Clif Notes 2/03/20
50 Years Of Building The State & Now Global Workforce!
DATES TO REMEMBER
This Week -
Monday - PD Day - RAVE School Safety
Tuesday - Faculty Meeting
Wednesday - Academic PLCs
Thursday - Academic PLCs
Friday - RTI & Master Scheduling Committee Meetings;
8:15am Junior Class Meeting, Auditorium
Upcoming:
2/14 - Valentine's Day
2/18 - Presidents' Day/CLOSED
2/22 - Interim Report Date
2/27 - Interim Grades Due by 3pm
National CTE Month & National School Counseling Week
February is National CTE Month. Let’s celebrate by showing our pride and promoting CTE Month through social media using the #CTEMONTH
February 4th - 8th is National School Counseling Week. Help us celebrate the amazing counselors at Delcastle and let them know what an outstanding job they do to support our students.
Ms. Denhardt Mr. Wells
Chem Lab Auto Body
Sheet Metal Air Conditioning (HVAC)
Tech Drafting Auto Tech
Welding Carpentry
Production & Imaging General Construction
Information Tech
Mr. DiPietro Plumbing
Aviation
Business Tech Ms. Taylor
Culinary Arts Bio-Med
Electrical Trades Medical Assisting
Nurse Tech
Ms. Jenkins Surgical Tech
Cosmetology
Dental
Digital Media
Graphic Arts
A Must See Video Before PD
February 4th PD Preparation
ACCESS Testing
Federally mandated ACCESS testing for ELs at Delcastle will take place from February 4, 2020 through February 27, 2020. Testing will be in the library. Passes will be dropped in teacher mailboxes closer to testing dates. Please allow the students to attend their testing sessions and allow them to make up any work they miss during the testing. We appreciate all of your flexibility and understanding during this time.
Bill, Tina, & Dulce
ESL
A Terrific Technology Resource for ELL Students
There is a Chrome extension that is available to all of our students called Snap & Read. While the extension is great for ALL of our students, it can be especially powerful for our English language learners (ELLs).
The extension has the ability to translate digital text (Google Docs, web-based (including Schoology), and/or PDFs) into Spanish. However, many of our ELL students cannot read high school level Spanish text. Therefore, the powerful ability of the extension is that it can also READ the Spanish text to the student!!!
This is just one of the many features that the Snap & Read extension offers. If you are interested in learning how to use this tool, please contact me for an appointment or to present during your PLC!!!
~Tara
Delcastle Instructional Focus
Talking in the classroom
Content-Area Conversations
by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg
Levels of Proficiency
Having acknowledged various differences among students, we also recognize the need to cluster them into levels of proficiency for instructional purposes. There are a number of ways to do this, but we have chosen the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) levels: Starting, Emerging, Developing, Expanding, and Bridging (TESOL, 2006).
Bridging
English language learners can understand and use …
… language to communicate with others around basic concrete needs.
… high-frequency words and memorized chunks of language.
… words, phrases, or chunks of language.
… pictorial, graphic, or nonverbal representation of language.
… language to draw on simple and routine experiences to communicate with others.
… high-frequency and some general academic vocabulary and expressions.
… phrases or short sentences in oral or written communication.
… oral or written language, making errors that often impede the meaning of the communication.
… language to communicate with others on familiar matters regularly encountered.
… general and some specialized academic vocabulary and expressions.
… expanded sentences in oral or written communication.
… oral or written language, making errors that may impede the communication but retain much of its meaning.
… language in both concrete and abstract situations and apply language to new experiences.
… specialized and some technical academic vocabulary and expressions.
… a variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistic complexity in oral and written communication.
… oral or written language, making minimal errors that do not impede the overall meaning of the communication.
… a wide range of longer oral and written texts and recognize implicit meaning.
… technical academic vocabulary and expressions.
… a variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistic complexity in extended oral or written discourse.
… oral or written language approaching comparability to that of English-proficient peers.
Source: TESOL (2006), PreK–12 English Language Proficiency Standards: Augmentation of the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) Consortium English Language Proficiency Standards (Alexandria, VA: Author), p. 39. Used with permission.
Starting. At this entry level, students have virtually no understanding of English and do not use English to communicate. They might respond to simple commands or questions, often nonverbally. Over time, they begin to imitate the oral language of those around them and will speak in one-word responses. Reading in English is very difficult, but students might recognize sight words or words that are similar to those in their home language. Pictorial representations are helpful, as are physical responses. When students who are starting to learn English write, they exhibit a number of unconventional spellings and grammatical errors.
Emerging. As students are introduced to academic English appropriate for their age, their language emerges. Students at this level begin to understand phrases and simple sentences. They begin to communicate their needs, wants, and desires, especially using familiar and often memorized phrases or word groupings. In addition, they begin to speak in sentences but often make syntax errors in doing so. When they read and write in English, they can recognize familiar and high-frequency words. They can also copy information but make errors in grammar that interfere with effective communication.
Developing. During this phase, students add considerably to their vocabulary. They use English spontaneously and are generally understood but often experience difficulty expressing feelings and other abstract ideas and continue to make grammar errors. As a group, they continue to produce simple sentences but understand sentences that are much more complex. They read increasingly complex texts and write more coherent information. Although their writing typically contains a number of errors and nonconventional forms, students in this place are able to demonstrate their thinking and understanding of the tasks at hand.
Expanding. At this level, students' language skills are sufficient for most daily communication tasks. Although they make occasional structural errors, the majority of their communication is clear. They participate in discussions and use English in unfamiliar settings, though idioms and other figurative language forms may present a challenge. Generally, students at this level can read well enough to gain information from a text and write fairly independently; however, their writing is typically scored below grade level because they use less sophisticated text structures and vocabulary.
Bridging. At this advanced level of proficiency, students generally perform well across the language domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Their speech becomes increasingly fluent, and they can discuss a variety of topics with ease. They can do grade-level work but may need some guidance for technical writing and reading.
After considering each of these proficiency levels, it's easy to see the importance of talking. At each level, the development of oral language is related to developing skills in written language. Equally important is the fact that reading and writing are not deferred while speech develops; rather, students are reading, writing, speaking, and listening from the beginning of their introduction into English. In addition, these English language learners are wrestling with what they know and do not know regarding language functions and registers, both of which are informed by the context of the discourse—mode, topic, purpose, audience, setting, and so forth.
When Talk Facilitates Learning
\ We've divided the opportunities for talk into four major categories. These categories are consistent with a gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, which acknowledges that students must assume increasing responsibility if they are to learn (Fisher & Frey, 2008). This does not mean that students are supposed to become independent learners in the absence of the teacher but, rather, that classrooms are structured in such a way that students are introduced to ideas and then have opportunities to work with these ideas before being expected to complete tasks independently. As you'll see throughout this book, a number of instructional strategies are available for integrating purposeful student talk. For now, let's consider the instructional routines in which talk can be integrated.
Teacher Modeling
During whole-class instruction, teachers model behaviors, skills, and strategies that they expect to see from their students. As we will discuss in Chapter 3, this modeling is based on an established purpose and provides students with a mental model for completing tasks they will encounter in another phase of instruction. We've already seen that questioning can be used during teacher modeling, but teachers can also activate their students' background knowledge during this time (for example, a 10th grade biology teacher might ask his students to talk with a partner about cell life before he explains cell division to them). In addition, teachers model the use of academic language as they engage in think alouds, shared readings, read alouds, lectures, and other whole-class events. After modeling, students can reflect on what they learned through both writing independently and talking with a partner.
Continue reading next week....