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Tag: Student Needs

Supporting English Language Learners

Written by HES Marketing on . Posted in MTSS & Student Support.

Everyone wants more resources to help English language learners. Harris Education Solutions has two platforms that teachers of ELL students appreciate. Castle Learning and eDoctrina include several tools that support students overcoming language barriers.

Different Tools for Different Levels of English Proficiency

English language learners have widely different instructional needs based on their backgrounds. While not every tool available on the Castle Learning and eDoctrina platforms is appropriate for every ELL student, each feature greatly benefits a particular subset of ELL students.

Plenty of ELL students have lived in the US for years. Many of these students have an advantage over their monolingual peers because multilingualism promotes cognitive development. However, biliteracy takes years to develop, so primary teachers will want to provide consistent support and instruction to promote English proficiency and literacy. Teachers will also want to encourage developing fluency and literacy in the home language whenever possible.

Recently immigrated students frequently need significant, global support. In addition to their academic challenges, they often struggle with culture shock and homesickness. Immigrant students with a solid academic background will transfer their content knowledge and skills, making their transition less challenging than immigrants with minimal formal education.

Whatever the new arrivals’ background, your patience and empathy make adjusting to a new system, culture, and language less stressful. The Castle Learning and eDoctrina platforms decrease the work it takes to meet their academic needs, freeing some time to support their emotional needs.

Helping ELL Students Meet the Standards

The educational goal for ELL students is the same as their native English-speaking peers. Regardless of their background, they should meet the standards in all subjects, including English literacy. To help students succeed, teachers scaffold content lessons and teach English. Students with more limited English proficiency may also need their assignments adapted.

Castle Learning and eDoctrina make scaffolding and adapting easier. The platforms also include resources for teaching English.

Scaffolding means structuring lessons to help ELL students meet the same objectives as their peers. Teachers unfamiliar with scaffolding instruction sometimes make the mistake of choosing activities that require only low-level thinking skills. Watered-down instruction limits English language learners’ access to a quality education.

Adapting assignments and assessments provides a way for some ELL students to show what they know. These adaptations lower the frustration level for immigrant students struggling in a new language.

Follow State Guidelines

Your state provides guidelines for assessing, setting benchmarks, and promoting quality instruction for English language learners. Thirty-five states belong to the WIDA consortium, which provides the comprehensive WIDA 2020 Standards Framework. Notably, California, Arizona, Texas, and New York, which all have high concentrations of English language learners, use independent frameworks. Some districts may supplement the state’s framework.

You will want to use your state’s formal assessment to measure students’ English proficiency for academics. Gauging students’ proficiency levels with informal interactions distorts perceptions. Many students have a higher level of proficiency in social contexts than they do in academic contexts. The distinction misleads many educators into thinking that some students no longer need supports. Sadly, sometimes teachers wonder if a child is “faking” not understanding due to the discrepancy in academic and social language proficiency.

To experience how ELL students often feel reading in a non-native language, you might try reading articles in The New England Journal of Medicine. Notice how much time and concentration it takes to understand text with unfamiliar ideas and words.

Provide Support with Scaffolded Instruction

You could spend years learning to scaffold instruction. Below are a few quick ideas to get you started:

  • Connect prior knowledge to new lessons.
  • Pre-teach and display academic vocabulary.
  • Use graphic organizers and other visual aids to help students organize information.
  • Teach and display sentence frames related to the content. Sentence frames allow students to fill in the blanks with their ideas without coming up with the syntax. For example, a history teacher might teach, “The ______ caused _______ because _______.”
Provide Support by Adapting Assignments

Here are a few ideas on how to adapt assignments and assessments for ELL students needing additional supports. These adaptations are beneficial for students with low to medium levels of English proficiency and literacy.

  • Irregular spelling doesn’t make learning to read English easy. “Enough” and “though” don’t rhyme, but “queue” and “to” do. Students with emerging literacy skills benefit from hearing and reading words simultaneously. Give students audio versions of written text until they read fluently in English.
  • Reading text in a non-native language takes longer to process. Give ELL students enough time to think by individualizing how much time you allow them on assessments.
  • Provide extra practice before tests, so students hear the associated vocabulary more.
  • Allow newly arrived students with minimal English skills to use a dictionary or translation tool to help them understand.
Use eDoctrina and Castle Learning to Teach English, Scaffold Instruction, and Adapt Assignments

eDoctrina and Castle Learning reduce the workload of supporting ELL students. Choose the appropriate features to make your life easier and meet the needs of your ELL students. All features are available on both platforms unless otherwise noted.

