Three activities

Salish course

Pow-wow

Challenge course

Getting in touch with the real world

We ´ve just come back from Pullman. We participated in two workshops there. They were about engaging students in the classroom through technologies and social justice.

Anyway, I thought it is a good chance to make a quick overview of all the places and schools we visited in the last three weeks.  We don´t often know where we are exactly going, what we are going to find or who we are going to meet. But, that forms part of the adventure. We just get on the vans knowing that something new for us will be on our destination.

We´ve been lucky enough to meet people holding very different positions related to education: from the migrant/bilingual coordinator in Olympia to a couple of Salish teachers in Spokane.

I especially enjoyed the panel discussion we had with immigrant parents in the offices of Catholic Charities in Spokane. It was a unique opportunity to know from first hand their experiences and the barriers they found when they arrived to America. It was also interesting meeting Jennifer, one of the volunteers in Global Neighborhood, a non-profit Christian organization, which seeks to provide services to all refugees in Spokane through close relationships, creating programs focused on education and community development. I was actually touched by these two visits. I became a bit more concerned about the pain these families feel. They lose many features of their previous culture to acquire others from a culture that they couldn´t understand.

We also had the chance to meet the person in charge of the assessment for Special Populations in Spokane, the migrant/ bilingual coordinator for Washington State in Olympia and the coordinator of Home-School connections in Central Valley School District. I consider their job is essential to provide equality as it has an effect on every school in the district or the state. From these meetings I´ll bring with me two main ideas. Firstly, it is necessary a detailed plan of action to help students who speak a different language other than language. Secondly, it is essential an appropriate teacher training to put those policies into practice. These two facts are usually forgotten in Spanish schools. It is a field in which we still have to work a lot.

However, visiting actual schools is the activity that was more linked with my personal interests. We have visited Great Northern School District, Holmes Elementary School in Spokane and Domino Preschool. It is very helpful listening to teachers and principals talking about the challenges they have to face day after day. It is very inspiring getting to know the creative ways in which they solve those situations.

All the visits let me have a taste of the challenges of American education, which are somehow very similar to those we have in Europe, such as, promoting home-school connections and meeting the needs of minorities.

Assistive technologies

Case study: Picture Writers: Journey Through the Writing Process with Eric Carle

Context: Marylin Evanston is a third grade elementary school teacher working with her students on a picture book about wild animals and habitats. She is collaborating with a reading specialist, Juanita Long.

Content: She wants to integrate three different subjects in one project: science, literacy and art with topics that are respectively wild animals and habitats, story maps and collage.

Disabilities: Oscar is student with visual impairment. He has difficulty to read print and usually requires the assistance of a transcriber.

Accommodation: - Helping Oscar following the entire process by providing a one-on-one relationship. A There is always a special teacher with him.

Modification: -Targeting books of different levels to students.
                     -Tiered assignments.

Strategies: - Cross curricular activity
                 - Constructivist method
                 - Create a small group of four peers
                 - Guided reading

Technologies: - Books and art
                       - Video player
                       - Speech synthesis

Understanding our students

1)Do you think educators hold different expectations for minority children?

2)How should we honor students’ personality, family, culture, and religion in the learning environment?

3)To what extent do you recognize students’ background and emotional baggage?

We can find much evidence that demonstrates that educators hold lower expectations for minority children, as Nieto (1996) states. Teachers usually have a lack of faith in students from socially subordinated groups. In my opinion, students can easily perceive this fact through common events that take place in the classroom. For instance, minority children are usually less likely to be called in class and they are required activities that demand the use of lower-order thinking skills. As a consequence, they can believe that they are less able than other students.

To prevent this from happening, teachers ought to be socioculturally conscious. This means, they are aware that every student learns in a different way depending on his or her previous experiences of the world. Therefore, teachers have to adapt the strategies they use in the classroom to their students and their background. However, it is important that those children still receive meaningful input and they have an active role in the classroom.

Personally, I haven´t been still working as a teacher in a school. However, I can recognize some concrete ways of being socioculturally conscious, such as: getting to know children´s families and environments or taking into account student´s background and emotional baggage.

Seattle in 10 snapshots

We spent last weekend in Seattle, city where it was born Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks and Jimi Hendrix. 

