from visions of the possible to quality learning and teaching with all students

© WestEd, Teacher Professional Development, 2007

From Visions of the Possible To Quality Learning and Teaching

With All Students

Aída Walqui, Ph.D.Director, Teacher Professional Development Program, WestEd

[email protected]

LAUSD Local District 4Principals and Assistant Principals Meeting

December 12, 2007


The plan for today’s presentation

• Discuss what is possible in schools in terms of the acquisition of English and academic achievement by students who are currently underserved

• Observe segments of an accomplished teacher in action

• Define and operationalize accomplished teaching with linguistic minority students

• Outline the task of moving all teachers towards the goal of offering quality learning opportunities for all students and view an example of the apprenticeship of a teacher


The teacher and his context

Accomplished teachers are the result of years of reflective practice in collegial and supported environments

Teacher: Anthony DeFazioClass: Humanities (ESL)Students: In the U.S. between 3 weeks and 3 years,

Junior Institute (9th and 10th graders)School: International High School at La Guardia

Community College, Queens, NYCUnit: LinguisticsLesson: Third day of a five-week unit focused on the

exploration of language


What happened before this class?

Monday

• Teacher announces the theme of the next 5 week exploration

• Students in their groups brainstorm questions they may explore

• Tony carts in a wide variety of books and other materials on language (in many languages, at a wide variety of levels) for students to peruse and begin answering their own questions individually

Tuesday

• Students work in groups sharing what they found out about language and construct Semantic Maps

• Requirements for the Semantic Maps: they must be self-explanatory


Sample Semantic Map

Language is a mode of expression

A way to communicate with sounds, movements that combine and make a sentence

There are no languages better than others

Dialect is a variety of language. We all speak dialects

Language is the expression of [unclear] by means of symbols and sounds combined into words

A language is a system of arbitrary sounds and symbols by means of which a social group understands each other

Different languages are expressed in different forms: different grammar, sounds, intonation, etc.

There are about 6,703 languages in the world

Animal communication is not a language

Characteristics of a language: etymology, sound

Parts of a language: lexis, syntax, grammar

Lenguaje, Langage

How can we define language?

DeFazio’s class, 2001


As you watch Tony and his students in action

• Jot down three elements of his teaching that you find noteworthy

• After we view the clip, I will outline 5 principles that underlie the teaching of Mr. De Fazio


Defining quality teaching with English Learners: Five principles

• Academic Rigor

• High Expectations

• Quality Interactions

• Focus on Language

• Quality Curricula


1. Sustain Academic Rigor in teaching ELLs

• Promote deep disciplinary knowledge– Develop central ideas of a discipline– Establish the complex relations that exist between central ideas– Sustain a focus on central ideas and depth of knowledge

• Require higher-order thinking skills– Lead students to combine facts and ideas to synthesize, evaluate,

generalize– Lead students to solve problems and construct new meanings and

understandings• Develop substantive, generative concepts and skills, and teach students to

support thinking with evidence– Lead students to construct explanations and arguments in the

discipline


2. Hold High Expectations in teaching ELLs

• Engage students in tasks that are high challenge and high support– Use tasks that are academically challenging and engaging– Provide scaffolds that facilitate student engagement in intellectual tasks– Provide varied entry points for instructional tasks– Promote apprenticeship and increased participation over time

• Engage students in the development of their own expertise – Act on the belief that all members of class community can achieve – Foster a climate of mutual respect that contributes to the achievement of all

• Have clear criteria for high expectations– Be explicit about the criteria for what constitutes quality performance – Be clear with students that it is necessary to take risks and work hard to master

challenging academic work


3. Engage in Quality Interactions with ELLs

• Engage in sustained, deep interactions to build knowledge– Dialogue between teacher and student and between peers is

sustained and builds on the participants’ ideas to promote improved understanding of concepts

– Dialogue involves the exchange of ideas and is not scripted or dominated by one party

• Jointly construct knowledge mediated through language – Talk is about the subject matter of the discipline and encourages

reasoning, application of ideas, argumentation, forming generalizations, and asking questions


4. Sustain a Language Focus in teaching ELLs

• Explicitly develop disciplinary language Explicitly discuss how language works (purpose, structure,

and process) and the characteristics of language, texts, and disciplinary discourse

