Teachers' Beliefs and Students' Success

Hello friends, Recently, there has been a fascinating debate about differentiating instruction on the Education Week website. Carol Ann Tomlinson recently wrote a poignant response to an article entitled "Differentiation Doesn't Work" by James R. Delisle. Some members may want to check out Tomlinson's inspiring article "Differentiation Does, In Fact, Work."

A critical component of Tomlinson's argument is the importance of a teacher's beliefs about the potential within each and every student. She writes, " ...teachers who believe firmly in the untapped capacity of each learner, and thus set out to demonstrate to students that by working hard and working smart they can achieve impressive goals, get far better results than teachers who believe some students are smart, others are not, and little can be done to change that." Members will likely recognize a "growth mindset" as an underlying principle in Tomlinson's words.

I've observed that adult educators hold a strong belief in every single student's potential. We tend to operate on the assumption that every student is brilliant, as argued so powerfully in Lisa Delpit's stirring book "Multiplication is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children. (Please note: Delpit's title reflects the disheartening words of an African American child.) A teacher's belief can make all the difference. One never knows what someone may be capable of.

Please offer comments on the value of a teacher's beliefs as well as the efficacy of differentiating instruction. 

Cheers, Susan

Moderator, Assessment CoP

Comments

Her critically wrong assumption is that I'm thinking my students have different *ability* levels, not different skill levels.   

Oh, but (I say, gazing around the dozen people here in the computer lab)... my students *do* in fact,  bring different abilities to the task. 

  I don't think those ability levels are fixed... but in my experience, in order to grow those abilities we need to build from where the students are. 

  If the students are from different places, then it helps to differentiate. 

I totally appreciate that it can be, simply, logistically impossible to do with the minimal resources our teachers have.  Teachers don't have the background to figure out appropriate differentiation along levels (it wouldn't have to be a 1:1 differentiation, but my student who is still counting to get from 9 to 12 doesn't need the same thing as the student who's got basic number sense in the bag), much less the time.  Some of my students will need special strategies -- like learning to use a pencil to guide them to figuring out which lines in those weird "T" shapes they have to find the area of are parallel... others can follow the general directions. 

     I know that requiring something that pretends to be differentiation can actually take away from the quality of a lesson, in which case it "isn't working."   However that doesn't make differentiation a bad thing; it simply highlights the egregious injustice of unfunded demands.   

 

As someone who has used, studied, and taught differentiated instruction for many years (I'm facilitating the TEAL DI-Writing course as we speak), I can wholeheartedly endorse Tomlinson's remarks. In adult ed, we can't apply DI as intensively as in K-12 classrooms becuase of our limited time with our students, but that doesn't mean we can't use it at all. Our students come to us with hugely varying strengths, experiences, and skills, but we certainly have seen that they all can learn with the proper support on our part and effort on theirs. We can't treat them all the same -- we can't even treat a single student the same all the time, because, for example, she might be a skilled writer but dreadful in math. Differentiation doesn't have to be a huge, intimidating, time-consuming project; it can be as small as allowing students to choose their own topics for writing, by allowing advanced math students to do some exploring in the area being taught, by giving English language learners a few simple options for demonstrating their language prowess.  It's not a question of "if" our students come in at different places; they do, and we must respond, as Tomlinson has said elsewhere, in ways that permit "each individual to learn as deeply as possible as quickly as possible, without assuming one student’s road map for learning is identical to anyone else’s.”

