Myth 7

Thinking that EL students are the sole responsibility of the ESL teacher is one of the most common misconception in today’s educational system. Students interact with a variety of educators each day from speech teachers to gym teachers and can include the principal and support staff on some days.

As noted in Unlocking English Learners’ Potential more districts are making the move towards collaborative teaching models (Staehr Fenner & Snyder, 2017, p. 125). Staehr Fenner and Snyder go on to emphasize that ELs spend most of their school day with grade level and content area teachers. They write that “content area teachers will need to take on more shared responsibility for teaching ELs features of academic language at the sentence as well as discourse level.” (Staehr Fenner & Snyder, 2017, p. 125)

Staehr Fenner and Snyder note that specific instruction of academic language will benefit non-ELs in addition to EL students. A strategy they recommend is for content area teachers to consult with their ESL teachers on which features of academic language to focus on during instruction and provide guidance when planning minilessons (Staehr Fenner & Snyder, 2017, p. 125). Staehr Fenner and Snyder also recommend that teachers collaborate when analyzing texts (p. 126). The strategy behind this is to discover which elements of academic language will create a barrier and prevent ELs from comprehending the text (Staehr Fenner & Snyder, 2017, p. 126).

Ways to Collaborate with Content Teachers:

• Team planning meetings

• Shared Google Drive

• Planning together over ZOOM

• Divide the workload and communicate via email

• Provide feedback to one another

Contributor: Rachel Rota