A little presentation

I would much rather teach a huge class of children than present to six adults.  I gave a little presentation today to some other teachers and I still have all this adrenaline rushing through my body.  Hence, the blogging.

My district has paired up with the local university and is offering an ESOL endorsement program.  ESOL = English to Speakers of Other Languages.  The lady teaching one of the classes asked me to present.  I'm not good at saying no, so I did it.  Now, I'm left with the feelings and thoughts you get after an interview.  I talked too much.  I talked too fast.  I don't know if I said the right things.  I don't remember what I said and therefore don't know if any of it was meaningful.  I can't stop thinking about the things I don't remember saying.

Here's what I was supposed to talk about:

1. Guided Language Acquisition Design.  I'll blog about this some other time. 

2.  Teaching English Language Development (ELD).  That's what I teach. 
To sum it up,  ELD provides explicit instruction about vocabulary and sentences structure and opportunities for students to practice specific language structures so they internalize it.  

Vocabulary taught to my first graders during my weather and seasons unit 

Sentence frame using comparative and superlative adjectives to talk about sports preferences 

Sentence frames to compare and contrast the needs of athletes 

Subject/verb agreement

  3. The third thing I was supposed to talk about was collaboration between the classroom teacher and the ELD teacher.  The teachers in the class asked what they could do as classroom teachers to help the ELL teacher.  I had never been asked that before.  Usually I'm thinking about what I can do to help the classroom teachers.  I could only think of a few things:  shelter instruction and then hold ELL students accountable, provide appropriate level reading materials especially in subjects like science and social studies, and give me copies of big classroom assessments. 

Any ELL teachers out there? What do classroom teachers at your school do to help you?