I am terribly tempted to jump in here with loud endorsements of working to achieve full differentiation in adult ESOL classrooms, but then I would be anticipating my discussion coming up on March 2.   One imperative for working for differentiation is the simple and powerful fact that EVERY adult ESOL classroom has multiple levels- despite any attempt at "leveling" .  Those classes that are "the only game in town"-- i.e. mixed level classes because there is only one ESL class- are the most likely to have the A-Z configuration-- no education to college education and everything in between.  It is because teachers unprepared for such a range of students often "teach to the middle and hope for the best" (not my words...) that many learners are then deemed to have "disabilities" of some kind--either because they cannot make head nor tails of what is going on in the classroom or because they are bored silly and choose not to apply themselves or choose to leave.    Thus differentiated instruction is the ONLY way to assure that all learners at all levels WILL be able to make progress.   As many of you know, I have focused for several years on the practice, or method of classroom management, I call "learning centers" or stations.  I can say with full confidence, because I have seen many teachers I have trained do it and do it WELL, that it IS possible to have students at ALL levels of education and English proficiency working simultaneously productively and on materials and content that is relevant and of their own choice.   It DOES require pretty strong commitment to the idea and the method, and yes, to the notion that ALL persons CAN and WILL learn under the right circumstances.     Both of the women who are going to be my co-"speakers' for the guest discussion from March 2-5 are experienced in managing classrooms with multiple levels of learners using learning centers and achieving a VERY high level of successful differentiation.     I hope they will receive some good questions on learning how to do it and the challenges --and especially the rewards-- of making that effort.  

Robin Lovrien (Schwarz) 

I agree with Carol Ann Tomlinson that differentiating instruction is extremely important. I also think that in the past it has been very difficult for teachers to do, including for adult ed teachers..Now, however, there are a lot of online tools, some free or inexpensive, some with sophisticated management information systems that, once set up, and once teachers are comfortable using them, can make differentiation and personalized instruction possible.

I wonder if others here have experiences to share with using online software or apps that have lightened the load in differentiating instruction. If so, I would love to hear about your experience. I would also like to know what challenges you have faced in using this software.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

"Teaching up" planning for the advanced learners and scaffolding for less advanced, according to Tomlinson resulted in more marked progress when compared to schools that did not use this approach. The distinguishing factor in Tomlinson's argument is the strategy or concept of "scaffolding". Vygotsky's scaffolding in learning is a strong component for differentiated instruction and also for addressing teacher beliefs about the potential within students. If there is a scaffold built to encourage each student to achieve the small part that challenges them, then the classroom can be a safe place to see potential take form in student achievement. As adults we build our own scaffolds when we are learning something new. Differentiated instruction can become the scaffold that serves as bridge from incompetence to achievement. The scaffold and the achievement will be different for each student. "Any system that depends on exclusivist practices in order to secure its existence will eventually implode from within as a result of its own short sightedness. On the contrary, any system that welcomes inclusion as a practice will eventually continue to thrive, not on its own strength, but through those that others chose to exclude. Still the inclusionary system will not thrive because of being inclusive, but through the generosity of creativity and strength brought by those who would have been excluded" (Morris, 2014). With that said, it is important to keep in mind what Moll (2005) stated about minority and second language learners in the classroom when he referred to the backgrounds from which these students come, as funds of knowledge. Differentiated instruction provides a scaffold for inclusion.

Morris, R.K. (2014). Teachers perceptions of emergent writing in the bilingual preschool classroom. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Walden University.

Moll, L. (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Ruth

Susan, Thank you for sharing this article. It's fantastic. I love the concept of "watering up" the curriculum rather than watering it down to engage ALL students in learning. Presenting learners with big and important ideas and authentic real-world learning activities is essential. In this way, we are far more likely to motivate students to engage in their learning. The teaching activities suggested in this piece, including the "rainbow sticky note semantic mapping" are great!

According to the author, Edwin Ellis, the goals of a watered up curriculum are as follows:

  • More emphasis on students' constructing knowledge
  • More depth, less superficial coverage.
  • More emphasis on archetype concepts, patterns, and strategies.
  • More emphasis on developing relational understanding and knowledge connections to real-world contexts.
  • More student elaboration.
  • More emphasis on developing effective habits of the mind, higher order thinking and information processing skills, and learning strategies.

Let's hear how these ideas might play out in practical terms in an adult education classroom!

