Teaching ELLs in the Remote Setting

Hi everyone. My name is Molly riendo and I am here to provide you with a virtual professional development on supporting our English language learners during remote learning. This professional development could be relevant to English as a second language instructors, it could also be relevant to any teacher who has English language learners in their classroom and are looking for ways to support them. So let's get started. The first strategy is, of course, to get to know your students. We know the high value of knowing and building connections with our students and how that translates to success academically. We also know that in the remote setting, we might not even be seeing the students faces. So we need to develop ways that we can get to know our students in this setting. Some strategies to do this are having your students complete a Google form or an online digital survey. Make sure you translate it if needed, and you can ask questions to get to know your students. One thing I highly recommend you include in the survey is getting to know their remote setting at home or if they're at a parent's workplace, where are they sitting down to take their class? Are they helping siblings? Are they responsible for younger siblings? Getting to know that setting will help you support the student. You also want to ask them questions about their hobbies, so you can build connections. You want to know their home culture and their home language as well. So make sure you offer a questions that will allow for them to respond and give you the most information as possible. On the same survey, you also want to give them an opportunity to ask you questions that you can answer either privately within an email or you could address during class. You also want to recreate those doorway greetings and at the beginning of class and at the end of class that we use in the actual classroom, making those connections saying hello to our students and saying goodbye at the end of the class are so important. So you want to recreate this in the virtual setting. Maybe sign in a few minutes early and as students enter the zoom or the Google Meet or whatever platform you're using, greet them, address them by name, make sure that you know their name and make sure you learn how to pronounce their name correctly. You might do this by having them record a quick little video to send you. Introducing themselves. But make sure you use those first few minutes of class and the last few minutes of class to build connections like you do when you are in an actual classroom. You can encourage your students to unmute and say hi to you or just to use the chat to respond back. It's also a good opportunity the first few minutes of class to have students engage in just greeting their classmates as well. So try and recreate the doorway greeting in the beginning of the class readings as much as you can. You also want to reach out to families and get to know the families, maybe send an email with a video of yourself, introducing yourself, the open houses that we typically have at the beginning of VR are happening in different settings. So make sure that the families know who you are, know what you look like and sound like and get to know them as well. Strategy number two is to establish norms and routines within the remote environment. These come naturally when we are in the classroom and not as naturally when we're in a remote setting. So you want to make sure that you still develop structure within the classroom setting. If you have, if you typically have a do now, have that screen presented as your students are entering class and as you're greeting, have that assignment ready to go so students can say hello and get right to work and they know that that's the expectation when they come into class that they have something that they jump in and start right away. Another way to create structures to identify student roles within the Google Meet or the zoom class, maybe you have a student who is the link checker and makes sure that all the links are active, maybe you have a student who's the classroom representative and brings any issues to the forefront to your attention that you can address, create, give students jobs, even though we're not in the classroom, think of what you could use as an assistant and give those jobs to the students. Same with exit tickets and do nows if that is something that you typically do in your classroom, make sure it's something that you do in your virtual class, wrap up class a few minutes early and have students, even if it's just a quick check and how are you feeling about this topic or how are you feeling today or giving them a practice assignment? Continue to do that in the virtual setting. Remember that routines can be modified. So anything that you're doing in the actual classroom, you can modify and try and find a way to do it virtually, and they also need to be taught to students. So don't expect these routines to go flawlessly the first time, you want to make sure that you are teaching them, reminding them they are going to need refreshers throughout the year in this environment. So make sure that is done. Remember that predictability and routines can help our English language learners if they know what to expect, they're going to feel more comfortable in our classrooms and they're going to feel ready to learn. Also, this is a great opportunity no matter the age of your student to ask for help. Establishing the norms of your virtual classroom. So what are some good rules that you think should exist in our virtual classroom? And I have students have say, give students some say on how to develop those what they should be. This is a great opportunity for students to offer their feedback and their thoughts. The third strategy is something that you might already implement in your real world classroom. Where students are actually interacting in person, but this is also something that is very important to do in the virtual world. You want to pair up your English language learners with either a native English speaker or someone who is proficient in English and give them opportunities to connect. Ideally, these pairs are in similar classes. So if you're in the middle school or a high school level, you want them to try and find someone who will be in the same classes, so that person has a point person to check in with to be mindful of those pairings. And you also want to provide opportunities for those students to actually meet and get to know each other outside of the class. So maybe you have a study hall or an office hours where students can come and get to know each other. Share their contact information. And then that English language learner can have support. As a student support throughout the year, as well as their teachers. The fourth strategy includes tech tools that will encourage student to student interaction. So we know that students love games and a lot of the games that I know I play, you need to be in person. There's whiteboards involved or there's manipulatives involved. So we need to get creative and how we're going to