How Students Learn And Interact Is Better Learned When They Are Observed Essay

When an educator walks into her classroom for the first time, she needs to be prepared to encounter students that come from a variety of backgrounds. The children will be in different stages of language development, and the educator must accommodate for each of these students. Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, and Matera (2013) state, “The US Census Bureau projects that by the 2030s, children whose home language is other than English will increase from roughly 22 percent to 40 percent of the school-age population” (p. 9). This increase in second language learners will cause the educator to accommodate for those needs. Second language learners “need teachers who welcome them and recognize their unique abilities, what they know, and what they need to learn” (Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, and Matera, 2013, p. 10).

It is important in the United States to have a competitive workforce, and a great way to do that is to have a society of learners that can communicate with people of other cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Although there are efforts for teaching school children other languages, most programs are primitive at best, left to be forgotten before the skills reach the point of relevancy. Dual language programs should be established in the US wherever feasible to give parents, at the very least, the choice to expand the minds of their children. Recent years have seen the inclusion of voluntary language immersion programs in places such as Athens, Georgia, in which students are taught from Kindergarten in two languages. These are steps in the right

The film does a great job of portraying the complexity of the situation by comparing two teachers that work at Hoover, Third-grade teacher Dianne Lee and First-grade teacher Arcelia Hernandez whose approach towards ELL students differs tremendously. Dianne Lee takes the English only approach with her students, hoping they will learn the language through immersion. Dianne is approaching her students in a way that is forcing them to give up their culture, even quoted saying “to become American, you have to be willing to give something up” pointing to her grandparents who immigrated from Russia and strove to Americanize themselves and their family. What Dianne most likely did not realize that more dropouts come from students who are placed in English only instruction where their primary language is suppressed (Freeman, p. 159). While showcasing another approach is Arcelia Hernandez who uses Latino culture and language that she shares with her students in order to help them learn both Spanish and English.

At Arts-Based School I did my observation in Leni Fragakis’s third grade class. This was the first observation I had done since learning about instructional design. Since learning it, I now have a new way of observing, I pay more attention to the teacher; how she implemented the lessons, what strategies she uses, and the types of assessments she uses. This gives me a better experience because before I was just paying attention to what the students were doing and their part in the classroom and now I am paying attention to so much more. Even though it is important to watch the kids, I now also know how important it is to observe the teacher, too. I was also able to observe what I am learning in class be used in the classroom.

According to Gleason and Ratner (2013), “In the United States, the proportion of children who are raised learning more than one language is estimated to be about 20 percent, with Spanish becoming the most common second language (Gleason & Ratner, 2013, p. 75). My interview this week was with a teacher, Mrs. T, who teaches young English learners. Mrs. T teaches children who are in the first grade. Because the school has a growing Hispanic population, the native language of the children she teaches is Spanish. The interview took place in her classroom during the last hour of the school day. I observed as she worked with one of her students in particular who seems to

I interviewed an Instructional Aide that I work with at Cottonwood Elementary. Her name is Marcela and she works with the Kindergartners. She moved from Argentina to New York when she was 3 years old and her first language was Spanish. Her mother put her in preschool when she turned 5, to help her learn English. Marcela shared with me that when she went to school she felt very sad, disconnected and was constantly looking for other children that spoke Spanish. She did find a girl who spoke Spanish and she became “buddies’ with her. The girl that she befriended would help her by translating everything the teacher would say, which was all in English. Marcela said she was speaking English by Kindergarten, but she must have had a strong accent because they put in her in speech

From an early age I found learning hard and in my early educational years I

The Far West Elementary school is a non-profit in the United States that seeks to provide the framework and foundation for a better life overall through installation of solid education and values early on in life. The school focuses a lot of its energy on immigrant children that know little to no English. The Far West program is indeed designed to handle such children whereas many public schools are not due to lack of resources and/or lack of focus on English Second Language (ESL) students. Some cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, have very entrenched and massive immigrant and/or ESL populations, thus making the need much more apparent than it would be in an area that is more homogenous or at least mostly English-speaking.

Diverse cultures within the United States are rapidly developing and growing and the educational sector is the number one target to ensure that English –learners are receiving adequate education. Within the educational sector there are administrators and teachers who are involved in students lives on a daily basis to ensure that education is equal. In order to achieve the vital objective of equality, socio-cultural influences on ELL students, bilingualism and home language use, parental and community resources, and partnerships between families and schools all have to be considered to provide an opportunity for equal education.

The second classroom I observed was a first grade class of twenty-five students. Students in this class were all of Mexican descent and labeled as early intermediate English language learners. The

Most students these days just think they have to go to class, pay attention, write some notes and they will do fine. That may be true for some people but if they were to use a more active learning approach instead of passive, they could do even better. Active learning is a learning approach that gets the student more involved which helps lead to a better understanding and idea of the material being learned (VickyRN, 2009). Passive learning is the common classroom learning approach where you listen to a teacher and read information (VickyRN, 2009). If students were more aware of the benefits of active learning and the difference between active and passive learning, they could achieve higher academic results and may even enjoy it more. Many

I know that schools are trying to offer appropriate programs to teach ESL students. They are trying to integrate Spanish classes. I don’t have anything negative to say about it. I’m always for teaching more than one language. In this time, people have to learn more than one language and schools can start integrating that. Some countries requires speaking another language and that takes them to know many cultures. I think that US schools are teaching students about diversity and I think that learning other’s language will achieve one of the most needed goals about other cultures.

Many of the things that we have talked about in class were illustrated for me in

On Wednesday, the 16th of December, I headed to the writing center to observe a tutoring session. I have waited for few minutes for the tutee to arrive and fill the writing center form. After taking the tutee’s permission I sat along with her few minutes chatting about the wri221 course until the tutor joined us.

Education has long been the center of reform with new ideas about learning and teaching. Educators are regularly introduced to new teaching strategies, curricula and rigorous standards in an effort to provide effective instruction to students. However, the pursuit of proficiency in mathematics and reading through the use of research-based methods requires an understanding of the learning models and theories that both drive instruction and learning in the classroom. In this paper I will address the evolution of ideas about learning and teaching in education as well as address the shifts in learning in the 21st century.