Supporting ELLs in the English Regents

Exhibited by:

Lauren McCoy

PLO Attended:

Manhattan FSC Workshop for ELL Leads – High Schools

Coached by:

Paula Waldron

1. PLO Goals:

My main goal in attending the series of MFSC Workshops for High School ELL Leads, facilitated by Paula Waldron, was to gain new strategies to develop ELLs’ academic language and literacy. I planned to share these strategies with my school community, a high school for ELLs. Another goal I had for attending this PLO was to meet and collaborate with ENL teachers outside of my school community and share best practices.

2. PLO Learnings:

In one particular workshop, in which we examined the English Regents text-analysis essay, we broke down the task to see what would be particularly challenging for ELLs. We tried different strategies to support ELLs with identifying a central idea in the text and analyzing the author’s craft, such as using a close reading protocol and a Socratic seminar. While sharing strategies with fellow ENL teachers at this PLO, I realized that many ENL and ELA teachers of ELLs have already developed scaffolds and supports in response to the challenges of the Regents for their ELLs; however, this work remains on an individual or school-wide level. There is little time dedicated for collaboration across schools in thinking about how to support ELLs for the Regents.

3. Implementation of Techniques and Practices:

Inspired by this PLO workshop I reworked the model of the PLO to form a Professional Learning Community (PLC) that would give ENL and ELA teachers across schools a space to collaborate and think about how to best support ELLs for the English Regents. To do this, I reached out to my administration and to the MFSC who supported me in organizing a 3-session workshop.

4. Impact:

Work products from this PLC included a “toolkit” for preparing ELLs for the English Regents, an archive of the strategies and materials that were shared at the PLC. This archive is accessible via a shared google drive folder for continued collaboration with participants. There has also been evidence of growth in my students’ writing as they used scaffolds and language stems shared at the PLC.

5. Conclusion and Next Steps:

This work in the PLO and the subsequent PLC should be continued to promote collaboration among ENL teachers throughout the city, particularly in thinking about how to support ELLs with the demands of various exit exams. In my school community, for example, ENL teachers will designate some common planning time to work with content teachers, looking at the tasks, language, and skills specific to that subject’s Regents exam.