the kids were getting ready for lunch.  I noted how the example sentence was missing in all the vocabulary models such as the Frayer Model, and I handed the article to her with that specific part highlighted. The teacher began to provide cloze sentence activities and paired the students up to read and choose the word. This gave them the opportunity to try it orally in a non-threatening environment, a big part of how ELLs succeed in learning. I even got a,” I did this part for you, Mrs. Stevens”.   

4. Offering targeted, simple and succinct lessons with activities that engage students almost simultaneously to address the material they are using in the classroom. 

The lesson that blew the proverbial roof wide open for me was one I chose to do in September of the third year with this teacher. After this amount of time I knew the stories they were reading and the process the teacher would take to get them to their first piece of writing. On my own, I poured over the language standards and stayed away from opening with a drier skill like labeling the parts of speech in sentences.  The lesson I began with was teaching the students about compound sentences.

Understanding the concept of starting simple and with something the students could all do, I first presented the simple sentence, staying away from using the formal names like subject and predicate, and I created a visual to model it.       

On their own, students placed a simple sentence on a large sentence strip. That ended the first day’s lesson. The following day I introduced a way that student can stretch their simple sentences, and I presented the conjunctions that the standards outlined as those that all third-grade students needed to be able to use in their writing. I created an anchor chart poster for the classroom wall as I taught these target conjunctions.  For their activity, students paired up with their partners and exchanged their simple sentence strips to create new compound sentences. On the third day, I explained the reason why they needed to know this. Their writing would improve if they mixed simple sentences with compound sentences. I showed them pages in the books they were reading that did this. These books were the high-interest books that the content teacher had already completed other learning skills with. As we read aloud together, we noticed how the sentence change affected the flow of the reading. The students went back to their groups and discussed the differences of their created sentences from simple to compound. On the final day, we decided that they would pick an animal to write about, and the students would show its movement through the mixing of sentence types.  

My example for them was the following:   

The turtle makes deliberate steps. He heads to the water. He sees a predator and suddenly he halts. His legs and head jerk into his shell so he can defend himself. He is safe.

With this lesson, the classroom teacher was already planning to include the assignment of using the conjunctions in all their writing assignments.  She cleared off a bulletin board area solely for the language skills I was to feature throughout the year and entitled it, “Language”. She expressed how this skill was what they were missing in their curriculum and added it on to the student resource sheets in their binders.  It was a defining moment as to what my role came to be within that classroom!

5. Becoming part of the conversation about what works and what doesn’t with more than the classroom teacher.

       Through collaboration with more than just my classroom co-teacher, my teaching skills improved in many ways. This team of teachers began to look to me to present a language concept contribution, and they also offered the perimeters I didn’t see.  Time was one perimeter. My ENL classes are not as constricted in this way, so I needed to obtain that way of thinking myself.  Another perimeter unveiled to me was pace. Unfortunately, we needed to move on or drop something we just didn’t have time for, particularly due to testing and pull-outs. The perimeter that really followed the pace idea was the class with Special Education students.  My lessons were taught in all three 3rd grade classrooms, but I wasn’t thinking of the inclusion room.  I began to have conversations with that teacher about really spending more time on the basics, specifically focusing on the language objective and getting all students just to that point without embellishing or seeing if we could challenge them more.

To conclude, I must stress that these processes take time and commitment. For me it was three years in the making.  Many of my efforts were met with failures where I had to swallow my pride and go back to the drawing board. However, to say that I am there now would not be correct.  A better co-teaching model also means I have enough input to evaluate m lessons in order to continue improving.  For the upcoming year, the teacher has asked that we teach explicitly each conjunction separately to solidify understanding of meaning to all students.  I have already found some ideas to use for such a lesson. Will it be successful?  It may be, or maybe not, but all teachers involved will expand their knowledge through co-teaching.    As a result, every student will benefit!    

Other Resources:

Collaboration and Co-Teaching  A webpage with numerous articles and book recommendations from Laura Stevens

Integrated ENL Resources  by NYSED

Weebly: Collaboration and Co-Teaching for ELLs   by Andrea Honigsfeld and Maria Dove

How to Make the Best of Co-Teaching by Valentina Gonzalez

Helping Academic English Learners Develop Productive Word Knowledge  by  Dr. Kate Kinsella