    It was a great overview of a big American city. We really enjoyed it in spite of the rain. 

On our way to it, we could enjoyed some beautiful landscapes 

and two very interesting meetings in Olympia. 

It was a busy, amazing weekend!

Podcasts: a useful resource to learn a second language

Gina, these are my podcasts suggestions for you to learn Spanish. I looked for some of them that could actually help you to acquire some new Spanish words and expressions. I will introduce them one by one and write why I think they will be useful for you.

This is the first link: http://radiolingua.com/2008/10/lesson-01-coffee-break-spanish/.  Radiolingua offers this Spanish course aimed at beginners through to intermediate learners providing weekly 20-minute lessons covering the basics of Spanish. This is an ideal course for anyone who wants to go further than learning phrases off by heart, and will allow listeners to develop their confidence in the language. I´ve found, this podcast meets the following optimal conditions for learning a language:

•        Interaction/ Negotiation: in this podcast we can find an ongoing dialogue between two people. One of them represents the teacher and another represents the student. It is a good example of negotiating meaning through dialogue.
•        Feedback/ Time: the main speaker poses several questions to the listener so that he or she can collaborate in what he is saying. The speaker always lets the listener some time to think and answer. He also provides feedback after each of the questions.
•       Comprehensible input: the speaker uses the English language to clarify what he is saying most of the times so that the input is always meaningful to the listener.

 The second link I want to suggest for you is this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/talk/age/. This podcast meets many of the conditions for optimum language learning:

•        Authentic language/ Task: the videos show very common situations which take place in our daily lives. Native Spanish speakers show how language is actually used.
•        Creative language: the videos show different people fulfilling a same task. Consequently, they provide many different alternatives to express a same meaning. They use language in a creative way. It´s not something scripted.
•        Comprehensible input: the images in the video help the listener to understand what they are talking about as well as the words that appear on the screen as they are talking, which can help visual learners.

I hope they are being useful for you ;) Finally, I´d like to introduce you my favorite one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/mividaloca/. It´s called Mi vida loca and it consists on 22 episodes. Each episode is a combination of real-action video with language teaching and practice, focused on developing communicative skills. It´s an interactive mistery involving you: a drama in which you will be the main character. It sounds fun. Besides this, there are many reasons why it provides optimal conditions for learning the language:

•        Interaction/ Negotiation: I consider this is the most interactive kind of podcast I´ve ever seen as it makes you a character of the story. Furthermore, you can also negotiate new meanings with real people in the section Intrigue in the website. There, people right their guesses about who is suspicios and why.
•        Authentic audience/ Task: the actors and real people with whom they interact use real Spanish. What´s more, you will also have to interact with them.
•        Creative language: throughout the story we can find a Learning Section within each episode. In the Learning Sections, the eight key words and phrases and main grammar point are presented. These chunks of information allow the student to express himself in a creative way. It doesn´t consist on repeat sentences but on create your own questions and answers to interact with the characters.
•        Feedback /Time: listeners of these podcasts can listen to them as much as they like. There are options available to stop them and repeat the parts listeners are struggling the most with.
•        Comprehensible input: input is very well clarified through the images that appear on the screen as well as subtitles and translations.

 I hope they will be helpful. Enjoy them! ¡Que los disfrutes!

Role Play Scenarios

This is a typical case in which many members of the educational community are involved. Although all of them have their personal opinions, they must come up with an agreed solution.

I consider these situations are hard to deal with, over all, if many measures have already been put into practice without any results, such as, talking to him, talking to his parents or even suspensions. However, I can spot a positive feature in Pedrin´s attitude: his desire to graduate. Consequently, I would take advantage of that. We could create an action plan in which Pedrin´s disruptive behaviors would have an effect on his marks. For example, Pedrin would be asked for an extra project, piece of writing on his subjects or a specific task to help the school community each time he was disruptive with partners, teachers or other staff members. If he didn´t work on them properly, his marks would be lowered. On the contrary, if he really worked hard on them, he could even obtain extra points.

This plan should be assessed in detail on a weekly basis by his teachers and support staff members, so that likely drawbacks and missteps could be corrected as soon as possible.