Week 1 Summary and Reflection

SUMMARY AND REFLECTION WEEK 1, Dianne Petersen

I took this course because I need to renew my teaching certificate by the end of August. I chose this class because it was available when I could take it, but also because it seemed practical. I am finding that, indeed, it is practical. As a vocational business and technology teacher—I support hands-on all the way. What I have learned and observed this week that has impacted me most includes the demonstration of various ways we have interacted to get to know each other in the class very quickly, learn material for the class, and begin to learn about the methods and research regarding the difficulties of language acquisition of ELL students.

Getting to know classmates quickly is not always something that happens. I have been substitute teaching this past year and have been in some LPS high school classes where the students don’t even know the names of the people sitting around them halfway into the semester (so I sometimes had them interact). They were not engaged in school, but rather just sucked into their phones. In this course, we were immediately assigned a group, moved around the room to write some things on posters, and we have moved around in different groups for peer information sharing. I already know the names of over half the students in the class after only four days. That is motivating vs. isolating—it lowers the affective filter.

The variety of ways material is presented or pointed out to us helps reinforce what I have been reading in the textbooks and the burden isn’t only on the student or only on the teacher. The research is serving as an important basis for how old this problem of effectively educating ELL/ESL students is and seeing what methods are and are not effective ways to maximize their learning. I can also see that these methods have a lot of elements of common sense and all students would benefit from better constructivist learning environments, implementing things such as sheltered learning with more intentional scaffolding, and educating from an asset view of the students.

Even though we have been learning many new terms, acronyms, and concepts, I am also grasping the great need for better ESL/ELL programs and teacher training in our schools.