More Instructional Strategies

 A variety of different instructional strategies can be used to allow to SLIFE to be more successful in the classroom.

• Some strategies help address student challenges with language or content knowledge, such as: Making Text Accessible, Sheltered English Instruction, Scaffolding Lessons, and Flipped Learning
• Project-Based Learning> can reduce cultural dissonance by providing more immediate relevance and interconnectedness.
• Blended Learning> can be used to provide the combination of flexibility and support needed to accommodate for atypical educational histories and for ongoing interruptions to formal education.
• All of these strategies are consistent with the MALP instructional model, which provides an overarching framework.

Making Text Accessible:

• Text Compactor is a free online automatic text summarization tool.  Take a complicated piece of text and compact it to make it more accessible to students by pasting it into the tool.

• 60 Second Recap® is a website dedicated to making the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today’s teens.  Their Library has recaps of many of the books used in high school English classes.

• Simple English Wikipedia has articles on thousands of topics, all written using basic English vocabulary and shorter sentences. This allows a variety of people to understand normally complex terms or phrases.  A good place to start is at the Simple English Schools Gateway, which has information for teachers on how to use the website, student tutorials, and links to various subjects.

• Free Text to Speech.  With so much of the text in our classrooms now available in digital forms, text to speech applications have become an essential tool for many students.  This page is part of a larger Universal Design for Learning website and is frequently updated as new tools become available.

• Recommended Text Resources for Content Development is a list of resources compiled by teachingrefugees.com that suggests texts that might be helpful for teaching Math, Science, Social Studies and Language Arts to students with limited formal education.

Scaffolding Lessons:

• Six Scaffolding Strategies to Use with Your Students is a brief article from Edutopia that explains what scaffolding is and describes some common and effective generic strategies for doing it.

• I Do, We Do, You Do This 6 minute YouTube video clip shows a middle school teacher scaffolding reading comprehension in a social studies class along with her commentary on what she is doing and why.

• Scaffolding Academic Learning for Second Language Learners is a 2004 article from The Internet TESL Journal that describes how to use scaffolding while doing pre-reading activities, strategies for monitoring comprehension during reading, post-reading activities, and writing activities.

• Reading (and Scaffolding) Expository Texts is a 2010 article by Roberta Sejnost and Sharon Thiese from AdLit.org.  It gives a description of how to help students comprehend expository text structures by acquainting them with the signal or cue words authors utilize in writing each of the structures and by using the (downloadable) graphic organizers offered in this article

Sheltered English Instruction:

• The Teaching Diverse Learners website by Brown University describes Sheltered English Instruction as:

"an instructional approach that engages ELLs above the beginner level in developing grade-level content-area knowledge, academic skills, and increased English proficiency. In sheltered English classes, teachers use clear, direct, simple English and a wide range of scaffolding strategies to communicate meaningful input in the content area to students. Learning activities that connect new content to students' prior knowledge, that require collaboration among students, and that spiral through curriculum material, offer ELLs the grade-level content instruction of their English-speaking peers, while adapting lesson delivery to suit their English proficiency level."

• This website provides a very good overview of sheltered English instruction and its components.

• The primary model of sheltered English instruction is the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) that was developed by Jana Echevarria, MaryEllen Vogt and Deborah J. Short. Key components of this model include teacher preparation and instructional indicators such as comprehensible input and the building of background knowledge. It is comprised of strategies for both classroom organization and for delivery of instruction.  You can see a brief overview at Judie Haynes "everythingESL" site or go deeper into the resources and training available from PearsonPD.

Flipped Learning:

• Flipped learning is a recent trend in education that seems to be gaining popularity.  Recently it has begun to be promoted by SLIFE researchers and authors Andrea DeCapua and Helaine Marshall who include a chapter about it in their most recent book, Making the Transition to Classroom Success: Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners (2013).

• In Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom (Bilingual Basics, Newsletter of the Bilingual Education Interest Section of TESOL, August 2013), Marshall argues that, "The flipped classroom (1) increases comprehension of the material; (2) increases interaction with instructor and peers; and (3) increases critical thinking as a natural part of the learning process."

• There are a number of sites where you can find out more about this technique, including The Flipped Learning Network and  Katie Gimbar’s YouTube videos.

Project-Based Learning:

• In their book, Breaking New Ground, DeCapua and Marshall dedicate several chapters to the use of Project-Based Learning.  They argue that PBL is a very effective way to implement the MALP model because it encourages immediate relevance and interconnectedness, allows for a great deal of differentiation, fosters group work while requiring individual accountability, easily integrates oral transmission as well as print, and provides a structure to introduce academic ways of thinking (p. 84).

• There are a number of very good websites to learn how to successfully implement a PBL approach.  Some excellent information can be found on Edutopia as well as from the Buck Institute for Education.  These sources emphasize that there is a difference between doing projects with students and implementing a Project-Based Learning approach.

Blended Learning:

• Due to either prior or ongoing life circumstances, SLIFE often require greater flexibility and personalization in their educational programs.  Blended learning uses a combination of face-to-face instruction with individualized programming to personalize learning.  Typically, it involves leveraging technology to provide students with a more control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of his or her learning.

• There is a great deal of information about Blended Learning online, but a couple of places to start are the Edutopia Blended Learning page and the Clayton Christensen Institute.