3rd Grade Bilingual Education Curriculum

Around 1959, bilingual education took flight in the United States. Starting in Miami and quickly making its way San Francisco, bilingual education soon led to the Bilingual Education Act, which promoted “No Child Left Behind”. Only twenty years later, the act acquired the attention of high schools around the country. Nonetheless, bilingual education is not always taken to be the cure-all for acclimating immigrants to the United States. In his article “Aria: A Memoir of Bilingual Childhood”, Richard Rodriguez argues that students should not take part in bilingual education by explaining how it takes away individuality and a sense of family through the use of ethos, diction, and imagery; Rodriguez also uses parallelism and ethos to point out how a bilingual childhood can help students feel connected to society.

I taught for 25 years at an inner city school. My students were all second language learners, and often their parents were totally illiterate. I entered this career not as a teacher, but as a social worker turned teacher. The Los Angeles Unified School District was in dire need of bilingual educators, so they offered a district intern program where I took college courses while I worked in the classroom.

Bilingual Education where Supporters feel that students miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. That children that retain their family’s language will retain a sense of individuality. Their ethnic heritage & cultural ties. Helping Students acquire the skills of a classroom crucial for public success. Rodriguez also discusses the use of teaching and using a single language.

Assessment and data driven instruction are a vital part of teaching. Assessments are used frequently to guide the proceeding lessons. I am interested in learning more about the different types of assessments and the appropriate uses of each. I think it is critical as a future teacher to have many resources to back up my techniques, especially with the growing interest in data and tracking students’ progress. Gathering information about assessments will allow me to broaden my own techniques and strategies that I use in the classroom, more specifically the ways in which I grade and provide feedback on assessments so that students can use that feedback in a positive way. In my past experiences I have noticed my cooperating teachers providing grades on all assessments with no feedback because they want the students to correct their own mistakes. This may work on summative assessments but I think that there needs to be comments on formative assessments so that students know how to correct their mistakes for the end of the unit tests.

The instructional setting is two eighth grade classrooms with class sizes of 28 and 32 students. Of the 60 students, ten are Hispanic, four are Asian, and one is African-American. All ten Hispanic students are bilingual with overall California English Language Development Test (CELDT) classifications of: one student intermediate, three early advanced, and one advanced. The remaining five Hispanic students have been reclassified to English proficient and do not require EL support. Four students are foster youth. Nine students receive special education support.

Assessing the children understanding is considered to be a good indicator of their learning and development process (Reys et al., 2012). Stiggins (2002) discussed the difference between the children’s assessment for learning and assessment of learning. Teachers need to be familiar with both. Assessment for learning (or as we call it the formative assessment) helps the students to learn more about different concepts and increase the opportunity to develop various skills. On the other side, assessment of learning (summative assessment) is to give the teacher an evidence of students’ achievements for purposes of accountability and reporting. For example, assessment for learning can include the teacher’s observations, in-class assignments,

This is putting a lot pressure on teachers and is resulting in “Teaching to the Test”, which means they are spending a great amount of time teaching students only the objectives that they know will be on the test. This is only a small sample of what students should be taught throughout the school year. Another effect of these evaluations is the loss of effective teachers. A survey by NEA Today showed that nearly forty-five percent of teachers have or have contemplated leaving their profession. It is clear to see teachers’ evaluations need less emphasis on their students’ standardized test scores and more on their ability to teach. This would allow teachers to teach a wider range of objectives and be evaluated on their ability to teach and not their students

People of all ages constantly learn how to speak multiple languages. Children are taught to become bilingual, which increases their knowledge. A young boy named Richard Rodriguez grew up in San Francisco, California with a household of Spanish speaking family members. Rodriguez barely knew English when he entered his early years of Elementary school. Through the course of his education Rodriguez took note of how different he was from his family, and slowly began to lose his heritage. Rodriguez’s family embarrassed him since he was categorized as a Scholarship boy, which means a good student yet also a troubled son whose moderately endowed (Rodriguez 19).

