What Is Inservice?

Inservice is the ASCD community blog—a place for educators to gather and share ideas. We hope it will promote the kind of exchange that happens in inservice meetings, where educators discuss how best to support their students. We want it to be a resource for everyone who cares about and serves education, learning, and teaching.

Some topics discussed on Inservice include teacher professional development, No Child Left Behind, assessment of English language learners, and whether or not middle schools really work.

We invite you to continue these discussions and to participate in many more to come. Tell us and your peers what's happening in your districts, schools, and classrooms. And, if you'd like us to cover a topic that hasn't been discussed, please let us know.

A Little Bit About ASCD

Founded in 1943, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that represents 175,000 educators from more than 135 countries and 58 affiliates. Our members span the entire profession of educators—superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.

We address all aspects of effective teaching and learning—such as professional development, educational leadership, and capacity building. ASCD offers broad, multiple perspectives—across all education professions—in reporting key policies and practices. Because we represent all educators, we are able to focus solely on professional practice within the context of "Is it good for the children?" rather than what is reflective of a specific educator role. In short, ASCD reflects the conscience and content of education.

Visit the ASCD Web site to learn more.

Comments

[Mindy Clay]

We are looking at going to a single lunch for a high school of 1200 kids. One of our asst. principals read about this in a magazine and that school really likes what it has done for their school. Has anyone else tried this for a high school of 1000+? We are looking to see what the positives and negatives are with such a set up.

[Eric Dwyer]

ESOL teachers urge Florida Governor Charlie Crist to veto bills

Teachers of English to speakers of other Languages in Florida have been clamoring for Governor Charlie Crist to veto two bills: House Bill 1219 and Senate Bill 2512. Two Clay County, Florida politicians—Stephen Wise and Jennifer Carroll—passed legislation permitting Reading teachers to work with English language learners (ELLs) with no more than 60 hours of professional development. The current statute requires that any teacher with a non-English speaking student hold an Endorsement comprised of at least 300 hours of training. Thus, This law would cut Reading teachers’ work toward this permission by 80 percent.

I would like to ask for everyone’s help in requesting a veto from Governor Crist, who may be contacted by email at Charlie.Crist@myflorida.com or by phone at 850 488 5000.

So, what would these laws do?

The laws would accept the highly untenable argument that native language reading instruction is similar to foreign language instruction. At its most simplistic level, foreign language learning entails not only reading, but also, writing, speaking, and listening.

Native speaker Reading pedagogy outlines several aspects of the task, namely phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension, and in that order (as named by the National Reading Panel). Native speakers have a distinct advantage on ELLs because they already have speech comprehension speech; thus, connecting spoken language to written language. Most kindergarteners have already been learning their language for 5 years, and they’re darn good at it! Thus, jumping from the sounds (and phonemic awareness) of one’s own language and then applying the rules of an orthographic system based on it isn’t a leap for native speakers. However, for ELLs, none of those connections are immediately available. Thus, teachers are behooved to help ELLs garner comprehensible fun personal spoken language before engaging them with native speaker approaches such as English phonics.

Good ESL teachers are going to need more than 60 hours in order to understand how to flip the order such that comprehensible non-print language then links to the stuff kids can read. And their work will be even more effective if they emphasize ELLs’ developing their native language while simultaneously developing second language in all realms rather than just diving into English decoding.

If you’ve ever watched the National Spelling Bee, you’ll note that three quarters of the words posed are import words from other languages. Hence, these amazing spellers need to understand an enormous set of rules from other languages such as French, German, Latin, Greek, perhaps even Polish. ESL teachers, in order to help students work through the first language have to learn the same difficult language phenomena as do the sophisticated spelling bee contestants. And they’ll need far more than 60 hours of professional development to get that.

We have seen dynamic progress in students allowed to continue working in their first language. Doing so connects them to their friends and family around the world, permitting them to share with their closest peers. At present, Reading teachers do acknowledge culture and do things like have a cook-off where students bring their foods from around the world, but that’s so superficial. Strong ESL teachers understand the notion of displacement and immigration experiences. Thus, ELLs help native English speakers understand these powerful experiences. These stories are some of the strongest social studies lesson available. However, 60 hours of training won’t allow Reading teachers to develop such dispositions.

In this high stakes testing world which is bubble-filling ABCD, we have to work with ELLs who have never seen such a test sheet. Furthermore, learning to follow the test directions is intensely culturally based, entailing the learning of complicated abstract vocabulary and rhetoric. We can all imagine how it would be to take a math test in Mandarin or Zulu if we don’t know any of these langauges. Would extra time or a dictionary help us pass even one story problem? Teachers with more training will understand the realities students face under these circumstances. At the very least, teachers should paraphrase, repeat, and slow down when giving such directions. But most teachers don’t. In fact, they speed up if the sentence they need to utter longer sentences, regardless of whether the vocabulary is hard for students or not.

I have seen student teachers working with their Reading-based teachers recently make all sorts of errors. The processes are boring, and they have little or no base in what we know about helping folks learn English or any new language. To then suggest that we cut the training for these teachers by 80 percent almost ensures that English learners will fall even further behind. Such condemns innocent children to staying behind feeling themselves inadequate, condemns the teachers to the blame for not helping their students even though their credentials will say that they’re able to (which won’t really be accurate), and condemns the schools, whose funds are connected to test scores, will then face having to explain why their scores aren’t going up when they’ve followed all the rules.

And now law makers want to make English an official language. Certainly, asking for immigrants to get good at English but then cutting the service teachers can do for them doesn't make too much sense.

If these bills become law and are challenged in the courts, the quarter million English learners in Florida will pay a price again as funds directed to Education would then go toward any law suits.

Please, please urge a veto of HB 1219 and SB 2512 from Florida Governor Charlie Crist. You can contact the governor by emailing Charlie.Crist@myflorida.com or phoning 850 488 5000.

[Rosie]

The deadline for calling Governor Crist to request a veto of this bill is tomorrow, Monday, June 18th. The number is 850 488 5000. There is an answer machine at this number for calls made after office hours. The veto is the only way to stop this bad bill. Please call.

[Rosa Castro Feinberg]

Updated Information: Calls asking for the veto of SB 2512 will be accepted for the rest of this week at 850 488 5000.

[Linda Evans]

Florida is a large and diverse state. The demographics of students in the northern school districts of Escambia, Leon, and Clay counties vary dramatically from those of students in Orange County in the center of the state or Miami-Dade in the southernmost corner of Florida. Teachers in Clay county oppose the amount of training in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) required for reading specialists, feeling it to be excessive.

Perhaps it may seem that way in a district such as Clay, with relatively small numbers of English learners, but in districts in Florida with large numbers of English learners, reading teachers who understand the complex task of teaching reading to students who are not fluent in English is critical. Qualified teachers are essential for the practical purposes of raising school and ditrict FCAT scores, and for the moral and professional purposes of raising graduation rates and providing all students with a quality education. All children deserve the opportunity to learn to read.

Because Florida recognizes reading as a critical area to the extent that it puts in place reading specialists in schools, it should surely want that those specialists be qualified to help the very students who struggle the most with reading--English learners.

Governor Crist should veto this misguided and myopic legislation. We should encourage him to do so by calling 850-488-5000 to urge the veto of SB 2512. The governor will likely be reviewing the bill on Tuesday so make your call today.