Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013 - S10

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S10 | EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 30, 2013
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ESL Teacher Status
In many schools, ESL educators
have not traditionally been seen
as being as central to the enterprise
of teaching students as their
subject-matter peers, said Aída
Walqui, the director of teacher
professional development for
WestEd, a San Francisco-based
research group.
Often itinerant among schools,
ESL teachers may serve multiple
grade levels and are viewed by
their content-area colleagues
as being solely responsible for
developing students' language
skills. They are likely to spend
their instructional time with
English-learners in stand-alone
classrooms in the so-called "pullout"
approach, though some districts,
such as St. Paul, Minn.,
partner ESL and content teachers
to keep English-learners in
mainstream classrooms for all or
most of the day.
ESL teachers are also less likely
to become principals and take on
other leadership roles in their
schools than their content-area
colleagues, Ms. Walqui said.
All of that, said Ms. Walqui,
makes elevating and recasting the
role of the ESL teacher even more
challenging.
"This is a major dilemma," she
said. "What should the role of the
ESL teacher be in this dramatically
shifting environment of the common
core?
Ms. Walqui argues that ESL teachers
themselves, as well as their content-area
peers, need to reconceptualize
what language is and evolve
from their concentrated focus on
vocabulary and grammar or on
how to make a request or express
a hypothesis.
"Students are too often en-
gaged in the production of sentences
with vocabulary they have
'Push-In' Model
At another New York City
school, John J. Pershing Middle
School, where 40 percent of the
1,300 students are English-learners,
Marcus Artigliere and his
team of six fellow ESL teachers
are working together, and with
their core-content peers, to craft
common-core lessons in English/
language arts and math that outPAGE
S12 >
organization for teachers who
specialize in working with English-learners,
raised those issues
and more during a convening of
ESL professionals who work in
school systems in and around
Washington. There was strong
consensus among the group that
ESL teachers, in addition to working
directly with students, need
to be deployed as consultants to
content teachers who will need
guidance on how best to support
English-learners.
"If held to the same high and
rigorous standards as their
peers, the learning curve for
English-learners is going to be
longer and higher than most of
their peers and therefore, the
teachers who teach them need
to be much better equipped,"
said Rosa Aronson, the executive
director of the Alexandria,
Va.-based TESOL group. "What
ESL teachers bring to the table
is deep understanding of how
language is acquired, the importance
of teaching academic language,
and the cultural issues for
students who are English-learners.
They are often closer to their
students and families than content
teachers and can be strong
advocates for these students."
learned," Ms. Walqui said. "But a
sentence is an isolated unit of
language that would never really
count as deep engagement with
academic work, which is what
the common core is all about."
Content All Day
Deep engagement with content is
how a network of 16 high schools
that specialize in serving recently
arrived immigrants in California,
New York, and Virginia, approaches
instruction for English-learners.
"Every single teacher is a
teacher of language and content,"
said Claire Sylvan, the executive
director and president of the Internationals
Network for Public
Schools, based in New York City.
"If you want these students to
learn rigorous academic content
and gain dexterity in the new
language, you better be doing
more than 15 minutes a day of
English-language instruction
and better be doing rigorous content
all day long."
In the Internationals network
schools, students with varying
levels of English proficiency, as
well as those in different grade
levels, are purposely mixed in
classrooms. That way, more-experienced
students help "acculturate"
the newer arrivals, and a
team of teachers sticks with the
same group for two full years.
That team-consisting of math,
science, English/language arts,
and social studies teachers, at
least one of whom is also an ESL
expert-share responsibility for
the same cohort of students over
time.
Each school is autonomous,
but the network provides hundreds
of digital lesson plans and
other resources that integrate
language instruction with content.
Any teacher among the 16
schools can tap those, said Ms.
Sylvan.
"All the units our teachers
have developed are designed to
have students using their language
in group projects, talking
with each other, and actively
engaged in discourse, no matter
how imperfect it may be," Ms.
Sylvan said.
While most of the teachers
working in the Internationals
schools are not necessarily
trained in second-language acquisition
or how to work with
English-learners when they are
hired, Ms. Sylvan said principals
screen aggressively for prospective
faculty members who are
willing to learn.
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Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013

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