Scaffolding Techniques In My Classroom

I recently introduced a game called “Murder Mystery” in my class during transitions and to get kids out of their seats. The way you play is you have one person secretly chosen as a murderer. Then all students walk around and shake hands, only the murderer, when he or she shakes someone’s hands secretly scratches their palm, which means that they are poisoned and after waiting 5 seconds, they have to stage a dramatic death. To illustrate what I meant, I had another student shake my hand and then after five seconds, I “died.” This gave students a sense of how to play the game and illustrated it.

My CT is great at using modeling to show examples of good student work. In the middle of independent work, she’ll hold up one or more students’ work and either read it or show it if it’s art work to show what makes it great. I think this raises expectations in a way, and also provides one model of how to accomplish a goal. It also gives positive feedback which is nice.

My CT also encourages metacognition by having students grade themselves on various tasks that they’ve completed. She also has them think more generally about how they can improve, and she has them set goals as well. One example of her use of these strategies is after having students run “Literature Circles” at each table group. Literature Circles are a rather challenging form of student led discussions about text. In this case they discuss a novel they are reading. Each student has a different role, and each student at some point leads a discussion on an aspect of the text. This activity required a lot of teamwork, patience and hard work to learn these new roles. After trying these literature circles, Carlee (my CT), had them give themselves a grade, and she had them reflect on what worked and what didn’t work, and asked them what they could do differently next time. She had students share out their ideas so potential problems and solutions surfaced for the whole class to benefit from. I can’t remember the specific remarks that students made, but I was impressed by the honesty and clarity that the students had about themselves and their groups’ work.

Sentence Stems in Class

This past week I have been helping students to write biographies while I observe my CT teach english. They are doing something called a "hero" project where students can look at individuals who have done positive things in the face of difficult situations. I think about a third of my class is ELL students, and my teacher chooses to use sentence starters to scaffold the use of "academic" language. For example, in a worksheet in the conclusions, students choose a sentence starters like this one: "In conclusion, _______ (put your hero here)" has given us a ("gift" or "legacy") that lasts today in the form of_____________ (finish the sentence). The teacher briefly modeled each sentence using only one example. The students wrote about half of these sentences incorrectly in some way. Many of them filled in the blanks, then went on to write a whole sentence in the final blank that stood alone.

The challenge here is how to teach students academic language. I think that these phrases are very important, but that enough scaffolding was not given. The end result was that I went arround briefly trying to ask students to correct their own mistakes, and then usually ending up correcting incorrect entries and showing them why it was correct. It is an open question as to whether this works. I would like to see if students can use these sentence stems in the future without help or not.

Learning a Second Language is Hard

I once thought that if you live in a place for 2 or three months you'd just acquire the language. When I was 19 during a break in college, I decided to travel to Nicaragua and stay there fore a number of months to learn the language and to understand their political history. I figured, hey, I have two months, I should be able to become perfectly fluent in that time, right?

So I have basic fluency now. But as for speaking in complex sentences, or understanding a movie in Spanish, it's not happening. I realize now that it is much harder to learn a language, and my goal of speaking like a native speaker in 2 months was a little, um optimistic.

Nonetheless the experience was really wonderful and I did soak up language. I think it really helped to have individual tutors for 2 weeks, 5 days a week. Living with a family that had experience hosting foreigners also made learning a lot easier. THey knew how to teach me and foster me somewhat.

So what makes learning a language easier is having patient people to teach you and education. Living with a family is advantageous because you feel comfortable enough to ask questions and try things out. For whatever reason, I was rarely shy about speaking imperfect spanish. I was never ostracized or anything. In fact many people inserted me into their social structure and treated me as they treated wealthy people in their society. Some individuals wanted to confide with me in their distrust of poor lazy people, others assumed that I was super rich back home. At any rate I generally feel I had social capital to burn. Perhaps that is why I rarely felt stigmatized for not speaking spanish. Boy it's really different here though.

Not speaking the language, no matter how rich you are, is stigmatized. Which I imagine makes it really hard to actually learn the language.

I have found that even when you do start to learn a language, the cultural barrier is still there. Speaking spanish to a young person i relate to is much easier than an older adult with really different life experiences.

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