To me, our school has always been an innovative and forward thinking environment which has pushed me to use technology to help me solve everyday problems. For this reason, I view myself as what Scott Noon would call a techno-traditionalist. I like to take ideas that I am already using and update them with technology, but sometimes it is still hard for me to think outside the box. With this project, I am pushing myself to update another aspect of my teaching and to improve communication with both students and families.
I believe that our students (and their families) need to be to see how much progress they have made to stay optimistic and develop their growth mindset. Although learning, especially language learning, is a never-ending process it is important for us to recognize how far we have come. I also believe that this relates to Wesch’s “Problem of Significance”. Learning to speak English is incredibly significant to my students and their ability to survive and thrive in their new home. However, it is easy to get bogged down by grammar and vocabulary lessons, and the new struggles and questions that arise as language structures get more complex. I feel that by being able to show students how far they have already come it will help them to reflect and renew their perseverance. I also believe that students grow when they take risks in the classroom. By allowing them to record their learning and share it they will be asked to take a risk but it will also lower their affective filter when it comes to speaking or reading in front of a group of peers.
At a recent parent engagement event, my team and I hosted, one of our 8th graders spoke about her experience moving here as a Spanish speaker and learning English. One of the things we felt would support both students and families would be to have a way of recording and sharing student progress. But how do you “show” how students speaking skills have evolved? One program that I learned about in another class is SeeSaw. Using this program you can create a digital portfolio. This is different than a paper-based portfolio because, in addition to writing samples and test scores, I can have students record themselves reading and responding to questions orally to show progress in their confidence and ability to speak in a new language. I am particularly interested in trying this out because I have a lot of new arrival students and I typically have them for two or more years in a row. I think it will be very powerful to be able to look back with them and their families and see how much growth they have shown. I would also like to shift the focus in our room from mainly reading and writing skills to incorporate more thoughtful listening and speaking activities.
One of the options I was drawn to with Seesaw was that there is an option for parents to have access to their child's portfolio from home. I believe that students learn best when they are supported both at school and at home. Another aspect of my project is that I want to engage more parents in their child's education. It is around the time of middle school where parents begin to see their children as being more independent and begin to distance themselves from the school environment. For many of my students, there is also a language barrier. My team and I want to keep the parents in our community informed and involved in their children's education. Using this tool parents will be able to see their child’s work from either the website or using the SeeSaw mobile app. I am hoping this will be one way that we can help them see what their children are learning in school.
As part of the parent engagement committee, reaching as many families as possible is a part of my goal. Over 26% of our student population currently qualify for ELL services, with many more emergent bilinguals who have been exited in lower grades, meaning for most of our students their home language is not English. It is not enough that we translate handouts and hope that they make it home. The second part of my project is to create a bilingual newsletter that is available to our students’ families on the internet. After learning the facts about how lower income and Latino families mainly rely on their smartphones to access the internet I checked to ensure that the tool I wanted to use was easily accessible on a smartphone since this is the medium that I know most of our students are using at home. Knowing that our families would have access on their phone was important and so I decided to move forward and try using the smores.com website to create an ELL Team Newsletter for our school. This has been a goal of ours for many months now and beginning a new school year seems the perfect time to introduce this to our students’ families. Part of my goal with this newsletter is to help families feel like they have a voice in their child’s education. My students do NOT represent Leslie Grinner’s dominant ideology or SCWAAMP. I am hoping that a bilingual newsletter will be one small way to help them feel empowered and informed about their child's education. By using an online format it will also give families the opportunity to translate this information into multiple languages besides English and Spanish allowing all families to participate.