maintain that fun atmosphere of gaming, but in the virtual setting. So there's lots of fortunately for us. There's lots of games online that we can play with our students. Live in gim kit all offer a variety of gaming that we can provide our students. They all offer great vocab practice and reinforcement. They're super engaging for students and as soon as students get the feel for how the game works, this is something that you can build into a routine, something that the students will look forward to. Quizlet also offers an opportunity for students to just review vocab, which is awesome for our English language learners, and then you can build that into a game. So I highly recommend using those games to encourage interaction. I know when I play gim kit with my students and the students are usually jumping on the chat and the Google Meet to communicate to talk to each other. It really does encourage communication. Asynchronous communication can happen when you're not in the Google Meet can happen via websites like flipgrid. Students can record themselves, record a video, and then other students can go watch that video and reply. This is awesome for our English language learners because it takes the feeling of uncertainty and maybe that risk-taking that students have when they actually speak out loud in a Google Meet. They can practice and they can prepare and then they can post their video. And then students can go look and respond and they can have a conversation, it's not in real time, but it still happening in that flip grid. With padlet, the same thing can be happening except with writing. So that also provides students and opportunity to communicate, to comment on each other's work. But in a writing format, written format. The 5th strategy includes tech tools that will encourage engagement. So we know that when students sign on, our English language learners are signing on, some might not be turning on their cameras. We don't know if they are there. We don't know if they signed in and then walked away. It's our job to develop lessons that are engaging. If the student does not feel comfortable turning their camera on, if they do not want their house on the video, they don't want any part of their face to be shown, we have to be okay with that, and we have to develop ways. For students to engage and for a teachers to know that students are engaged, that doesn't just mean I can see the student's face on the camera. Pear deck is an awesome way to engage students during your lessons and offers you a great way to check in to see who's here. Okay, I see my students here on the Zoom, but who's actually here? Who's engaged who's paying attention? Who knows what's going on? Pear deck is a great way to develop Google slides where students can respond to questions, they can draw, there's lots of different options within pear deck. An example that you could use for your English language learners, you could give them a sentence or something from a book that you've been reading and ask them to draw a summary, they can write a summary. There's so many great ways. There's art and there's also a templates that you can use that are already created within para deck. Ed puzzle is another great way that students can engage with digital media. So if you find a great YouTube video on a certain topic that you're studying in science and you want your students to engage with that video, but you don't want them to just watch and then summarize at the end. Ed puzzle is a great way that you can embed questions within the video. It will stop the video, prompt the students to respond to a question, and they have to answer before they can move forward. It's a great way that students can engage with different videos that you find across the Internet. Again, flipgrid is another way to encourage engagement. The students can record videos on flipgrid and the teacher can record their own prompt or their own video and ask students to respond with another video. It's a great way to visually see what our students doing, what are they capable of, and it's just a great way to keep them engaged. Near pod is another. Another format that you can engage students during lessons, you can do student paste or instructor paste without lessons and there's ways to assess students, give formative assessments and other assignments. Similar to pear deck. Strategy number 6 is to digitize what you've been using in the classroom. All of those age that you've been providing to your English language learners such as digital graphic organizers and visual aids, all of those can be digitized and provided to your students to support them in the remote format. You can easily go on and Google how to take if you have a specific worksheet that you want as a PDF, Google how to do that, it will easily show you how to create that into a PDF, which you can then upload onto Google Classroom and provide to your students. Remember that if you have, if you are using things in your classroom and your physical classroom, worksheets and things like that to aid your English language learners, you can find a way to create a remote digital version of that document. Also pair deck is a great way to develop your own graphic organizers that students can complete as they're listening to a lesson. The 7 strategy is to embrace opportunities to collaborate. If any point during the school year, you have the opportunity to collaborate with other colleagues and coworkers to support your English learners, you should take advantage of that because they are going to need a lot of support in the setting. If you are in the middle of rewriting your curriculum and you realize that there is an opportunity to create an interdisciplinary unit or even a project based learning assignment that is interdisciplinary or thematic, you should take advantage of that because that's really going to support our students. With building vocab and understanding the content of our classes. The 8th strategy is to really take advantage of small group breakout rooms. I know this can be complicated depending on whatever platform you're using for your remote class, but there are ways to do it even on Google Meet. And hopefully they're coming out with an easier breakout room soon. You want to make sure that you provide ample opportunity for your students to work and breakout rooms because this is when they're really going to get the chance to communicate, to practice, to summarize all of the good things can happen and breakout rooms. When students are in a Google Meet with 30 other students, there's not a lot of interaction going. So breakout rooms are going to be crucial this year for student learning. You need to plan ahead, you want to make sure that your breakout rooms are thoughtfully adjusted and planned. So if you know that certain students work well with other students and vice versa, plan it out as if you plan and we're planning your assigned seats. You want to make sure that students are in breakout rooms where they're going to feel supported. They're going to feel comfortable, and they know that there appears that they can work productively with. Zoom