Article

Neoliberalism in the age of pedagogical terrorism

Henry Giroux

U. S / January 4, 2019 / Author: Henry A. Giroux / Source: Arts & Opinion

Marx was certainly right in arguing that the point is not to understand the world but to change it, but what he underemphasized was that the world cannot be transformed if one does not understand what is to be changed. As Terry Eagleton rightly notes “Nobody can change a world they didn’t understand.” Moreover, the lack of mass resistance to oppression signals more than apathy or indifference, it also suggests that we don’t have an informed and energizing vision of the world for which we want to struggle. Political struggle is dependent on the political will to change, which is central to any notion of informed agency willing to address the radical and pragmatic issues of our time. In addition to understanding the world, an informed public must connect what they know and learn to the central task of bringing their ideas to bear on society as a whole. This means that a critical consciousness must be matched by a fervent willingness to take risks, and challenge the destructive narratives that are seeping into the public realm and becoming normalized.

Any dissatisfaction with injustice necessitates combining the demands of moral witnessing with the pedagogical power of persuasion and the call to address the tasks of emancipation. We need individuals and social movements willing to disturb the normalization of a fascist politics, oppose racist, sexist, and neoliberal orthodoxy.

As Robin D. G. Kelley observes we cannot confuse catharsis and momentary outrage for revolution. In a time of increasing tyranny, resistance in many quarters appears to have lost its usefulness as a call to action. At the same time, the pedagogical force of civic ignorance and illiteracy has morphed into a national ideal. Tyranny and ignorance feed each other in a theater of corporate controlled media ecosystems and function more as a tool of domination than as a pedagogical outlet in pursuit of justice and the practice of freedom. Under such circumstances, when education is not viewed as central to politics itself, resistance withers in the faux language of privatized struggles and fashionable slogans.

For instance the novelist Teju Cole has argued that “‘resistance’ is back in vogue, and it describes something rather different now. The holy word has become unexceptional. Faced with a vulgar, manic and cruel regime, birds of many different feathers are eager to proclaim themselves members of the Resistance. It is the most popular game in town.” Cole’s critique appears to be born out by the fact that the most unscrupulous of liberal and conservative politicians such as Madeline Albright, Hilary Clinton, and even James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, are now claiming that they have joined the resistance against Trump’s fascist politics. Even Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W. Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a proto-fascist. Writing in the New York Times, Hayden, ironically, chastised Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that “Post-Truth is pre-fascism.” The irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush’s illegal National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while the head of the NSA, he also lied repeatedly about his role in Bush’s sanction and implementation of state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This tsunami of banal resistance and its pedagogical architecture was on full display when an anonymous member of the Trump’s inner circle published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that he/she and other senior officials were part of “the resistance within the Trump administration.” The author was quick to qualify the statement by insisting such resistance had nothing to do with “the popular ‘resistance’ of the left.” To prove the point, it was noted by the author that the members of this insider resistance liked some of Trump’s policies such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” Combining resistance with the endorsements of such reactionary policies reads like fodder for late-night comics.

The Democratic Party now defines itself as the most powerful political force opposing Trump’s fascist politics. What it has forgotten is the role it has played under the Clinton and Obama presidencies in creating the economic, political, and social conditions for Trump’s election in 2016. Such historical and political amnesia allows them to make the specious claim that they are now the party of resistance. Resistance in these instances has little to do with civic courage, a defense of human dignity, and the willingness to not just bear witness to the current injustices but to struggle to overcome them. Of course, the issue is not to disavow resistance as much as to redefine it as inseparable from fundamental change that calls for the overthrow of capitalism itself. Neoliberalism has now adopted unapologetically the language of racial cleansing, white supremacy, white nationalism, and fascist politics. Unapologetic for the widespread horrors, gaping inequality, destruction of public goods, and re-energizing of the discourse of hate and culture of cruelty, neoliberalism has joined hands with a toxic fascist politics painted in the hyper-patriotic colors of red, white, and blue. As I have noted elsewhere:

