Discussion

Discussion on how the state standards and federal mandates you reviewed compare to the recommendations made in your course readings.

Kim-Hawaii students in my school who are in the ELL program get pulled out of their regular classes twice a week for 45 minutes. Sometimes the ELL teacher will help the students with their work from regular classes. There are some students who enter the ELL program and can't pass the exit test, so they stay in ELL classes, but really don't need to be there. What are your experiences with your ELL programs?

Fotini-In our school we have two ELL teachers. Both teachers provide (daily) in the classroom support, especially during the writing block. They are also then pulled into the ELL classroom to do additional activities once a week. It is beneficial to have the extra support daily, but it’s even more beneficial to have additional activities provided to these children.

Velika-My ELL students are pulled out during the day to reinforce weekly lessons. Classrooms are inspected to make sure homeroom teachers have everything they need to support student learning.

Mandy-In my school district, the school that I work at is the only elementary school to have ELL students. These students work with the ESL teacher once a day as a pull out program and she also works with them in the classroom throughout the week. The ESL teacher provides support for the classroom teacher and helps to gather materials, create lessons, and answer questions that they teachers may have.

Lisa-It is thought amongst Arizona educators that a non-ELL student at grade level would not be able to pass this AZELLA test because it is challenging. In our district we pull our ELL students for over 1 hour each day, but daily interventions by classroom teachers are listed in lesson plans and ELL tutoring is available three days every week for free. According to the class readings, some of the same strategies listed are in each of our state standards and individual lesson plans. Through the course readings there were excellent examples of building vocabulary through internet sites and sight word knowledge (Ch.6). Many of us use these sites in our daily instruction and the validation of these resources was benefical to our future plans.

