Teaching English to ELLs

I am going to start breaking away from my math education blog posts. I am working on a masters degree from the University of North Dakota on teaching English Language Learners. I hope that this program will help me to be a better math teacher, but I am also learning about how to teach English.

I live in Japan and my church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) offers free English Conversation Classes (Eikaiwa). I have taught these classes off and on since 2004. I have decided to return for me to practice teaching English and to serve the amazing people in my community.

I am teaching the beginning class and my first week I prepared a very pair conversation oriented lesson. The topic was families. For my records here is the flow of the lesson:

1) I asked the question: "Why do you want to learn English?"
This is the first question I always ask a new (to me) student. It is important that I know why my students are studying English. The common responses are:

• To watch American movies without subtitles.
• To talk to foreigners at work or family
• To use in international travel

2) I presented a family tree that I created with family relationship vocabulary. My students were all familiar with this vocabulary.

3) They were sitting in pairs, so I had them talk with their partner about their mothers. I then ask each partner to tell me about their partner's mother. I also asked about their oldest child.

4) We concluded with having partners discuss why families are important.

The lesson went very well! I walked away feeling like I wasn't teaching a beginning class, I was teaching an intermediate class. Which was my downfall for my second lesson.

My Unique Flipped Classroom

As I listen to the Flipped Learning Network Podcasts, read the Flipped Learning Network Ning, and read Tweets from other teachers who are using the flipped learning model.  I have gained a sense of what many teachers who use a flipped model are doing.  There are a few things that I do differently than most teachers I read about.

This is not where I want to be, this is where I currently am in my flipping transformation.

1. Not a Traditional Flip and not Mastery
First of all, I don't use a traditional flip model where all students watch the same video for homework.  I have given my students more autonomy this year.  The students are welcome to move at their own pace within the unit.  This gives students the freedom to slow down when they have questions and move ahead when they finish with a topic.  But all students are close enough together in the pacing that they can help eachother.  The students know that all work must be completed before the day of the test.  Then all students test on the same day.

At the beginning of the year, my plan was to use a Mastery model.  But when it came down to it.  I gave in and allowed students to move on, even if they didn't pass a test.  Students are still allowed, and even encouraged to go back and work on past material and retake their test, but it isn't required.

I have tried to find a happy medium between these two models.  My new model is that students are all working on the same unit at the same time, and I differentiate the depth based on student ability.


2. I don't require them to watch my videos
One thing I love about my flipped classroom is my ability to differentiate for my students.  Some students asked if they can take notes from the textbook.  I allowed them to do this.  At the beginning of the year, students who used the textbook scored an average of 4% lower than students who watched the videos.  But as the year has gone on, that different has decreased and now there isn't a noticable difference.  I like that my students use the textbook much more than they ever did in the past.  It is now a resource instead of a book of math problems.


3. Assessments
Because there is self pacing within the unit I don't require my students to take a "mastery check" on each section.  This just seemed too labor intensive for me.  Instead I give two quizzes and a test.  All students take the quizzes and tests on the same day.  And this is to help inforce the recommended pace.  Even though many students have not finished the notes and problems that the quiz covers, it emphasises that they are behind and need to catch up.


4. No Guided Notes
I get the sense that many teachers give their students guided notes with their videos.  At the beginning of the year I was planning to, but the other teacher that I have been flipping with said that she wanted to give them a blank sheet of paper, so we went with that.  For the most part, I have been very impressed with the notes students can take when they aren't rushed in a classroom setting.  At the same time some are very short and concise.  But I tell the students that their notes are for them and not for me.  I have been re-thinking guided notes recently.  But I am afraid of turning the notes into a fill in the blank activity.


5. Answers to Problems
I dont' know if this is different from other teachers that Flip, but I have provided answers to all the problems that students do.  This is so students can check their work.  I have seen a lot of benefit from students being able to check their answers and ask their peers or me to help them fix their mistakes.