Neoliberalism’s hatred of democracy, the common good, and the social contract has unleashed generic elements of a fascist past in which white supremacy, ultra-nationalism, rabid misogyny and immigrant fervor come together in a toxic mix of militarism, state violence, and a politics of disposability. Modes of fascist expression adapt variously to different political historical contexts assuring racial apartheid-like forms in the post-bellum U.S. and overt encampments and extermination in Nazi Germany. Fascism with its unquestioning belief in obedience to a powerful strongman, violence as a form of political purification, hatred as an act of patriotism, racial and ethnic cleansing, and the superiority of a select ethnic or national group has resurfaced in the United States. In this mix of economic barbarism, political nihilism, racial purity, economic orthodoxy, and ethical somnambulance a distinctive economic-political formation has been produced that I term neoliberal fascism.

While the call to resist neoliberal fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated rather than aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious, and educational forces that helped produce it. What many liberals and conservative calls to resistance have in common is an opposition to Trump rather than to the conditions that created him. In some cases, liberal critics such as Christopher R. Browning, Yascha Mounk, and Cass R. Sunstein document insightfully America’s descent into fascism but are too cautious in refusing to conclude that we are living under a fascist political regime. This is more than a retreat from political courage, it is a refusal to name how liberalism itself with its addiction to the financial elite has helped create the conditions that make a fascist politics possible.

Trump’s election and the Kavanaugh affair make clear that what is needed is not only a resistance to the established order of neoliberal capitalism but a radical restructuring of society itself. That is not about resisting oppression in its diverse forms but overcoming it — in short, changing it. The Kavanaugh hearings and the liberal response was a telling example of what might be called a politics of disconnection.

While it is crucial to condemn the Kavanaugh hearings for its blatant disregard for the Constitution, expressed hatred of women, and its symbolic expression and embrace of white privilege and power, it is necessary to enlarge our criticism to include the system that made the Kavanaugh appointment possible. Kavanaugh represents not only the deep seated rot of misogyny but also as Grace Lee Boggs, has stated “a government of, by, and for corporate power.” We need to see beyond the white nationalists and neo-Nazis demonstrating in the streets in order to recognize the terror of the unforeseen, the terror that is state sanctioned, and hides in the shadows of power. Such a struggle means more than engaging material relations of power or the economic architecture of neoliberal fascism, it also means taking on the challenge producing the tools and tactics necessary to rethink and create the conditions for a new kind of subjectivity as the basis for a new kind of democratic socialist politics. We need a comprehensive politics that brings together various single interest movements so that the threads that connect them become equally as important as the particular forms of oppression that define their singularity. In addition, we need intellectuals willing to combine intellectual complexity with clarity and accessibility, embrace the high stakes investment in persuasion, and cross disciplinary borders in order to theorize and speak with what Rob Nixon calls the “cunning of lightness” and a “methodological promiscuity” that keeps language attuned to the pressing the claims for justice.

Outside of those intellectuals who write for CounterPunch, Truthout, Truthdig, Rise Up Times, Salon, and a number of other critical media outlets, there are too few intellectuals, artists, journalists willing to challenge the rise of an American version of neoliberal fascism. It is not enough to report in an alleged “balanced fashion” on Trump’s endorsement of violence against journalists, the massive levels of inequality produced under neoliberalism, the enactment by the Trump administration of savage policies of racial cleansing aimed at undocumented immigrants, and the emergence of a police state armed terrifying new technologies aimed at predictive policing. The real challenge is to tie these elements of oppression together and to recognize the threads of state violence, white supremacy, and fascist politics that suggest the emergence of a distinctive new political order.

Shock and outrage in the midst of a fascist politics is now undermined by the mainstream press which is always on the hunt for higher ratings and increasing their bottom line. Rather than talk about fascism, they focus on the threat to liberal institutions. Rather than talk about the mounting state violence and the increased violence of neo-fascist thugs such as the Proud Boys, they talk about violence coming from the left and right. Rather than raise questions about the conditions and a society in which more and more people seem to prefer authoritarian rule over democracy, they talk about Trump’s eccentric behavior or keep tabs on his endless lying. This is not unhelpful, but it misses the nature of the true threat, its genesis, and the power of a corporate elite who are now comfortable with the fascist politics that Trump embodies.

