Content/ELL Teachers’ Collaboration Strategies

Collaboration teaching that includes a content teacher and ESL teacher aims to achieve content and English language acquisition goals. Simply placing two teachers in the same room does not create an effective teaching partnership. Instead, collaboration strategies must be implemented to create an effective content-ESL classroom (Dove, 2018, p. 8-9). Before covering the strategies, the funny video below shows the wrong way to co-teach.

1. Joint Planning

Joint Planning allows the collaboration teachers to create lessons that achieve both content and language objectives. It also helps the teachers differentiate instruction according to students’ needs and abilities. Accommodations can also better be provided when both teachers understand future lesson plans. Additionally, this planning time allows planning for every phase of the instruction process like designing assessments (Dove, 2018, p. 11).

2. Collaborative Assessment of Student Work

Piggy-backing on the last strategy, joint planning time can be used to for analyzing students’ assessment. Teachers can then plan for future lessons based on student performance and recognizing areas needing improvement. Teachers can also recognize when intervention is needed and create classroom time with needed intervention time in mind. Many times this will create a differentiated classroom that requires both teachers understanding their roles in the classroom set-up during intervention (Dove, 2018, p. 11)

3. Electronic Planning Systems

An effective, practical, and efficient method of communication is electronically: email, Google docs, etc. One teacher requests “information through a request form. I need key information such as essential questions, unit objectives, and vocabulary, so I can begin to create and gather supplemental information” (Dove, 2018, p. 26). Other teachers use a week at a glance Google doc to coordinate the next week’s lessons. I’ve found that a week at a glance which shows what will be covered in class and the assignment for each day helps not only the students but also the co-teachers be on the same page. There are many different kinds of week at a glance templates.

4. Provide Multiple Access Points to the Material

When providing scaffolding to access subject matter, the ESL teacher can scaffold onto the content teacher’s material by providing multiple access points: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Some examples of visual scaffolding include: pictures, visual representations, drawings, charts, and graphic organizers. Auditory supports can include including audio recordings and readers or incorporating music in the classroom. Kinesthetic scaffolding can include regalia, hands-on projects, total physical response activities, gallery walks, and other movement oriented learning techniques (Haynes, 2014).

5. Connect Material to EL’s Background Knowledge

EL’s may not understand all of the references a content teacher makes, and the ESL teacher can provide background knowledge which will allow the students to better understand the class content. The ESL teacher can also make connections to the students’ lives to better illustrate a concept taught by the content teacher as well as show how the material is still relevant to students’ lives (Haynes, 2014).

6. Utilize Different Co-Teaching Models

Different teaching contexts and objectives will benefit from different co-teaching models. At one point parallel teaching may work best, at another point stations may work best, and at another time one teaching and one observing may be the best option. These co-teaching models can work together as well. For example, Dr. Honigsfeld explained how a co-taught English class naturally moved from one-teach, one observe to alternative teaching.

A co-taught English class learned vocabulary at first by having one teacher call out definitions, and all of the students wrote the vocabulary word on their small white boards. The other teacher had a clipboard with the class roster, and she would mark whether a student understood the vocabulary or not. At the end of the activity, the observing teacher pulled students who did not answer correctly to review.  The other co-teacher went deeper into the lesson with the students who understood the vocabulary by building higher-order thinking and using the vocabulary in discussion (MariaGDove, 2014). The video below provides a quick summary of co-teaching models in a real classroom.

References

Dove and Honigsfeld. (2018). Co-Teaching for English Learners: A Guide to

Collaborative Planning, Instruction, Assessment, and Reflection. Corwin.

Haynes, J. (2014, June 5). | Six Strategies for Teaching ELLs Across the Content

Areas. TESOL Blog. http://blog.tesol.org/six-strategies-for-teaching-ells-across-the-content-areas/

MariaGDove. (2014, September 14). ESL Co-Teaching Models [Video]. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRcDNuZ8e0o