As a current 5th grade teacher through Teach for America and Masters’ candidate at the Relay Graduate School of Education, I believe I would be an excellent fit for the English Teaching Assistantship in Brazil. Raised myself in a bilingual household, my experience teaching English as a Second Language students in Passaic, New Jersey has strengthened my language skills. Teaching in a bilingual classroom (English and Spanish), I teach a range of students: some only speak their native language while other students are quickly approaching proficiency in English. This has helped me switch between English and Spanish seamlessly—and guide others to do the same, a skill I would like to bring to learners in Brazil. Further, I am now capable of helping others think metacognitively about the process. In addition to being fluent in English and Spanish, I have taken on Portuguese to be my third language. Although I have conversational skills now, I am hoping to reach the intermediate level in the next year and greatly boost these skills through interactions in Brazil. As well as the language skills I’ve gained, I have learned to create engaging lessons and units that scaffold information to help increase understanding. I have also learned to create my own handouts, worksheets, and charts to assure student learning. As a teaching assistant, these fundamental skills will assure I can focus on teaching and learning from my students, instead of the basics of teaching. I am also excited to

In the 1960s, Mexican Americans began organizing to address a broad range of issue of bilingual education. In New York, Puerto Ricans began to demand that schools offer Spanish-speaking children classes taught in their own language as well as programs on their culture. Latinos were demanding the right for school to teach students in their language because they feared abandoning Spanish would weaken their extinct culture. Additionally, women were excluded from education because it was believed that if women were well educated it would ruin their marriage prospects and be harmful to their mind. In this saying, Latinos were allowed to have education but it was the belive that a woman must stay home. Women with little education often believed that

The first student whom I assessed is an 11-year old female, going into the 5th grade in District 204. She was born and raised in Columbia for the first ten years of her life. The girl moved to the United States with her parents in June 2016. She speaks Spanish fluently, and at the time she arrived in the United States, she neither spoke nor understood English. The girl was placed in a general education class, and she receives bilingual instruction for about 30-40 minutes a day. She told me that her father speaks both Spanish and English fluently, and her mother speaks Spanish, and a conversational English. She also shared with me that her parents promote reading at home; they take her to the library to check out books, and encourage her to

The reading is directly concerned with the reasons underlying bilingual children's poor performance on standardized tests. The research believes that we as a nation constantly misunderstand the nature of bilingualism itself. Therefore, the problems encountered by bilingual individuals on such tests will continue to be misconstrued. This relates to my research because an overwhelming number of Latino students that took my survey and may have influenced results by the language barrier.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues surrounding the use formative assessments to evaluate student performance in the classroom. The article Inside the Black Box by Black and William explores the gains students achieve collectively by implementing formative assessment methods while revealing the lack of progress of high-achieving students. The paper will also explore the pros and cons of applying formative assessment methods hands on in the actual classroom. Methods of formative assessment have proven to improve overall performance for the students as a whole, but are more beneficial for students who are low achievers.

In this literature review I will be discussing studies that are in favor, not in favor, and neutral on bilingual education.

For this investigative assignment, I interviewed three of my closest friends about their perspectives on bilingual education in the United States. One of my friends, who I will call “A,” said that bilingual education is important for students because it helps them broaden their perspectives on the world. Students are exposed to learn different cultures and respect them, promoting multiculturalism in our country. “A” said that if students were only exposed to English-only classroom setting, they would most likely be ignorant of other cultures. She also told me about her experience when she was in an ESL program during her middle school year. She described the program as useless because she and her classmates learned broken English from each other. She somehow managed to get out of the program and put herself into the mainstream English class. My other friend, who I will call “B,” stated that bilingual education is helpful in developing a wider cultural perspective and cultivating a person suitable for the globalized world. As a foreign-born American and working as an international student coordinator, she emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and respecting different cultures. She believes that bilingual education can help students to achieve better knowledge on growing multiculturalism in our country. My last interviewee, who I will call “C,” also believes that bilingual education is important to cultivate young minds by helping them to respect not only their own but