An iPsos poll found that “a surprising 26 percent of all Americans, and 43 percent of Republicans, agree with the statement that the president “should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” In addition, a majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum — 72 percent — think “it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information.” Couple this with the fact that Trump has recently stated privately to his aids that he regrets reversing his policy of separating children from their parents at the border and you have a mix of fascist principles coupled with a dangerous demagogue who cannot bring the country fast enough to the fascist abyss. While it is true that the United States under Trump is not Hitler’s Germany, Trump has tapped into America’s worst impulses and as Jason Stanley and others remind us his ultra-nationalism, white supremacist views, and racist diatribes coupled with his attack on immigrants, the media, African-Americans, and Muslims are indicative of a politics right out the fascist playbook. If the public and media keep denying this reality, the endpoint is too horrible to imagine. If we are to understand the current resurgence of right-wing populist movements across the globe, economic factors alone do not account for the current mobilizations of fascist passions.

As Pierre Bourdieu once put it, it is crucial to recognize that “the most important forms of domination are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical, and lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” He goes on to state that left intellectuals have underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front.” In part, this means that the left and others must make matters of culture and pedagogy central to politics in order to address people’s needs and struggles. And they should do so in a language that is both rigorous and accessible. Matters of culture and consciousness in the Gramscian sense are central to politics and only when the left can address that issue will there be any hope for massive collective resistance in the form of a broad-based movement.

Trump has emboldened and legitimated the dire anti-democratic threats that have been expanding under an economic system stripped of any political, social, and ethical responsibility. This is a form of neoliberal fascism that has redrawn and expanded the parameters of the genocidal practices and hate filled politics of the 1930s and 40s in Europe in which it was once thought impossible to happen again. The threat has returned and is now on our doorsteps, and it needs to be named, exposed, and overcome by those who believe that the stakes are much too high to look away and not engage in organized political and pedagogical struggles against a fascist state and an omniscient fascist politics. We live in an age when the horrors of the past are providing the language and politics of illiberal democracies all over the globe. This is a world where dystopian versions of a catastrophic, misery producing neoliberalism merge with unapologetic death dealing visions of a fascist politics. We live in an era that testifies to the horrors of a past struggling to reinvent itself in the present, and which should place more than a sense of ethical and political responsibility on those of us bearing witness to it. As my friend, Brad Evans, notes under such circumstances, we live in a time “that asks us all to continually question our own shameful compromises with power,” and to act with others to overcome our differences in order to dismantle this assault on human rights, human dignity, economic justice, equality, and democracy itself.

Article Source:

http://www.artsandopinion.com/2018_v17_n6/giroux-26pedagogicalterrorism.htm

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When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges

Katrina Schwartz

United States / 26-08-2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED

Amidst the discussions about content standards, curriculum and teaching strategies, it’s easy to lose sight of the big goals behind education, like giving students tools to deepen their quantitative and qualitative understanding of the world. Teaching for understanding has always been a challenge, which is why Harvard’s Project Zero has been trying to figure out how great teachers do it.

Some teachers discuss metacognition with students, but they often simplify the concept by describing only one of its parts — thinking about thinking. Teachers are trying to get students to slow down and take note of how and why they are thinking and to see thinking as an action they are taking. But two other core components of metacognition often get left out of these discussions — monitoring thinking and directing thinking. When a student is reading and stops to realize he’s not really understanding the meaning behind the words, that’s monitoring. And most powerfully, directing thinking happens when students can call upon specific thinking strategies to redirect or challenge their own thinking.

 

 

“When we have a rich meta-strategic base for our thinking, that helps us to be more independent learners,” said Project Zero senior research associate Ron Ritchhart at a Learning and the Brain conference. “If we don’t have those strategies, if we aren’t aware of them, then we’re waiting for someone else to direct our thinking.”

