At the CA League of Schools conference, I held a professional development workshop for teachers on the importance of speaking and listening for English Language Development (ELD). The ELD framework was adopted by the state of California to assist the teaching and assessment of students categorized as English Language Learners. Although the session was billed as “advocacy speaking” for secondary school students, I decided to move in the direction of English language development because of the need by our schools to better serve English language learners.
Original Abstract
The original abstract for the conference- “Student advocacy is much closer than we initially think. Teaching students the strategies for critical thinking and oral discourse can put the focus on student-owned design and development in the classroom. This interactive session will provide participants with strategies to teach the CCSS Speaking and Listening Standards to all language learners. Empowered by the California English Language Development Standards, come to this session to move your students toward mastery, create graphic organizers, and demystify the CA ELD Standards for speaking and listening.” While wanting to move in this direction, I decided that I would share the following pedagogical mechanisms that I learned in The Netherlands, and that I used in my own classroom:
- Dictogloss activity for second language acquisition
- Group Collaboration Observation Chart for feedback as students co-construct knowledge through speaking and listening during group work
- Discussion Rubric for Socratic seminars
- QAR Graphic Organizer and Question Stems for questioning during reading and discussion
- For advanced Socratic seminars to investigate the status_quo, teachers can adapt the graphic organizer created by the CA High School Speech Association for Original Advocacy speech. The ability for teachers to differentiate the transfer of a speech category to their general education classroom can empower students to learn the techniques to pinpoint a call for action.
The Speaking-Listening Standards K-12 are helpful for teachers to see the progression in the anchor standards/strands. It is further imperative for classroom teachers to begin demystifying the ELD standards for discussion. As the ELD framework explains, “Interacting in Meaningful Ways” can increase language acquisition through any of the above examples from the professional development session.
OutSpoken ELA 