Cheers, Susan

Moderator, Assessment CoP

I read Ms.Tomlinson's article through the filter of adult education and something caught my eye.  In describing K-12 classrooms where DI is the norm, she wrote, "Teachers in those schools typically "teach up," planning first for advanced learners, then scaffolding instruction to enable less advanced students to access those rich learning experiences. Further, they extend the initial learning opportunities when they are not sufficiently challenging for highly advanced learners. In those schools, achievement for the full spectrum of learners—including advanced learners—rose markedly when compared to peer schools where this approach was not pervasive." (Para. 17)  

Keeping in mind that our adult ESL instruction aligns with Stephen Krashen's model of I+1, where instruction is slightly above the learner's "zone of proximal development," what caught my eye was the idea of planning the instruction towards the HIGHER performing learners in the class and providing scaffolding for the lower ability learners afterwards.  It has long been my belief that it was easier to ramp up the difficulty of an activity for a "fast finisher" than to simplify a lesson that was too difficult for them from its inception.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that maybe this belief is not borne out in research, but it has been my experience in practice as far as adult learners are concerned.  I approach every adult ESL classroom with the assumption that the group of learners will represent a wide variety of skills and abilities, so I approach my lesson planning with the question of what the lowest-skilled learners need to accomplish the objectives of my lesson.  Once I have that in place, hopefully with ample scaffolding and direct instruction, I find it way easier to remove the scaffolding and prepare activities or roles for the higher-skilled students that also meet the lesson objectives.

The gist of that paragraph is clear, however, and that is that classrooms that provide adequate challenge and difficulty for all learners are more successful. 

Thoughts?

Kat, I think your point above is well taken. I know the importance of high expectations, and so on, but have we stopped to think what this actually will mean for the basic level students who will struggle with the language and the content that is aimed at the the highest level students? When you couple that with the fact that the frustration level for readers is at  fewer than 93% known words (more than 7% unknown) and the instructional level is 93-97% known words, wouldn't aiming at the higher level automatically discourage (if not demoralize)  these learners?

It is a conundrum, I think. Yes, there is a need for complex language, rich content, and  the close attention to reading, but how does this square with not wanting to lose students - on either end?

Miriam

 

Hello all, Thanks to everyone for their contributions to this discussion. I agree that every class is multilevel, some are just more multilevel than others. I think addressing the needs of all the learners in a class is the most challenging aspect of our work. In adult literacy, we need to pitch instruction at a wide range of levels and keep all those balls in the air at the same time. K12 faces similar difficult challenges, but they have many more resources than we do.

I appreciate Kat and Miriam raising the issue of supporting the lowest level learners. Since we are being challenged to raise the bar across the board, many of us have questions about how to actually do that with the lowest level students, especially those who have little or no formal education in the past.  I think Robin's concept of learning stations is a great example of how to actually do this successfully. We will be fortunate to learn more about learning stations during the upcoming discussion in the Adult ELL CoP.

Cheers, Susan

Moderator, Assessment CoP

Miriam.

First, let me say that I worked for many years with Kathy Santopietro Weddel here in Longmont as a consultant for the Northern Colorado Professional Development Resource Center. She is still here and continues to be our state CASAS trainer, but she spends a lot of her time doing story telling. She's very, very good.  Connie Davis also worked in that office and she sends her regards.

Also, when I returned from teaching in China and found a job in adult ESL here, we were using Crossroads. I still have copies of all of those materials to have on hand for supplemental practice and materials. There were so many thing you guys did right with that book!

Second, thank you for your comments. This is a concern of mine as CCRS and Common Core push adult ed standards farther and farther towards more rigorous academics and workplace standards. In looking at our population of adult immigrants, the reality is that the majority of our adult learners have very little, if any educational background. They come to our program with a suitcase full of preconceived notions as to what school is, what there role as "student" should be and what my role as "teacher" should be.  So many of them need scaffolding and support in the form of bottom-up strategies so that they can be successful in their classes.

I was so happy to know that you concur. I will continue to plan lessons with my lowest performers in mind and ramp up activities for the higher learners. I often hear teachers complain about what a challenge it is to keep their fast finishers on task and busy. To me, that's the easy part. It's more difficult to bring the lower students up in a way that they see their success and develop their persistence as learners.

Kat

Thanks for your message, Kat. I know I have said this before, but I so believe that the hardest task for teaching is to help those students who are just  starting to get literacy in any language to achieve a level where they see that they are learning and will be motivated to continue. The best teachers I know are those who work sucessfully with literacy level learners. That is why I am frustrated by the fact that in many classes I observe the students with the least proficiency and literacy are often shunted over to the unpaid and likely well meaning but minimally trained volunteer, while the teacher works with those with higher skills.

