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Strategies

Throughout the TLC project, we modeled strategies that could be adapted for use in classrooms with English Learners. The same appraoch may be used effectively with university faculty and classroom teachers, who can teach and model them to pre-service teachers, who can use them with elementary school students.

These Strategies: 
  • may be adapted for use in K-8 classrooms;
  • employ multiple teaching techniques for English learners, including those described in the CREDE standards (in Teaching Transformed, by Tharp, Estrada, Dalton and Yamauchi, 2000), and in Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2004);
  • are collaborative and constructive;
  • build trust and relationships among participants; and
  • help participants learn about and reflect on the experience of English learners
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    Each strategy is described briefly; some include links to PDF and Word downloads. Others have web links and references. Please use these strategies and adapt them for the age group and purpose of your class or audience.

    Strategies for Building Community

    Each of the specific strategies in this section is designed to help participants get to know each other in ways that are relevant to learning. Teachers need to know their students interests, background, and knowledge base in order to design effective lessons. These strategies make use of teaching moments to build content and background knowledge, and increase language development in students’ first and second languages.

    Describe yourself in pictures A simple, short strategy for first meetings. Illustrations help English learners express themselves, learn new words, and recall information.
    --- Describe yourself in pictures (PDF)
    Introduce your partner Another simple strategy to use when people are still getting comfortable with each other. Focus can vary, according to what the facilitator would like to learn about participants.
    --- Introduce your partner (PDF)
    Three things Participants are asked to find three things that have personal importance to them (in purse, wallet, etc.), and to set them on the table in front of them. They free-write about each, and share their stories with each other. K-5 students may be asked in advance to bring in something from home.
    --- Three things (PDF)
    Pictionary This exercise again uses drawing to engage English learners. One at a time, ask each participant to draw on the board a picture that represents an activity or food they enjoy, or a place they have visited. Other students in the class guess what they illustration represents. This activity may be followed by a related writing activity, in which students write about another student in the class.
    --- Pictionary (PDF)
    I feel like a ... A simple, quick, and enjoyable little ice-breaker that has the added benefit of teaching about similes!
    --- I feel like a (PDF)

    Strategies for Language Development

    The primary objective of these strategies is to increase literacy through reading, writing, and oral language development. In addition, they all contribute to building learning communities, content knowledge, critical thinking, and help to move students towards independence.

    Instructional conversations are “discussion-based lessons geared toward creating opportunities for students' conceptual and linguistic development. They focus on an idea or a student. The teacher encourages expression of students' own ideas, builds upon information students provide and experiences they have had, and guides students to increasingly sophisticated levels of understanding” (Goldenberg, 1991). TLC participants practiced engaging in instructional conversations during workshops, and some teachers also implemented instructional conversations into their regular classroom activities. Goldenberg’s paper, “Instructional Conversations and Their Classroom Applications” is available as a PDF download from http://repositories.cdlib.org/crede/ncrcdslleducational/EPR02/. It is also available in html on NCELA’s website at http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/ncrcdsll/epr2/index.htm

    Interactive journals are “a type of writing in which students make entries in a notebook on topics of their choice, to which the teacher responds, modeling effective language but not overtly correcting the student’s language" (O’Malley & Valdez-Pierce, 1996, p.238). For more information, read about how two TLC Kindergarten teachers implemented interactive journals in their classrooms.

    Writers’ workshop: Many resources are available for teachers on Writer’s Workshop, developed by Lucy Calkins, Founding Director of the Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project. The project website at http://rwproject.tc.columbia.edu/ lists many publications and videos, as well as professional development workshops. Quick Google searches (writer’s workshop lucy calkins elementary) will render many useful ideas from teachers and others using writer’s workshop in K-8 classrooms. See how one TLC participant used writer’s workshop to supplement the Open Court curriculum in a 2nd grade classroom.

    Photography journals: An exciting visual approach to literacy and learning about students can be based on Ewald and Lightfoot’s book, I wanna take me a picture: Teaching photography and writing to children (1992). Using simple single-use cameras, this text supports a unit on photography, which can include self portraits, biographical essays, and family stories.

    Home visits: Home visits need not be long, but are especially useful if the teacher does not come from the same community as her/his students. Home visits give the teacher a deeper understanding of students' cultures, languages, and families, and fosters mutually respectful relationships with parents. Information gathered during home visits can be used in teaching writing, and in all subject areas.
    --- Home visits (PDF)

    Narrative symbols: Participants listen to "Salvador Late or Early," a prose poem by Sandra Cisneros, and summarize it using narrative symbols provided. Participants then use narrative symbols to tell their own story about going to school.
    --- Narrative symbols (PDF)

    Writing from the body: Participants listen to “My Diary from Here to There/Mi Diario de Aqui Hasta Alla,” a picture book by Amada Irma Perez, and use an outline of a body on butcher paper to connect parts of the book to the central character. Later, participants trace their own body outline onto butcher paper, in order to tell their own stories of their journeys from their place of birth to where they are now.
    --- Writing from body (PDF)

    Tableau: When teaching English learners, it is important to have a variety of ways for readers to respond to literature.  Journal writing, readers’ workshop, retelling, and illustration are all ways of responding to literature. The tableau is particularly effective as it requires students to communicate and problem solve with others to represent the text, to use their whole body in communication, and to articulate part of the story to the entire class.
    --- Tableau (PDF)