Category: STANDARD 5

Posted on

TESOL STANDARD 5.B

CollaborativeLesson    MS Saturday Academy Letter 2018     Jared C Wood Resume 2 (4)

Standard 5.b: Professional Development, Partnerships and Advocacy

Candidates take advantage of professional growth opportunities and demonstrate the ability to build partnerships with colleagues and students’ families, serve as community resources, and advocate for ELLs.

Standard 5.b offers guidelines for teachers to perfect their craft and to strengthen their own teaching philosophy. Importantly, when a teacher has a strong purpose, they are better able to mentor other teachers and share their knowledge. For this standard, my artifacts include a collaborative lesson plan, a letter sent to parents regarding Saturday Academy, and my professional resume. I chose these artifacts because they represent my proficiency at: participating in professional growth activities, knowing and understanding public issues that affect ELLs’ education and support ELLs and their families socially and politically, and collaborating with school staff to provide educational opportunities for ELLs and advocate for appropriate instruction and assessment by sharing their knowledge of ELLs. 

My collaborative lesson plan showcases a true partnership between the ELA/ENL teacher and the Special Education teacher. By meeting and discussing our objectives for the class, my co-teacher and I are able to not reach students at varying levels of English language comprehension, but also create models that can be used by us future lessons. Typically, we decide upon a text that will be of interest to all students. Once we have establish our goals and our delivery mechanisms, I add the differentiations and modifications for the ELLS and she will add the SpEd modifications. In most cases, the majority of our students benefit from both types of differentiation, regardless of their status. his practice of productive cooperation illustrates the idea that I am adept at providing leadership to staff in developing collaborative instructional models for ELLs. One area that I would like to improve in my collaborative teaching model is to offer more enriching activities for my (admittedly few) gifted students. I tend to use the more advanced students as peer tutors or as an instructional support, but that is not always fair to them.

The letter I included as an artifact relates to a program that we offer to bolster students’ academic success. Our Saturday Academy program is mainly seen as a test preparation course, and our ELLs have seen great improvement in both ELA and Math by attending the course regularly. By offering a translation of the letter into Spanish, and confirming attendance with follow-up phone calls, I am able to show how I help create empowering circumstances and environments for ELLs and their families.

Lastly, I attached my professional resume as an artifact. My resume informs the reader of my increased levels of educational attainment, including a Masters in Education-TESOL. Moreover, my career arc contains time spent as an TESOL teacher in Korea, which informed my position today as an ENL educator. My desire to become more knowledgeable in my craft is evident in how I engage in a continuous cycle of ESL professional development that is informed by their instructional reflections and analysis. Part of my professional development, as mentioned in my resume, is attending writing and literacy workshops that provide me with innovative techniques to use in the classroom.

Posted on

TESOL STANDARD 5.A

Cultural Assimilation Amongst East Asian Immigrants to the United States, and its Effects on English Language Acquisition

Standard 5.a: Candidates demonstrate knowledge of history, research, educational public policy, and current practice in the field of ESL teaching and apply this knowledge to inform teaching and learning. 

The artifact I chose for this standard is from ESC 759-Foundations of Bilingual Education. This artifact demonstrates my understanding of new instructional techniques, research results, advances in the ESL field, and education policy issues and demonstrate knowledge of the history of ESL teaching. One particular piece of research that I found fascinating is “linguistic distance”, the idea that the closer one’s language is to English, the easier it will be to attain English comprehension. As an educator who teaches students of varying cultural backgrounds, understanding current thinking in the field of ENL teaching enables me to perfect my lessons. For example, my Asian students may require additional time to improve their grammar, thereby dictating what types of scaffolds I create.

In addition to analyzing new concepts in ENL education, my artifact also provides evidence of my knowledge of history, research, educational public policy, and current practice in the field of ESL teaching and apply this knowledge to inform teaching and learning.  An aspect of my paper that connects with this substandard is my discussion of the burgeoning research on the connection between culture and academic success. One point I mention is the theory of the “model minority” and how Asian American academic achievement is directly related to their cultural beliefs on education. By extracting some of the customs in Asian American households, such as Saturday School and intense family involvement can have a positive impact on ELLs academic proficiency.

Since writing this paper,  I have made it a point to increase my knowledge of not only ESL research but also the history of education as a whole. With the continued inconsistency of ESL standards and practices, it has become difficulty to state with certainty which procedures are proven effective for the increasing number of ELLs in NYC schools. However, by having a number of techniques in my teaching arsenal, as well as attaining a historical understanding of ESL pedagogy, I am more able to be an effective educator.