And, it bears reminding all of what I think is an excellent resource for those who work with students with emerging literacy: The New American Horizon Foundation videos show two teachers working in two different classes with English learners with emerging literacy. They are both master teachers and both, frankly, working their hearts out in the videos. Here's a description from the webpage describing the two classes shown on the video:

"Lesson Planning for Life Skills: Betsy Lindeman Wong of Alexandria, Virginia, guides beginning level learners through highly structured to open-ended activities showing the progression of a life-skills lesson in talking on the telephone.

"Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers: Andrea Echelberger of Saint Paul, Minnesota, works with a Whole-Part-Whole approach to teaching literacy, using a learner-generated story of a shared experience and demonstrating activities to develop beginning literacy skills."

Here's a link: http://www.newamericanhorizons.org/training-videos/titles-in-the-series

By the way, sneaking a peak at Robin's post below about teaching to the needs of the learners, I think one of the classes in particular in this video is spot on there: Andrea's Whole-Part-Whole approach, where the students go to a hardward store in the neighborhood to buy necessitites such as mouse traps or poison and roach motels (I think? Or is my memory taking a Brian-William's-like foray away from what exactly they buy?), seems to exactly address these learners' current needs for oral language and literacy.

Thoughts, anyone? Other resources?

Miriam

 

 

Miriam,

This, of course, has been a problem for a long time. But I feel that the advent of technology offers a solution.

By now I would imagine that every class can be equipped with computers. And nearly all students have a cell phone.

There are very many lessons and classes online and it should be easy to divide a multi-level class up, so that everyone can work at his or her level or lesson.

In addition now may be a good time to discuss including native language literacy in ESL programs, sometimes called Pre-ESL.

Often low literacy beginners need a bilingual phase of instruction at first as a transition to an English Only class.

I have been teaching in the above manner for over ten years, and I have found it very successful and also extremely interesting. Now I am making short videos that I put on YouTube.

Sincerely,

Paul Rogers

 

Hello Kat, Miriam and all, I agree with your comments that working with emergent readers, i.e., those who have limited or interrupted formal schooling--some have never learned to read and write at all in any language--, is the most challenging aspect of adult ESOL-- and the most rewarding, too. These learners need our best, well-trained teachers, not well-meaning volunteers who have no training.

Thanks for mentioning the New American Horizons videos, Miriam. Every time I watch Andrea's class, I learn something new, and I appreciate the video more. Another resource that has been mentioned in the Adult English Learners CoP by Lisa Vogt is the Elder Curriculum, which is appropriate for ALL learners, not only elders. This entire curriculum, complete with step-by-step lesson plans, student handouts and excellent color photos, is available for free download.

As Lisa Vogt posted: "To request a free digital copy of the curriculum, please visit www.elderliteracy.org. You can also preview curriculum materials on the 'Resources' page: www.elderliteracy.org/resources/ "

Another important resource to recommend is the ELLU online course "Teaching Emergent Readers," which is available through the Learning Portal on LINCS.  I would definitely recommend this course to any teacher or volunteer who has not been trained in how to teach reading and writing to this population of learners.

It would be great to hear from teachers who are working with emergent readers. Please share your successes and your questions here!