  • Share your best assignments with other ESL teachers with a few clicks. Invite them to share their best assignments with you too. Collaborating to create effective ESL resources will help students improve their English proficiency.
  • Supplement your ELA program with a wealth of pre-made English language arts resources.
  • Add explanations to assignments that help ELL students access the material.
  • Upload graphic organizers, videos, and pictures to any assignment to help students visualize ideas.
  • Customize the assessment window for students who would benefit from extra time.
  • Provide assessments in Spanish for newly arrived Spanish-speaking students. Castle Learning has assessments available in Spanish to help you check a student’s understanding of various subjects and place them in the correct classes. You can print these in Spanish or convert them online. Available Spanish translations include NYS Regents exams in Algebra I, Global History and Geography, US History, Earth Science, and Living Environment.  Castle Learning also offers K-12 reading sets that are translated into Spanish.
  • Encourage continued literacy in French or Spanish if that is their home language with Castle Learning.
  • Allow students to use the Google Translate feature to translate a question or passage into their native language. Google Translate is far from perfect, but it is often sufficient for students to understand the content and not spend time translating.
  • Help students overcome some of the obstacles of English spelling oddities by allowing them to use the text-to-speech feature.
  • Preview vocabulary with Castle Learning. Later, when students come across the word in the lesson context, they will better understand what it means and how to use it. Castle Learning has a vast bank of vocabulary questions that you can search by keyword, level, and subject. You can also quickly make digital vocabulary flashcards.
  • Assign Castle Learning’s self-study to direct students to practice in the subjects they need help. The self-study feature provides unlimited practice and instant feedback with vocabulary and language structures.
  • Include audio, video, or text to any assignment using eDoctrina. Students can also answer with audio, so they get practice speaking.
One Lesson at a Time

When you first start teaching ELL students, helping them achieve grade level may feel daunting. However, helping them flourish is one of the most rewarding parts of any teacher’s career. At Harris Education Solutions, we make tools to help you do your best work.

Help Students Returning to the Classroom Navigate their Emotions

Written by HES Marketing on . Posted in MTSS & Student Support.

Ms. Conner guarded the door, which was ajar, so seven-year-old Mark would feel safe changing his rain-soaked clothes.  As Ms. Conner discretely ensured Mark’s privacy, she pondered his destructive tendencies and realized that they were his way of expressing and releasing emotional turmoil. Now his stress and grief were manifesting as a fear of being alone, even for a few minutes. Admitting this vulnerability and asking for help was out of character for Mark. Despite his usual bravado, this little boy needed emotional support as much, if not more, than other students did. Mark is hardly alone in having a big emotion overwhelm his ability to regulate behavior.   

No child escaped repercussions from the pandemic. Some students suffered catastrophic losses. Many students dramatically changed their lifestyle. Every student had to adapt to differences in the community and at school. New thoughts and conversations about safety permeate every aspect of daily life.  

Students returning to the classroom after remote learning or a holiday break will have varying responses.  Returning to school can be an emotional experience, even in regular times. In addition to all the typical emotions, students returning in 2021 may also be suffering grief, depression, fear, disappointment, anxiety, guilt, loneliness, and more.  

No one expects you to act as a counselor. However, your daily interactions provide an opportunity to help students develop socio-emotional skills. The blog Supporting Students Experiencing Trauma During the Covid-19 Pandemic discusses the importance of classroom routines and ensuring students feel a sense of control in their lives. 

Teaching Empathy and Emotional Intelligence 

As discussed in Three Steps to Emotionally Support Students to Promote Academic Success, feeling emotionally safe in the classroom improves learning. As the teacher, you set the tone. However, students affect the emotional climate as well.     

A student who has not experienced stress from the pandemic at home may start feeling it in the classroom. Students likely echo their family’s response to the pandemic, which may be quite varied among different students.  

This convergence of perspectives and feelings offers an opening to explore empathy and emotional intelligence. Without such instruction, many students will be oblivious to the feelings of their classmates.   

Consider the differences between Marie and Mason. Marie had regular social interactions outside of school during the pandemic, including attending group events. Mason stayed home except for a few brief outings in which he always wore a mask and stayed six feet apart from others. At recess, Marie repeatedly invites Mason to play, and Mason continually declines. Marie may inadvertently be pressuring her friend to engage in a way that makes him uncomfortable, and Mason may be unwittingly hurting Marie’s feelings by rejecting her invitations.   

