Introduction
In order to complete this activity, I interviewed DA, our lower school principal, who deals with the incorporation of most of our ELL students. She and I discussed the number of ELL students we have, what programs we use to address their needs, how their families are involved, and other related issues. I also reviewed the National Research Council’s “attributes of effective schools and classrooms that benefit all students, especially English learners,” paying careful attention of how these attributes are aligned to the programs and practices we employ.
Findings
The NRC research pointed to four main issues which are present in effective ELL programs. They are local autonomy, some native-language instruction, especially initially, the early phasing-in of English instruction and specially trained teachers as students grow older. I was gratified to see that the programs in place at our school align with these characteristics quite well:
- As a private school, we enjoy the kind of local autonomy the research describes. Though we strive to meet the same requirements our public counterparts do, we can travel our own path where appropriate and have far more flexibility to experiment with new methods of meeting our students’ needs.
- Our Early Childhood program features teachers who are all fluent in Spanish, the non-English language most of our ELL students speak. Moreover, they are native speakers, meaning that in addition to their knowledge of the language, they are familiar with idiom, traditions and Latin-American culture. Since these teachers are usually the first faculty that new families meet, this familiarity goes a long way to making the students and their parents comfortable.
- Despite the early instruction in Spanish, our Early Childhood curriculum transitions to English, following the third of the NRC findings.
- As students grow older and move into our lower school, if English is still a challenge, we offer an ESL program staffed by specialists at every grade level.
Strategies
Rather than invent strategies of my own, I will describe things I observed while visiting our classrooms.
As a religious school, we teach far more than just academic content. And, as a school with students from over 25 different countries, we are an international community which takes every available opportunity to celebrate our diversity. So, for example, during a lower school unit on Passover traditions, students were asked to demonstrate their favorite family traditional rituals. With students from such diverse backgrounds, classes were filled with a rich variety of differing traditions, all centered around the Passover Seder. This allowed our teachers to build home-school connections which celebrated and demonstrated the diverse backgrounds of our ELL families alongside their classmates.
Similarly, around the High Holidays, students were asked to bring a family guest to class to help teach a song or prayer appropriate to the holiday. Many of these songs were in Spanish (and many family guests spoke little or no English) which allowed teachers to value home language and culture as a resource as opposed to an obstacle to overcome.