#8 - Sheltered Instruction

In watching this lesson given by Miss Kraus, I saw a lot of great instruction happening.  The prereading portion of the video went into setting goals/explaining objectives of the day, previewing key vocab (her use of pictures for each vocabulary word was a really great idea), previewing the story, using graphic organizers, activating background knowledge, and making predictions (not all of this was done by Miss Kraus, but was mentioned in the voiceover for the segment as a part of good sheltered instruction).  Using Post-it notes is a great strategy as is modeling the thinking that adult readers to as they read.  Special care was made to point out wait time, as it’s just important for ELL students to be using language as it is for them to be hearing it. It takes ELL students longer to process English because they are still learning it.

I feel that most if not all of the strategies and techniques shown in the videos are ones I use with students whether they are acquiring English as a second language or not.  I think the real difference lies in the pacing of the lesson, the accounting for cultural differences, and the awareness that these students may need more time to process or that these students might be used to receiving information a different way than they currently are.  Using active reading strategies like those shown in the video are especially important with ELL students and the time spent on them in the classroom is absolutely crucial. I don’t feel you can skip over them with any group of students, but I think the videos made it very clear how explicit the instruction should be on using those strategies with ELL students.

 I think another big aspect of the sheltered instruction was insuring that ELL students feel safe in the classroom – the students shown seemed very willing to jump into the conversation with their teacher, which is a great sign that they feel like their contributions will be valued and that they won’t be ridiculed if their language skills are not exactly like those of a native speaker.  The interactions between the teacher and the students were good and the pacing of the lesson seemed very well done, though that feeling may have been contributed to by the fact that the video was broken into parts/interrupted the classroom parts several times.  But it really did seem as though Miss Kraus had a very relaxed pace set and that she was not hurrying the students through any part of the lesson.  She also did a great job of scaffolding them along, based on how many of her questions were stems that her students were able to fill in for her.

Overall, I feel like this sort of sheltered lesson would be really successful in any classroom of struggling readers, because it would incorporate both ELL students and native speakers.