Open conversations about what feels safe to each student help mitigate these types of situations. Reading and discussing literature is another great way to explore different emotional responses. Teaching children to respect the feelings and differences of other perspectives not only improves class culture. Harvard Business School considers Emotional Intelligence essential to a person’s professional success.   

Happy, Sad, Excited, and Nervous – All at Once 

Human emotions are rarely orderly and logical. Students often experience cognitive dissonance because they have conflicting feelings about the same situation. Let students know that an onslaught of coexisting mixed emotions is normal. Mason’s anxiety about the virus does not negate his excitement to see his friends.   

Helping students identify each feeling and its source helps them make sense of how they feel. According to the experts in emotional intelligence at 6seconds.org, naming and admitting fear and anxiety helps people face them. Emotional check-ins also give students practice identifying their emotions and aid in forming a trusting relationship.  

Like learning any skill, learning to identify and cope with tricky emotions requires seeing someone doing it. Some of your students may lack a model of emotional health in their home environment. You could act as the model or invite a guest speaker to address the class. Talking about a time you experienced conflicting emotions normalizes how they feel. The Disney movie Inside Out does a great job showing the purpose of negative emotions and could be used as a light-hearted entry point to the discussion.  

Of course, keep your discussions and resources appropriate for the students’ developmental level and the classroom. As you teach students to identify authentic emotions, including healthy coping strategies will help your students through tough times. These conversations invite your students to increase their awareness and manage their feelings. 

Providing Comfort and Calm 

Even in the calmest, most nurturing classroom environment, students may have emotional breakdowns.  Emotional breakdowns look different in different individuals because emotional expression varies by culture, gender identity, developmental level, personality, and temperament. Whereas Mark often destroyed property, Marie would cry, and Jordan would withdraw. If possible, try these strategies to help the student in crisis.  

Help calm students so they can think clearly. Human touch is healing, and your first instinct may be to hug the child. Now, a simple embrace may not be allowed or safe. Dr. Robert D Keder suggests students hug themselves. The pressure and skin-to-skin contact of a self-hug mimics the feeling of a real hug. The self-hug will release oxytocin to aid in calming the child. He also provides some mindfulness exercises such as deep breathing.    

Once the student relaxes enough to think and talk, ask them what caused the intense emotions. As you listen, help the child find places they can take control of the situation. Unfortunately, there are circumstances where the only thing they have the power to control is their thoughts. Luckily, improving the positivity of one’s thoughts cultivates positive emotional responses.   

In the revolutionary work, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” it says,  

Whether they’re aware of it or not, all people keep a running account of what’s happening to them, what it means, and what they should do. In other words, our minds are constantly monitoring and interpreting. That’s just how we stay on track. But sometimes the interpretation process goes awry. Some people put more extreme interpretations on things that happen-and then react with exaggerated feelings of anxiety, digression, or anger. Or superiority. (p. 215) Carol S. Dweck 

For example, a child who incorrectly answers a question could think, “I am dumb.” or “I need to study this more.” The first thought demonstrates a fixed mindset, whereas the second thought shows a growth mindset. The growth mindset fosters an improved emotional response because it puts the thinker in control of the situation. Dr. Dweck emphasizes the critical role teachers play in helping students develop a growth mindset. There are plenty of growth mindset resources available for the teachers.  

Sometimes an event becomes catastrophized in the child’s mind. For example, a child may touch another child who is fearful of germs. While the event may seem small to an onlooker, the scared student may jump to the conclusion that they now have a fatal infection. The thought induces a panic attack.   

Acknowledge the student’s authentic emotion. The way a student perceives the situation may, or may not, have its basis from accurate information. Either way, the feelings triggered are genuine.  After verbally acknowledging their feelings, you may help the child reframe their negative thoughts and perceptions.  

Enlist Help 

A much as you care for your students, you do not have to shoulder all of their emotional needs yourself. Send families these parent resources  from National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Ask a mental health professional to teach some lessons on coping strategies. Refer children who need it to the next level of support.   

Being back in the classroom may present some emotional challenges for you too. Remember to take time to address your own emotional health needs. In the next blog, we will discuss how administrators can support the emotional needs of teachers and each other. At Harris Education Solutions, our mission is to help schools improve and succeed, thereby helping students succeed.