Helping students to “learn how to learn” or in Ritchhart’s terminology, become “meta-strategic thinkers” is crucial for understanding and becoming a life-long learner. To discover how aware students are of their thinking at different ages, Ritchhart has been working with schools to build “cultures of thinking.” His theory is that if educators can make thinking more visible, and help students develop routines around thinking, then their thinking about everything will deepen.

His research shows that when fourth graders are asked to develop a concept map about thinking, most of their brainstorming centers around what they think and where they think it. “When students don’t have strategies about thinking, that’s how they respond – what they think and where they think,” Richhart said. Many fifth graders start to include broad categories of thinking on their concept maps like “problem solving” or “understanding.” Those things are associated with thinking, but fifth graders often haven’t quite hit on the process of thinking.

By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as “concentrate” or “don’t get caught up in things that aren’t relevant.” But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including “making connections,” “comparing” and “breaking things down.”

Ritchhart studied 400 students at a school focusing on cultivating a culture of thinking. The study had no control group, but Ritchhart could chart development of metacognition from 4th-11th grades.

“Students basically made a two-and-a-half year gain from what would be expected just from teachers trying to create that culture of thinking,” Ritchhart said. He admits that the study isn’t definitive, but to him it’s proof that when teachers focus on these ideas they do see improvement.

HOW CAN EDUCATORS HELP?

In a culture of thinking, students recognize that collective and individual thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members. This type of culture can exist in any place where learning is part of the experience including school, after school programming or museum programs.

To help make these ideas more concrete, Ritchhart and his colleagues have been working to hone in on a short list of “thinking moves” related to understanding. To test whether these moves were really crucial, researchers asked themselves: could a student say she really understood something if she hadn’t engaged in these activities? They believe the important “thinking moves” that lead to understanding are:

  • Naming: being able to identify the parts and pieces of a thing
  • Inquiry: questioning should drive the process throughout
  • Looking at different perspectives and viewpoints
  • Reasoning with evidence
  • Making connections to prior knowledge, across subject areas, even into personal lives
  • Uncovering complexity
  • Capture the heart and make firm conclusions
  • Building explanations, interpretations and theories.

These thinking moves all point to the conclusion that learning doesn’t happen through the mere delivery of information. “Learning only occurs when the learner does something with that information,” Ritchhart said. “So as teachers we need to think not only about how we will deliver that content, but also what we will have students do with that content.”

One easy way to start asking students to be more metacognitive is to build in reflection time about thinking. Ask students to think about the lesson and identify the kinds of thinking they used throughout. That not only builds vocabulary around thinking, but it often gives kids confidence to name specific thinking strategies they used. Taking this time to reflect also reminds students that they did real work during the lesson.

THINKING ROUTINES

To get at how teachers make thinking visible, Ritchhart studied teachers who were very effective at helping student dive below surface level retention of information into really understanding material as it connects to the rest of their studies and their lives. He noticed none of them taught a lesson on thinking.

“They had routines and structures that scaffolded and supported student thinking,” Ritchhart said. This discovery led him and colleagues at Project Zero to develop “thinking routines” that all teachers can use to help students develop the habits of mind that lead to more understanding.

One way to develop a culture of thinking is to pick one of the thinking routines Project Zero has designed and use it over and over in a variety of contexts. Rather than trying each routine once, applying one routine in multiple ways will help make thinking in that way habitual. It becomes almost an expectation in a classroom, like other class norms.

One example of this that goes beyond the K-12 classroom comes from Harvard Medical School, where instructors were struggling to train students to listen to patients and make strong diagnoses based on the symptoms they heard. As an experiment, the medical school offered an elective module to students, where once a week they would join a fine arts class using the “See, Think, Wonder” thinking routine to observe art. After 10 weeks, all the medical students were assessed on clinical diagnosing and the students who had done “See, Think, Wonder” had improved much more than those who had not participated.

“One of the reasons we call them thinking routines is that through their use it is the thinking that becomes routine,” Ritchhart said. Project Zero is working with teachers around the country to apply thinking routines in the classroom and many have reported that after doing the routines in a structured way several times students naturally start using the protocols for everything.