Focus student performance and corrective feedback on: fluency, complexity, or accuracy

Amplify rather than simplify communications


. 5. Develop Quality Curricula for teaching ELLs

Curricula have long term goals which include benchmark moments

Curricula are problem- based and require knowledge construction and sustained attention beyond a single lesson

• Curricula spiral to increasingly deepen student understanding of concepts, language and skills, and enable students to move from ambiguity to increasing clarity

• Curricula weave knowledge in ways that interconnect the world of ideas to the student’s reality and that of the world around him /her

• Curricula build from the students’ linguistic and cultural knowledge and group identity


Tackling the Educational EnterpriseTheories of Development

Three ways of conceptualizing the future (Valsiner, 2001)

• Atemporally

• Past to Present

• Present to Future


• Atemporal: humans do not develop but mature – genetics (e.g. innatism)– environment (e.g., behaviorism)

• Past-to-present: life history of the organism leads to its present state of functioning – Development “sequence of stages” a person passes through on

way to final stage– stages cannot be skipped – future predicted post factum – already has become present

• Present-to-future: emergence of novelty – Chart development before it happens, while it is emerging – Others participate actively in developmental process– Brings person’s past into contact with the future


A future-oriented pedagogy: Sociocultural L2 Disciplinary Learning

• Development follows learning (therefore, instruction precedes development)

• Participation in activity is central in the development of knowledge and language (the mediator)

• Participation in activity progresses from apprenticeship to appropriation, from the social to the individual plane

• Learning can be observed as changes in participation over time


Quality Teaching with ELLs

Is premised on apprenticeship notions of schooling. This means that students:

• Are perceived and treated as capable, legitimate participants • Engage in rich, intellectually demanding interactions that

have been deliberately crafted • Engage in high challenge, high support tasks that provide

them with multiple points of entry to the academic community

• Takeover responsibilities that are handed over to them


More on the Future-in-the-Making

• A. N. Leont’ev: “American researchers are constantly seeking

to discover how the child came to be what he is; we in the

USSR are striving to discover not how the child came to be

what he is, but how he can become what he not yet is”

(Bronnfenbrenner 1977)


How do we help teachers become what they are not yet?

By engaging them in a coherent portfolio of professional development opportunities that are situated in the particular of their own context and offer:

• Workshops

• Coaching

• Lesson Planning Sessions

• Video Clubs

• Intervisitations

• Team Teaching, etc


Assistance from more capable peers or adults

Inner Resources: knowledge, experience, memory investment

Interaction with equal peers

Interaction with less capable peers

Working with teachers (and with students) in four kinds of relationships

REGULATIONSELF

Scaffolding: Modeling…Resourcefulness, Self-access

“Docendo discimus” (We learn by teaching)

“If one member of a dyad undergoes developmental change, the other is also likely to do so”

65)

van Lier, 2004 20022004


So that they learn to teach in the apprenticeship zone

(adapted from Mariani, 1997; Hammond and Gibbons, 2007)high challenge

low challenge

high supportlow support

‘APPRENTICE SHIP’ ZONE (ZPD)

‘FRUSTRATION’ ZONE

‘POBRECITO’ ZONE

‘TWILIGHT’ ZONE


Teachers going through quality professional development learn, just as their students do, by participating in activity


This active engagement enables them to understand the language and pedagogy necessary to implement tasks, and builds a basis for

pedagogical reflection


A focus on language is essential for teachers

Language is the most important tool they use in their work, so teachers need to:

• Develop language awareness

• Recognize the linguistic assets their students possess

• Understand how language mediates all learning

• Explore disciplinary uses of language

• Learn to learn from their students’performances to build their futures


If provided with the right support, teachers can develop their expertise

… and move from the terrible following example from a class in Merced, California, into becoming teachers who in similar ways to Tony De Fazio, can dream futures of excellence for their students and make that possibility a reality.


Tony understands language and his discipline deeply, and he has

developed ways of teaching it

Rather than beginning his review of student work by focusing on the most atomistic elements of an assignment, he follows a very different direction.


