ESL Push-In: What To Focus On.
The new year brings new hopes that this year will be easier, less stressful and more efficient. In fact, less overwhelm comes not only with efficiency but also with the ability to put things in perspective and focus only on things that matter. Indeed, we can work all day long, and it will never seem enough, especially in planning and putting resources together.
In this post, I am sharing my list of 8 things that matter to me this year as an ESL push-in model teacher.
1. Don’t try to save the world and everyone in it.
Providing in-class push-in services can make your head spin if you think you are able to help and teach every ELL. Your students most likely have a variety of language proficiencies and academic preparation. They are most likely or may be scattered throughout the classroom.
Provided you only have 20-25 minutes or more likely only 10-15 with the English learners, and you need to make sure they understand the legacy of the Roman Empire, your goal as an ESL teacher is to work with the students who need the most help and give them immediate resources to tackle the task to reach the content objective of the lesson.
Don’t stress over thinking a nice poster could have helped, or a game would have made it more entertaining. If you just have a board and chalk, your imagination, preparation and intuition are your best resources you can afford at such a moment, so use a laser-like focus to handle the situation and provide an equitable learning environment for language learners.
2. Invade when you can shine.
Many co-teaching models are designed for content and ESL in-class teachers to implement. The reality always dictates its term of interaction, so from my experience as an ESL push-in teacher, I have various relationships with the content teachers I work with. Some of them are more territorial, some of them are less open to cooperation, some of them are more open to collaboration, and others don’t really care.
As you figure out your influence in the classroom, pick your battles and find ways to infuse your teaching into content area lessons. I work with 4 content area teacher.
In math, I have a smaller territory and less time to do my teaching, but only 2 kids to service.
In social studies, I work with 7 learners, and the content teacher shares a lot of materials and gives a green light for me to modify them based on my students’ needs. She is also flexible with the timing for the completion of tasks and gives me the right to choose what’s best for my English learners.
In a science class, I collaborate 50/50 with the content teacher; I have a plethora of teaching time to help English learners during the execution of assignments.
In writing class, I collaborate with the content area teacher and offer resources for English learners to use. I plan and design 100% of the resources for ELLs.
As you can see, you need to figure out the relationship with content area teachers and how much of co-teaching you are able to do.
3. Know your language objectives.
Real life teaching does not give you everything you need to be prepared to teach.
Sometimes you don’t have access to the content-area teachers’ lesson plans. Very often you can only anticipate what the resources could be that the content area teacher is planning to use during the lesson.
What you are left with is to be ready to come into the classroom, figure our a lot of things on your own and make the content accessible to English language learners.
To do it, you need to know only one thing – the language objective of the lesson. For this, you need to take into the account the content objective, the resource available for students to reach the content objective and the time you have in disposal.
If you know what your students need to do with the language of the lesson, you will know how to teach it. Check out my post about how I plan lessons.
4. Keep data regarding your students.
The more data you have about your English learners, the more clear understanding you will have about how to teach them. The data you need can come from different sources. Usually, for ELLs, the information comes from:
-ACCESS scores (NJ)
-a district-approved assessment (in my district we use Star 360)
-online platforms with ELL recorded information (in my case, Ellevation Education platform)
Besides, communicating with your English learners every day in class will start giving you a very clear understanding of their English language proficiency.
Whatever data you have, keep the file for each student with the information about their current proficiency level and what they are capable of doing in English.
This data will help you with planning your language objectives and picking the strategies you will implement to teach the material. Also, you need the data to justify to the evaluator or administration the modifications you are proving to your ELLs.
5. Know your strategies.
If you have your language objective all figured out, to reach it, you will need strategies that will vary based on your students’ proficiency levels.
The internet has millions of document on this topic, and all this is confusing and time-consuming to digest.
Check out my post about how I plan my lessons with the list of strategies I use for my ELLs and how I use them.
6. You don’t need to like every single person, every single person does not need to like you.
Being an ESL push-in teacher doesn’t always come easy regarding communication with a content area teacher. We are people, and as people, we like or dislike one another. Although teachers usually tend to be cooperating and professional, not all professional communication is effective or fruitful.
Just remember, you don’t need to like a content teacher’s teaching style or what’s happening in the classroom to do your job.
You don’t need the content area teacher to like your strategies and your implementation of strategies or all your suggestions. You can still do your job if you focus on students’ needs not on the status quo of the relationship between you are the content area teacher.
Remember, it’s not the power struggle, or who teaches best, or what difficulties you have in co-teaching or co-planning. It’s knowing your goal each lesson and providing quality help to the English language learners.
7. Don’t bite more than you can chew.
There are no books that explain from A to Z what exactly an ESL-push in model is or how to do it best. You might sometimes feel pulled into different directions by teachers or students or even the administration.
You might have an idea about that perfect lesson, or the activity or the strategy that you think will work so well for your students. You might think that this coming weekend you will arrange all your files, made modifications for all the lessons you plan to be in, create those beautiful anchor-charts for your students or find that worksheet you read about.
The reality is there are many things you can do as an ESL teacher. There are many more things you could do if you spend all weekends just making sure school work is done. But hey, your job is not your life.
Don’t invite more stress into your life by thinking you are less efficient as a teacher if you don’t have that perfect anchor chart or you didn’t do those modifications for the lesson this week. Don’t try to do everything.
My secret is my focus on the immediate need of my students in the classroom. What it could be like, or I want it to be ideally – is not my type of thinking. Just take every day as a learning opportunity and create as you go.