Source of Article:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/44227/when-kids-have-structure-for-thinking-better-learning-emerges

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Why Teaching English Through Content Is Critical for ELL Students

Katrina Schwartz

United States / July 1, 2018 / Author: Katrina Schwartz / Source: KQED

Teaching grade-level content to students who have just arrived in the United States and whose English skills are limited is a difficult task. High school-level content specialists especially have little training on how to integrate language acquisition into their content. Often teachers deal with that by either dumbing down the curriculum to make it linguistically simpler or alternating between lessons focused on language and those about content.

Teachers in San Francisco were looking for better ways to teach their newcomer students the English skills they need, without losing a focus on the complex content all students should be learning. To do that, they looked to adopt some of the strategies of the Writing Is Thinking Through Inquiry(WITsi) work being done in New York City with the general education population.

Based on Judith Hochman’s work, at its core these strategies focus on building up students’ ability to put together sentences piece by piece*. Through an inquiry process, New York teachers discovered that their students’ writing was breaking down at the level of the sentence, making it difficult for them to express more nuanced and complex arguments.

Nell Scharff Panero developed the WITsi strategies and has been working with New York Renewal schools to implement them. As she watched teachers having some success, she realized the same strategies could be powerful for English learners. She has been working with language specialists to adapt the strategies for that population.

“Teachers are so responsive to this work,” said Amy Gottesfeld, a supervisor in San Francisco’s Multilingual Pathways Department. “They’re finding it hugely helpful and successful in terms of giving them concrete ways to integrate language into their content.”

San Francisco Unified School District is starting small, bringing together sheltered pathway teacher cohorts from seven high schools around the district. Together they look closely at student writing, share lesson ideas, and try to deepen their own understanding of the English Language and how to teach it through content.

“Given these strategies that support language, that support writing, without having to sacrifice the focus on content has felt liberating to people,” Gottesfeld said.

The program is intentionally set up around cohorts at each school so that teachers can collaboratively build the WITsi strategies into every class, regardless of content area. One activity asks students to write sentences using “but, because and so” correctly. These small conjunctions are powerful language markers that students often use incorrectly.

But when the science teacher is using “but, because, so” sentence routines to help students understand relationships in an ecosystem, while in the next room the history teacher is using the same structures to help students identify the effects of colonialism, it reinforces writing and thinking for students. And, it means students are getting explicit language development help throughout the school day, not only during their legally required English Language Development time.

“I was like, oh, this is what I’ve been missing,” said Anne Ryan, a history teacher in the sheltered language pathway for newcomers at Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco. She first learned about some of the strategies through an exchange with the Internationals Network for Public Schools in New York, whose teachers have become standouts in developing language alongside content. She was trying to use some tips she picked up at a conference on her own when SFUSD announced the current pilot. She jumped at the chance for more formal training on the strategies.

Teachers in Thurgood Marshall High School's sheltered language pathway collaborate during a professional development training about how to teach thinking through writing.
Teachers in Thurgood Marshall High School’s sheltered language pathway collaborate during a professional development training about how to teach thinking through writing. (Courtesy Amy Gottesfeld/SFUSD)

“I think that non-English Language Development and English teachers, a lot of us still have nervousness around how to really develop English and writing skills in our classroom,” Ryan said. “But it really is our responsibility as well. I think doing the WITsi has made that responsibility feel lighter and feel effective.”

Bringing instruction down to the level of the sentence forces the teacher to carefully identify the most important information she wants her students to learn that day, and build sentence-level activities around the main content goal. This practice often leads to more effective instruction, in addition to helping students build their language skills.

WITsi work in New York City Renewal schools with the general education population has uncovered similar sentence-level misunderstandings in high school student writing. In those cases, it’s often hard for high school teachers to accept that they have to go back and teach the basic building blocks of good sentence writing, then paragraphs, and finally essays. They feel that their students should already have those skills.