Purpose and Constraints of the Assignment

Tony’s framework for evaluating writing



Ideas



Purpose and Constraints (Audience, etc.)of the Assignment

Ideas

Organization




Ideas

Organization

Sentences/Clauses



Purpose & Constraints (Audience) of the Assignment

Ideas

Organization

Sentences/Clauses

Vocabulary




Ideas

Organization

Sentences/Clauses

Vocabulary

Spelling



Deepening our understanding of quality teaching and learning

Other materials from Tony’s class included:

1. Tony’s reflections on his assignment

2. A set of letters written by two students in Tony’s class, Angela Pérez and Eric Lee

3. A commentary by Kenji Hakuta on Eric Lee’s letters


A Lens on Quality Interactions and Language Focus

• Talk helps us apprentice into the ways of being and using language of a specific community

• It organizes our thinking into coherent utterances

• It allows us to hear (assess) how our thinking sounds

• It enables others to respond to our ideas

• We provide others with the opportunity to add, expand, or contradict our thoughts


There is a long and rich tradition in the study of quality in talk:

Grice’s Conversational Maxims (1975)

MAXIM OF QUANTITY

1. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as necessary

2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than necessary


Grice’s Conversational Maxims

Maxim of Quality

1. Do not say what you believe is false

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence



MAXIM OF RELEVANCE

Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the current topic of the conversation)



MAXIM OF MANNER

1. Avoid obscurity of expression

2. Avoid ambiguity

3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness)

4. Be orderly


Talk that leads to quality learning

• Does not emanate spontaneously

• It takes effort and time to create classroom cultures where it becomes a valued norm

• Teachers need to scaffold student participation to develop the norms and skills needed for valuable talk to occur

• Scaffolding students’ ability to engage in talk requires attention to the structures that support the participation, as well as to the process enacted


Quality interactions and deep learning can be taught

The task:

• Requires teacher expertise

• Assumes that intelligence can be socialized

• Acknowledges two requirements: deliberate work by teacher and students, and the conscious development of student academic stamina


Teacher scaffolds the process:Guidelines for the apprenticeship of

the genre: description

Discussion of purpose: why do people describe scenes to others?

Structure:

• Where does the scene take place?

• Who is the central character(s) in the picture?

• What does this person look like (approximate age, sex, height, face, hair, clothes)?

• What is this person doing?

• Any other relevant information?


Preferred language: Teacher offers models of language

that students may use:

• This scene takes place in …

• My picture shows …

• The picture I have shows a …

• The central character in my picture is

• In my picture you can see a …


Oral Development Jigsaw

AA BB CC DD AA BB CC DD AA BB CC DD AA BB CC DD

BASE GROUP

AA AA AA AA BB BB BB BB CC CC CC CC DD DD DD DD

EXPERT GROUP

Genre:Description


Apprenticing a Second Genre: Narratives… Short Stories

Discussion of purpose: Why do people tell stories?

Structure:

• Setting, title

• There is a central character (and other character/s)

• Something happens to the character

• Resolution

• The event transforms the character


Oral Development Jigsaw


BASE GROUP


BASE GROUP

AA AA AA AA BB BB BB BB CC CC CC CC DD DD DD DD

EXPERT GROUP

Description

FromDescriptionTo Narrative


Roza Ng’s Class: The Transcript

Please read the first two parts of the transcript and focus on whether students are engaging in quality interactions and academic rigor.


The Apprenticeship of one teacher

• Teacher: Roza Ng

• School: MS 131, Chinatown

• Class: Intermediate ESL

• Range: three months in the U.S.- two years

• Period: 45 minutes long


Sequence of Tasks

Discussion of the purpose and generic structure of descriptions

Students jointly create a description

Individually students share oral descriptions with new groups

Discussion of the purpose and generic structure of narratives

Collaboratively students construct an oral narrative

Students jointly write their narrative

Narratives are performed

Independent written narrative


Two Elements of Scaffolding:

• Conventionalized, ritual structure (constant and flexible): teachers scaffold as they prepare tasks for their students, know what they are good for, decide when they are appropriate, how they connect to each other

• An interactional process, jointly constructed from moment to moment: teachers scaffold as they support students’ interactions

The process is enabled by the scaffolding structure, and a constant evaluation of the process indicates when parts of the scaffolding structure can be dismantled or shifted elsewhere

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