Element 2: Culture
In today’s elementary schools ELLs are encouraged to share their language/culture with teachers and their classmates. To support this, all of the classrooms I visited, contained some evidence of understanding, appreciation, sensitivity to cultural heritage, community values, as well as student interests, however the best would be Mr. Hill’s. He is a Hispanic teacher who clearly understands the challenges that his students face, consequently conducting his class using both languages. He allows his students to talk in their primary language, giving them a choice, while providing positive encouragement for them to practice more on English. The classroom houses a small library of books written in the student’s primary language
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It is crucial to academic performance and essential to culturally responsive pedagogy. Each of the teachers have established very strong curricular content and language objectives based on their team teaching approach to instruction. Through conversations with Ms. Castorean, Mr. Hill and Mrs. Hawkins I was able to learn that after school every Monday they get together to create and post content/language objectives for their lessons.
One of the important steps of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol model (SIOP) of teaching content to ELLs is to build students’ background knowledge before teaching content by linking concepts to students’ personal, cultural, or academic experience. As we all know
An assignment in Mrs. Hawkins history class was to read an article entitled “Blazing a Westward Trail” dealing with the Louisiana Purchase. Prior to beginning the group reading, she asked students if they come to the map and draw a circle around all of the area included in the sell testing their prior knowledge of what they were going to be reading about. This allowed students to make an explicit connection between present and past lessons in history. Then the class participated in an open discussion where the teacher asked specific questions that determined her student’s general background knowledge on the reasons for the purchase and how they felt it affected the United States and if the decision was up to them would they have made they purchase and