But with newcomer students, teachers are hungry for anything that will help them make their curriculum more accessible to students who don’t have language skills yet, but desperately need them. All of these strategies should be used in conjunction with the most important content of the day. The idea is to marry the linguistics with subject mattercontent at every step to make the language relevant, while helping students learn the content.

SEVEN BASIC WRITING STRATEGIES

1. Sentence boundaries: These activities are designed to help students understand what a sentence is and what it is not.

In the process, teachers can identify the parts of a sentence: noun, verb, object, but more than the grammar, these activities use content to discuss what makes a sentence. How can one tell if something is a fragment, or a run-on? Activities include matching different parts of a sentence to either make a complete sentence or repair a fragment. Or, teachers might ask students to sort sentences into fragments, complete sentences and run-ons.

“But again all the sorting that you’re doing is around the content that you’re studying,” Gottesfeld said. So, if the lesson focus is Alexander Hamilton, all the sorting and matching is related to his historical contributions. The dual approach is the most important part of all these strategies.

2. Recognizing different sentence types like statements, questions, exclamations or commands.

This includes helping students look for clues — does the sentence start with a question word, for example? While it may seem simple to a native speaker, expressing the content using various types of sentences can dramatically change meaning, an important concept for students to understand. Also, focusing explicitly on questioning helps empower English learners as question askers throughout the curriculum and in other learning settings.

3. Working with the coordinating conjunctions “but, because and so” to help students elaborate on their sentences.

Many students, even ones who speak English, don’t have a firm grip on the differences these words signal. “But, because, so” activities might start off with matching sentence stems to sentence ends based on the conjunction, and gradually become more difficult, ending with giving a student the three bases and having them complete the sentence.

This is often a favorite with teachers and students because it begins to open the door to more analytical thinking. Knowing how to use these conjunctions is not only a language rule, it indicates the student’s ability to think comparatively, to explain, to make connections.

4. Subordinating conjunctions

Subordinating conjunctions are an important way English speakers vary sentences structure and express complicated relationships between things. They’re also tricky for non-native English speakers, and deserve explicit introduction. Words that signal time and position are powerful expressions of analytical thinking. When teachers introduce subordinating conjunctions within a content lesson, it gives students more ways to express complex ideas and improves sentence fluency.

5. Sentence combining

Activities in this sequence include giving students two sentences and asking them to use a variety of techniques to combine them into one. Scaffolds might include giving students a word bank or conjunctions to choose from, while the most complex version might ask students to write a sentence with an independent and dependent clause on Alexander Hamilton that uses a conjunction. A core goal of these activities is to use relevant content to help students reduce redundancy in their writing by combining sentences. It’s also an opportunity to work on syntax within the context of content objectives. Students are motivated by the desire to be understood.

6. Appositives

Appositives are a language structure that allows the writer to rename a noun. This is another explicit language structure that makes student writing more interesting, specific and nuanced. But rather than making it a disconnected grammar lesson, teachers can use activities about their content that incorporate appositive practice.

Many English learners also struggle to follow the chain of references in texts with unknown words, so explicitly teaching about appositives can help with reading comprehension as well.

7. Sentence expansion with descriptors

In these activities students ask students to expand on a simple, unelaborated sentence by asking them to answer a series of questions aimed at teasing out details. A typical simple sentence might be, “Alexander Hamilton helped establish it.” The teacher then writes questions to identify the information that would elaborate this sentence: What did he establish? Why did he establish it? How did he do it? Who helped him? Once students have identified all these details, they rewrite or “expand” the unelaborated sentence into a much improved one that includes those details. This guided process helps model the way English sentences are constructed and is a precursor to revision.

“The ‘Writing as thinking’ presents somewhat of a sequence to introducing these strategies and approaches,” Gottesfeld said. “That feels new and clearly makes sense” to many teachers in the sheltered language pathways.

And when students have these clear sentence-level building blocks, practice them regularly, and understand the way they function to express ideas, teachers can use them in the most complex process of all: parallel revision.

