“ Immigrants constitute the fastest-growing group of students in U.S. schools, and many demographers predict that by 2025 approximately 20% to 25% of students enrolled in elementary and secondary schools will have limited proficiency in English (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008).”
It is an eye-opening and yet shocking reality that one faces in Elfers and Stritikus’ article “How School and District Leaders Support Classroom Teachers’ Work With English Language Learners.” The article discusses the role of school and district leaders in supporting classroom teachers’ work with second language learners and how this intentional support may be part of broader teaching and learning effort in school communities.
The article reveals the ugly truth that English learners often do not have access to appropriate instructional curriculum and materials, yet attempts to address these issues may be structured in ways that inadvertently deprive students of learning opportunities.
Inadequate Teaching & Other Schooling Conditions
Two studies quoted in the article resonated with me the most. DeJong & Harper, 2005; Rumberger & Gándara, 2004 talk about the attempts to integrate students in structured English immersion classes without well-trained and well-supported teachers who can end up robbing them of the specialized help they need. In my previous school, the high school students were streamed in English classes based on their language test scores in IELTS, which was the biggest mistake ever. IELTS is an international language proficiency test that can not be used as a placement test for streaming students. It took me a year to explain the difference between a placement and a proficiency test to the high school leadership and that urgently we needed an English placement test prepared by professionals in this field. However, I wasn’t heard nor given a chance to bring up a solution for the misconduct. The students were the ones who suffered the most. Being placed in classes where they were set to failure, those instructional hours got wasted in those classrooms without helping any of those low achievers who needed the help most. We didn’t have well-trained teachers either. It wasn’t easy to be part of their classes as an ELL support teacher. Some of the teachers hesitated to open their doors for an outsider-as they call. It wasn’t my place to teach them how to teach but offer some support with the techniques I know work well with ELLs. As some district-level leaders put it in the article, I did “go with the goers” and prioritized training and collaboration for those most likely to take up the strategies in their classrooms.
Not Only For ELLs, This Is For All
I think the most feasible and effective way to engage teachers and maintain a system of supports for serving ELLs is -as one of the district schools in the article does- to convince the teachers that the focus is not only the English language learners but all students to benefit from additional instructional strategies for success. In the article, the district leader explains, “We’re not calling it ELL specifically because we want to get buy-in from everybody, so we’re framing it as cross-curricular best practices for English language development, which ultimately when you think about our population, that really is all of our students because we have a high level of poverty here in our community.” In short, they sought to shift the conversation to provide a rich environment that valued all students and the languages and cultures they represented (Hawkins, 2004).
“Breaking The Mold”
So, my question is, as one of the schools mentioned in the article did, can we break the mold of leadership and focus directly on instruction by creating a system in which the
distributed expertise of teachers could be accessed by other teachers within institutions. Why not? Is it that difficult to give a chance to people to take initiative and decide what they need to do? As in my scenario, my leadership didn’t have the will or energy to listen to what we were saying, but it is sometimes better to sit back and let things happen, which can positively impact the whole culture of a building.
Source: Elfers, A. M., & Stritikus, T. (2014). How School and District Leaders Support Classroom Teachers’ Work With English Language Learners. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(2), 305–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X13492797
