TEACHER DIARY #2: A CHRONICLE OF A FIRST-TIME ELL TEACHER

By Kristin Bair, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

When I last spoke with first-time ELL teacher Jacqueline Gallo, during the second week of school, she had seven students in her first-grade class. Though she had been feeling a bit daunted with all she was taking on (an ELL class in a new school, a graduate program, and ongoing SIOP [Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol] training), she was upbeat, energized, and hopeful. Now, two and a half months into the school year, Ms. Gallo's classroom has grown, along with her understanding of the challenges faced by ELL teachers across the United States. When I ask her how it's going, she's refreshingly honest. "It was tough for a few weeks," she says. "It got really hard. I have twelve [students] now. I have three different languages-Spanish, Somali, and Russian. . . . The very first week, it was hard, but there were only five, and I didn't expect very much from them yet. As time went on, we had to keep moving, and I had to keep teaching the same math as the other first-grade teachers."

Because the Lynn school district has adopted the SEI program model for all schools, English is the only language spoken in the classroom, and Ms. Gallo must present course material on a schedule similar to that of teachers whose classrooms are filled with native English-speaking students. "I had to pick up the pace," Ms. Gallo continues. "And it was really difficult. The students didn't even know my simple commands like 'Take out a pencil' or 'Boys line up at the door.' Everything was really difficult . . . every movement, everything."

Ms. Gallo's day with the children begins at 7:45, when she takes them to breakfast. By 8:00 or so, they are back in the classroom, and for the next fifteen minutes, the students work on a "morning paper," usually related to number or color words, a little something to get their minds going and keep them busy while Ms. Gallo takes attendance and does the lunch count.

From 8:15 to 8:30, Ms. Gallo and her students work on calendar math. "We predict patterns. We count," Ms. Gallo says. "We do the days of the week, the months of the year. Sometimes we do a clock or a graph."

Again, since this is an SEI classroom, all activities, including calendar math, are strongly language-based. Ms. Gallo does a lot of talking in her classroom, even though the students only understand a small percentage of what she says. "During calendar math, we tell stories," she explains further, "for example, about the number four and the number two. I'll have four blue circles in my hand and two red circles in my other hand. And I'll say, 'Let's think of stories about four and two.' Then I'll say something like, 'I made four blueberry muffins and two strawberry muffins.'"

At first during calendar math, the students would just look blankly at Ms. Gallo when she told these stories, but now, she says, they're starting to understand and participate. "'Who can tell the story?' I'll say, and they'll say, 'Cake.' Then they'll help me do a story about cake. It's getting to be fun. They're starting to really interact with the lessons."

After calendar math, the reading block begins, and Ms. Gallo admits that this is her favorite hour of the day. Earlier in the year, the students took the DIBELS test (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), and an ELL specialist did a special screening. As a result, the class is divided into three reading groups: low, intermediate, and high. With the exception of Fridays, the ELL specialist comes to Ms. Gallo's classroom each day from 8:30 to 9:30 to do in-class intervention with the students. The low and intermediate groups require intervention, while the high group does not. During this hour each morning, the specialist works with each of the two lower groups individually on letter recognition and letter sounds.

During the reading block, each of the three groups is engaged in one of three activities: intervention with the ELL specialist, guided reading with Ms. Gallo, or independent work in a literacy center.

Ms. Gallo uses Rigby's On Our Way to English for all reading activities, and she says that the guided reading is working well, especially with the high group. "They're not reading, but they can memorize," she says. "They memorize words, and they know their sounds. There are two girls who are able to blend the sounds together. And the third boy in the group . . . he knows all the sounds and he'll tap out all the letters, but he just can't blend them yet."

According to Ms. Gallo, the students in the other two reading groups are just becoming comfortable handling the books during guided reading. They're learning to point to words while she reads aloud, and they can now repeat after her.

Students in the literacy centers either listen to a story on tape or work in their journals, and Ms. Gallo says that they work surprisingly well independently. To get them started in the writing center, she often does a shared brainstorm. The brainstorm will have pictures that she draws, along with written words. "Once on their own, the students write the words they know," she explains. "It's good because some of the kids can't write anything and they're just copying. Other kids can write a little bit more."

After guided reading, Ms. Gallo spends 30 to 45 minutes doing a shared reading lesson with the whole class, again using Rigby's On Our Way to English. She follows the lessons organized in the book by week and day as closely as possible. "From my understanding," she says, "I'm expected to do a lesson a day, but it's hard. Some days, I don't get to everything on the page. Some days, there's not a lot on the page. Other days, there's too much. There'll be a science or social studies activity in addition to the shared writing, and shared writing takes a lot out of them. When I don't get to everything on the page, I have to pick and choose according to what I think they need."