has the breakout room, option, but Google Meet you're going to have to at this point, I know some schools have a breakout option and there's some extensions that you could use. What I've been doing is I've been developing ahead of time, links to Google meets, and I create a Google slide that has those links and student names under the links, and they click on their meat and they enter. It's also very important to monitor our breakout rooms just as we would monitor students in a physical classroom. So have a setup where you can see those classrooms making the minimizing the windows of your breakout rooms and keeping them on a separate computer or separate monitor so you can keep track of what students are doing. There's also a great ways other teachers have provided great ways for logistics with breakout rooms online. You can easily find if you take do a quick Internet search. When students are in breakout rooms, you really need to give students a task. Give them an assignment. What are they going to, what do they need to produce before they're called back to class? You can set, you can send them in just to socialize. And you can give them a speaking prompt or speaking task, but ideally they have something that they have to produce. That way they are working towards a finished product, and they have an objective when they go in there. Otherwise, there could be a little chaotic, giving them a Google slide that they have to fill out, giving them a Google form that they have to complete record, they can record themselves on flipgrid, they can share their screen on flipgrid and record their conversation, but making sure that they have an actual item to produce by the end of the breakout room is very important. Just like we talked about earlier setting up norms and providing guidelines and expectations for students in the Google Meet. We need to do that with breakout rooms. And again, the students can be a part of this process. You want to teach them exactly what they need to do for their breakout rooms. How are they going to enter their breakout rooms? How are they going to come back to class? How are they going to ensure every student is involved? How are they going to politely ask someone to unmute themselves and speak? How are they going to politely ask a student to mute their mic if they need to do that? So making sure that you have all of those norms set up ahead of time, that's going to help our English language learners be successful. If they are fully prepared and understand our expectations. Another idea for a breakout room is if you are students are working in an assignment individually behind their screens, creating a little breakout room that you will be in along with yourself and the main Google Meet are the main zoom and then creating an additional breakout room that you can students can go into and privately ask you for support, ask you for assistance, I've taken advantage of that and students really have appreciated the ability to leave the meat other zoom that has 30 students and go into a different one or maybe just a couple students are in there and getting extra support that's going to be really helpful for our English language learners to know that they can get the help they need even though we are in this remote setting and not in an actual classroom classroom. We know that when students are in an actual classroom, they can just raise their hand and I can quietly discreetly come over and help them out. It's not really the case in this setting, especially for our quiet and more introverted students. They're going to need options to ask for help. The 9th strategy to support our English language learners is using authentic materials. We have an opportunity right now where we have our students are sitting behind a computer screen and we have access to a lot of authentic material on the Internet. So you would ideally be able to easily integrate all of this into your lessons to create engaging and authentic, lessons and materials for your students. So examples could be news and current events, YouTube videos, and other sources that would be helpful. These authentic materials, students can students can find these authentic materials every student has a device now. So they can they can look for the authentic materials and bring them back to class and they can be applied within our classroom. They also provide great material for breakout room discussions. And it can be engaged with the smaller groups as well. Our final strategy is brain breaks and movement breaks. These are so important for our students, especially if you have a longer meat times. My digital clap my remote classes are 90 minutes long and I teach middle schoolers and there's just no way they're going to be able to sit for a full 90 minutes in front of the screen. And in fact, I don't want them to. I want them to move. I want them to look away from their screen and rest their eyes. Our English language learners are going to be overloaded this year with information with screen time we need to make sure that we take care of them and we offer them the breaks that they need. We also need to be intentional with our breaks. We can't just say, okay, take a break. Come back in three minutes, come back in 5 minutes. We need to make sure that students can see the time, so it provide them with a timer, we need to make sure that we've set up the guidelines and we're being intentional with what we want them to do. Let them know that this is a good time to use the restroom. Let them know that this is such a good time to get a drink. Let them know that this is a good time to go say hi to a pet or a family member. Let them know that they are allowed to do those things. They can turn their camera off. They can mute their mic and they can leave and then come back. You also want to incorporate brain breaks and movement breaks that the class can do together. Students love listening to music. So finding a song that everyone can listen to, dance breaks, different activities, and let the students get involved with that. Those will also create community within your classrooms. You also want to incorporate reflection breaks, like I said before, our English language learners are going to be overloaded with information. We need to make sure that we are providing them just like we do in the classroom in the remote classroom and we need to provide them with opportunities to reflect stop to think about what we're doing to think about what they know and to think about if they need more support or if they feel prepared to move on with whatever the content is. You want to model that and encourage reflection. So for example, a brain break might be, okay, stand up and listen to this song and do a dance and then sit down and write down three things that you remember from the lesson that we just did. As simple as that. All right, those are my ten strategies for engaging our English language learners and supporting them in this remote learning. References here are all for the online tech tools that I mentioned. And they are great resources for our students. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.