ELL/immigration response

Teaching ELL students is an increasingly important skill, as the demographics in the country change.
One of the barriers to accommodating for ELL/immigrant children is a bias against them culturally and politically from teachers and community members. Bias against immigrants and a movement toward “English-only” makes school an unwelcoming environment for many learners.

One problem teachers as a group face when dealing with culturally and linguistically diverse students is that teachers tend to be majority white, middle-class women. And unfortunately a lot of teachers don’t feel comfortable with students that have different backgrounds, or, at least, they feel most comfortable with students that are similar to them. As we talked about with gender, this can put boys at a disadvantage in school. For ELL students the implication then is kind of obvious.

Studies have shown that ELL students can do really well in a bilingual setting, but you’ll find in many states that there are actually laws saying that all instruction must be in English (looking at you, Arizona). I feel like the idea of English-only is so antiquated and jingoistic; I’m so concerned that these attitudes seem to be growing. The wave of immigration is increasing. Already in five states the majority of K-12 students are from “minority” backgrounds. If we continue to politicize the education of those students, it’s not just going to have a negative impact on their individual education; it’s going to be negative for the country as a whole. I feel like in a K-12 setting it’s necessary for teachers to be advocates of social justice. There are a lot of reasonable barriers teachers might have in providing the best education to all students, but their politics or biases shouldn’t be among those.

Behaviorism and social-cognitive response

How would you define successful mastery of your lesson objectives from a behavioral view of learning? From a social cognitive view of learning?

From a behaviorist perspective, when learning takes place, you can see a change in behavior.

So, in the classroom, this would be like, after a lesson, students perform a task that they previously could not. A pre-test given before the lesson would have students give incorrect answers, whereas a post test would have them answer correctly. This change in behavior (answering correctly instead of incorrectly) would be the evidence of learning. Or, another example, say you have a dance lesson. Before the lesson, the students would not know the steps to the foxtrot. After the lesson, having students perform the foxtrot would be evidence of their learning.

From a social-cognitive view of learning, a change in behavior may or may not take place. From a social-cognitive perspective, learning is an internal mental process that may or may not be reflected in behavior.

The social-cognitive theory is different from the behaviorist theory, because in the social-cognitive theory, you don’t need to learn everything by doing it yourself; you can learn by observation. Therefore, the learning might take place in your mind, without being reflected in your performance. This makes defining and assessing learning objectives more difficult. The focus, then, in a social-cognitive classroom, is creating an environment where students are likely to have good models and high self-efficacy.

Creating a productive learning environment response

As a prospective teacher, I worry about classroom management and am a little daunted about being the only adult in a room full of kids, and being legally responsible for them. Some things I will definitely try in my own classroom are: having kids participate in making the classroom rules and giving them some amount of choice in their activities. Not only does this “feel right” but it is good to know it is research-supported. I guess I kind of hope to create a self-sustaining classroom, one where students are involved somehow in the maintenance of order (and therefore one where hopefully it doesn’t all fall apart if they have a sub one day).

One thing that really resonated with me was the idea that creating a warm learning environment didn’t just mean giving students affection—that treating them with respect also meant taking your role as teacher and adult seriously. When I reflect on my experiences as an elementary student, the best teachers were compassionate and treated me like a person, but moreover, they were prepared, worked to create engaging material, and set high standards for our class. I never had an elementary teacher who was mean—I think as more jobs are open to women in general, less people go into this profession who don’t enjoy being around children than maybe did before, so everyone is pretty sweet and nice. But what makes a teacher stand out of that pack is taking the job itself really seriously.

I recently visited a classroom, which, while not being exactly how I envision mine, was absolutely impressive in its organization and rigor—and these were first-graders! But they all knew exactly what they should be doing, and, without generally falling into the trap of tattle-tales, they monitored each other even when the teacher was working elsewhere.

One of my favorite ideas from the readings was having a two-way journal with students, where the teacher doesn’t correct their mistakes. Not only does this provide a way for teachers to foster closer relationships with students, giving an opportunity to interact with them personally that may be rarer in a busy classroom, but also give insight into student interests that can be used to make activities more enjoyable, and give a teacher a look into a student’s writing level. Plus! Writing without criticism can make a student feel more comfortable doing it, and they may begin to appreciate how writing for communication can be valuable and even pleasant.

CSEL: Elementary Education case study response
First, with this student, you may want to try reiterating and defining specifically what behavior is acceptable in the classroom. Then, try to take them aside at some point to talk with them one-on-one. It may also be beneficial to explicitly teach the social skills that cooperative learning requires. Finally, you could use a behaviorist approach to reward compliant behavior and punish noncompliant behavior.