Cheers, Susan

Moderator, Assessment CoP

Thank you Kat for noting that for adult ed, the concept of watering up sounds extremely useful and effective but for ESOL, it is not realistic at all.  While I believe it is possible to chunk up a topic in ways that those with the lowest ENGLISH can manage it, it is quite another thing to make topics accessible to those with low or no education.  Two of the cardinal rules of adult ESOL, repeated over and over and over in the literature, such as it is, are that instruction must be relevent-- i.e. personally useful-- and just a little challenging.   Just last week I participated in an extended interview with a person who manages a very large corps of literacy tutors, the majority of whom work with ESL students.  This group seems to have a particularly good retention of students.  When asked what the key to retention was, she replied it was making sure that the work the tutors were doing with the students was " highly relevant and personalized and a little challenging."  This means that a pre-selected curriculum or topic, no matter how well intended, very likely will not be highly personal and relevant to someone who needs the most basic English to manage simple day-to-day interactions, or who needs to understand his or her manager on the job.   Therefore, in my practice and for those I coach, differentiation means not only that work is "accessible" in terms of language and grammar ( to say nothing of content, as the cautions about "watering down" the curriculum note), but that it is highly relevant and usable to the individual learner.   I cannot even count the number of classrooms I have sat in where a lesson was going on that was from a mandated curriculum or a teacher or program-chosen text book and probably half of the students were unable to make sense of it or were uninterested.  The crux of the problem is that having a book to grab and a lesson to follow is very easy for the volunteer part-time ESOL teachers that make up so much of the teaching corps, but that this is often a very poor choice for the learners themselves.   We all wrestle with the notion that whatever we are teaching----lessons on transportation, cooking, health, etc-- are "good for the learners" and what they need, but in reality the needs are far more urgent and immediate than the book lessons can fill.  

I have cited here before the study by Schalge and Soga (2008) in which ESOL students who had dropped out of a program were asked why.  The most prominent reason was that lessons, while beautifully crafted, were irrelevant-- of very low interest.  The lessons cited specifically included one on cooking and one on going to the airport.   Personally, when I lived in other countries, I did not need to know basic cooking or equipment vocabulary in the new language because I was cooking by myself and did not do it "in French."  Also the cooking lessons in question were teaching students how to cook things they were not going to prepare on their own (and contained , no doubt, subliminal health and nutrition messages...).  And why, one has to ask, would there be a lesson on going to the airport for students who were either refugees or undocumented or otherwise highly unlikely to USE the airport?   So often, though extremely well-intended, the lessons in the books or curricula are NOT what students really want and need. I have long complained of the English-as -a-foreign-language approach to ESOL that predominates in so many places.   In foreign language classes, it is considered normal to hop from topic to topic, ones that are chosen, presumably for their high interest factor, and to do spot grammar lessons.  For the vast majority of our students, however, as I have said, and know from long experience, the urgent needs of jobs, communicating with a child's teacher or a doctor or a utility office are paramount and these students do not have time to get there through the long route of learning the language systems from the bottom up.  

When we accept that stark reality and structure learning so students can practice exactly what they need and get to a level of competence where they can USE what they are practicing, then we are truly differentiating.  

Robin

 

 

Hello all,The points made by Robin above are important. Robin wrote, "While I believe it is possible to chunk up a topic in ways that those with the lowest ENGLISH can manage it, it is quite another thing to make topics accessible to those with low or no education.  Two of the cardinal rules of adult ESOL, repeated over and over and over in the literature, such as it is, are that instruction must be relevent-- i.e. personally useful-- and just a little challenging."

I would agree with Robin's premise here. Relevance is the key to excellent adult ESOL instruction. This is true for learners at all levels of education and English skills; however, it is even more important for those with little or no formal education. With the lowest level learners who have limited formal schooling, published materials present far too much print to be effective. The Language Experience Approach and the Whole-Part-Whole method modeled in the New American Horizons video are techniques that works. Click here for a CAELA brief on the Language Experience Approach.

Print should be introduced with language the adult learner is already familiar with. In other words, we want to build oral language first and then introduce print based on familiar words. As a very first step, it would be wise to begin with an individual's name and address and the names of family members.

Another resource that members who work with this population may want to check out is Patsy Vinogradov's article on the Whole-Part-Whole method.

Thankfully, there has been a lot of helpful information available to us in the last few years since the  Low Educated Second Language Literacy for Adults (LESLLA) organization was formed. At their site, you can find many interesting and useful papers archived from the LESLLA annual conferences.

Members' ideas and suggestions here are always welcome!

Cheers, Susan

Moderator, Assessment CoP

Miriam and Susan,

Thank you for the marvelous link to the teacher training videos, especially the first one that demonstrates the power of Language Experience Approach for emerging readers.  I have long been a fan of this technique and have used it with beginners and high-intermediate students with the same level of student engagement and success.

 

Kat Bradley-Bennett