“We know that revision is critical for the writing process to support students in developing good writing,” Gottesfeld said. Parallel revision is a more structured way to help students revise their writing. Teachers might write “elaborate” next to a thought in a student’s paragraph and suggest the student think about the “but, because, so” strategy to carry out that elaboration. This practice can also make peer revision more useful, grounding the discussion in specific strategies the kids know well through prior practice.

“It puts the kid in a position where they have to think about language that they know and try to apply it,” said Joanna Yip, a former teacher in the Internationals Network who helped design the materials and activities SFUSD teachers are using. “It is an absolutely necessary component for kids who are learning the language.” Through parallel revision students begin to truly appropriate the language and transfer the piecemeal sentence-level work into paragraphs and even essays.

Yip said this systematic approach to language construction that WITsi offers is fairly new to many English language teachers, especially ones who see themselves foremost as content specialists and secondarily as teachers of English. Rather than chunking out the steps of writing a paragraph and asking students to follow instructions, parallel revision requires students themselves to do the thinking about which strategy responds to the teacher’s feedback.

Yip said a lot of English language teachers are well versed in using language frames, sentence starters, vocabulary work and scaffolding larger pieces of writing. They regularly use the cycle Pauline Gibbons champions, in which teachersbuild up background knowledge jointly as a class before asking students to do it on their own. “That’s all good and necessary,” Yip said, “but the one missing piece to those approaches tends to be there isn’t explicit instruction on how to build sentences.”

And keeping these strategies tightly tied to the content makes the language lessons useful to students. Too often when teachers try to focus on the nuts and bolts of language, they end up delivering a disconnected lesson on grammar that students don’t transfer to the writing they do in each content area.

“If they have opportunities to do this kind of work that is appropriate for their phase of language development, then over time they will gain that momentum as students,” Yip said. “When they feel supported in doing it, it’s a rigorous task, but a task they can manage.” She said it’s unreasonable to ask a student who has been in the country for three months to write an essay. And without carefully scaffolding writing strategies, that student may never get to the essay writing level.

A TEAM EFFORT

Evelyn Sulem is just finishing up her second year of teaching high school history. She said teaching in the sheltered language pathway isn’t a highly coveted position, so it often falls to newer teachers. But she enjoys watching the incredible progress her students make and plans to continue teaching newcomer students, especially now that she feels she has a few more tools and a supportive group of colleagues.

“I have definitely seen a massive progress in the level of English and in the level of content knowledge,” Sulem said about using the WITsi strategies. She meets with colleagues from other content specialties who also teach newcomers once a week. They share strategies and try to sync up their curriculum to reinforce vocabulary, concepts and language structures.

“We try to bring forth the vocabulary in all the disciplines,” Sulem said. Through this intensive WITsi work, she has also become more aware of the different English levels in her classroom. She is now carefully building more scaffolds into her lessons, using WITsi strategy variants to support her students to understand the history content. For example, students might complete the activities in their home language, or discuss the content with a partner in their home language before trying to use their English to write down thoughts..

“We teach history in a workshop style,” Sulem said. The social studies department at Lincoln wants to build students into critical thinkers who can analyze history. They try not to lecture from the front of the room, and have de=emphasized memorization. That’s even more important when students don’t understand the lecture anyway. “We don’t give any lectures, but we engage students with simple text which has history content,” Sulem said.

Sulem is grateful the WITsi work has given her more tools to reach her newcomer English learners, but she admits the work is very difficult. Many of her students arrived in the U.S. with interrupted educations, and their writing skills in a home language aren’t strong either.

“It makes me think about my own teaching practice in a different way,” Sulem said. “Students need visuals and need to be informed about the same theme in three different ways: speaking, writing and visually.”

And because she teaches a few sections of general education students, Sulem is applying tactics that work with her newcomers to all her classes. She thinks teaching English learners has made her a more creative teacher, helping her to guide kids to an analytical understanding of history using multimodal forms of learning. And when she can see a student is struggling to express a complex idea in their writing, she’s got more linguistic supports to help them get there.

*This piece has been edited to reflect that the WITsi strategies build on ideas originally developed by Judith Hochman.

Source of Article:

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51268/why-teaching-english-through-content-is-critical-for-ell-students

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