Ms. Gallo says that the students respond especially well to the manipulative chart and the phonics piece. "The kids love it [the phonics piece]," she says. "It's on a CD, and it's usually a song about a sound. Just today we were doing the soft sound of C. It was 'C is for Cider' or something like that. They loved it."

As the year progresses, Ms. Gallo says it gets easier and easier to manage the Rigby program. "It took me a while to get used to it," she says. "Now I'm able to figure it out a little bit better. But it was hard because I didn't know what I needed."

One of the problems was that she inherited the classroom and the program from another teacher, so some of the pieces are actually missing. For example, there are supposed to be words for a word wall but she doesn't know where they are. Instead, she created her own word wall.

After the reading block, the rest of the morning is spent working on Wilson Language Training, and then the students have lunch. After lunch, Ms. Gallo teaches math to the whole group using Mimosa's Growing with Mathematics program. "Some days math is excellent," she explains, "and sometimes it's really hard. I have a good number of them catching on, but because my class size is so small, when there are a few that don't get it, it seems like the whole class does not get it."

This is frustrating to Ms. Gallo, and I get the sense she is hard on herself about it, but overall, she feels things are improving. It's obvious that her confidence in her own abilities is growing, too. "It's funny," she says, "I'm not sure if I can explain it, but I notice that my lessons are going better. I feel like I'm being clearer and the students are participating more. I can't list what I've learned but it's a lot more comfortable. They're getting a lot more out of the lessons than at the beginning of the year. They're learning from me, and I'm also learning from them. It's that kind of a process."

One of the ways in which she has grown as a teacher is in her ability to adapt or even postpone a lesson if she sees that it's not working. "In the beginning of the year, I only knew what I knew. But now if I realize things are not going to work out, I might collect something. It's funny because last year, I didn't do that very much. Even if a lesson wasn't working out, I'd do it anyway. I felt like I had to, but this year, I realize that it's ridiculous if I do this. I'll revisit the lesson, think about it a little bit more, and try again the next day."

When I ask if she ever stops class to do something less academic, Ms. Gallo pauses. "No, not yet," she says. "Harrington is an underperforming school, so I don't think I could do that." Then she laughs and says, "That's when the principal would walk in."

Thankfully, Ms. Gallo gets a good deal of support from her principal, Joanne Roy. According to Ms. Gallo, the principal stops in quite often, most recently to do a SIOP walk-through. Ms. Gallo is enrolled in the SIOP training program and has had two classes thus far. The component with which she is most familiar and comfortable at this point is the use of objectives-posting content and language objectives in the classroom and referring to them before, during, and after each lesson.

Ms. Gallo explains that the objectives are intended to help everyone understand what is being taught-visitors to the classroom, the teacher, and the students. At this point, the students can't really understand what she writes, but she does it anyway and then explains it in a way that they might understand. For example, one of the objectives for the Wilson language lesson is to identify correct letter sounds, so she'll read it and say to the students, "That's when we do our yellow folder and go over our letter sounds." Then after the lesson, she'll return to the objectives and say, "Did we go over our letter sounds?"

One of the most rewarding moments for Ms. Gallo so far was Harrington's first Open House. "I had 5 parents," she explains, "and I was so surprised. They came in one at a time, and I talked to them individually. It was difficult because none of them understand English, but I showed them their children's work. Even one of the Somali parents came, but normally they wouldn't come. Last year, someone told me that was part of their culture, and they believe that school should stay at school and home is separate from school."

Perhaps the best news is that Ms. Gallo is actually enjoying her day at school again. For a few weeks, she admits, she thought she couldn't do it, but that's changed a bit more recently. "Certain things will happen and the whole class will laugh now. We're having fun. I feel like I'm making a difference already, and they're learning so much," she says. "One of the Somali girls has very limited English, but she's speaking. She can't speak in sentences but her vocabulary is growing. In the beginning, she couldn't at all. She didn't even understand my questions. Now she can understand enough of my questions. Today we were doing a shared writing, and I asked her to describe a part of it. We were talking about tasting and things that we taste. I drew a mouth and I wrote, 'I taste with my mouth.' And then I drew pizza and apples and strawberries and things the kids told me to draw. So I asked her to describe the picture and she said, 'mouth.' And just the fact that she said that, I was so pleased."

We will follow Ms. Gallo's experiences for the next few issues of the ELL Outlook. Comments, support, or advice for Ms. Gallo can be directed to: alex@coursecrafters.com.