Before I moved to Providence, I didn't know much about English Language Learners and the special regulations and rights that are given to them. In a lot of research I have read and conversations that I have been a part of, there has been much debate about immersion as an effective way for EL students to both learn content and language (I couldn't remember specific research I have read in the past, but this results page has some interesting papers I browsed through). I say this because EL education in Providence is immersion-based (as opposed to a bilingual approach) and teachers are strongly discouraged from providing any sort of translation in students' native languages (but, I also can only speak to the experiences of those at my school and friends at other schools).
The reason I bring this up is because I was really interested in the Hesson and Toncelli article and did not know about this change in the ESL regulations. The article was really relevant to conversations I've had with several different ESL teachers about our EL students and our new online curriculum. This year was the second cohort of teachers and students to implement Summit, a curriculum students access on their own personal Chrome books. With the new platform, students were no longer given their language development class which (at the time) was their right. Thus, several ESL teachers had mixed feelings around Summit because it interfered with the rights of their EL students to get exposure to language development.
However, with this new proposed regulations, our EL students will have even fewer rights. I felt like I didn't understand exactly what the proposed revisions meant entirely, so I found the revised regulations on RIDE's website. If students are no longer guaranteed to be in ESL labeled classes, I worry that regular education teachers will not be equipped to fully service our students. Although I do want to do more research on New York's collaborative model that Providence is apparently trying to move toward. A big question I still have is why these revisions are being considered and what evidence or reasoning is being given to back it.
The reason I bring this up is because I was really interested in the Hesson and Toncelli article and did not know about this change in the ESL regulations. The article was really relevant to conversations I've had with several different ESL teachers about our EL students and our new online curriculum. This year was the second cohort of teachers and students to implement Summit, a curriculum students access on their own personal Chrome books. With the new platform, students were no longer given their language development class which (at the time) was their right. Thus, several ESL teachers had mixed feelings around Summit because it interfered with the rights of their EL students to get exposure to language development.
However, with this new proposed regulations, our EL students will have even fewer rights. I felt like I didn't understand exactly what the proposed revisions meant entirely, so I found the revised regulations on RIDE's website. If students are no longer guaranteed to be in ESL labeled classes, I worry that regular education teachers will not be equipped to fully service our students. Although I do want to do more research on New York's collaborative model that Providence is apparently trying to move toward. A big question I still have is why these revisions are being considered and what evidence or reasoning is being given to back it.
Thanks for your post Haley. I am interested to learn more about the Summit program you described. The good news is that in part because of the work of community leaders like Sarah and Rachel in speaking out against the proposed regulations, they were not put into effect. The bad news is that Rhode Island was recently named the worst state for supporting emergent bilinguals (ELLs).
ReplyDeleteMore tomorrow!
Best
Victoria