Cooperative Learning Structures

CIRCLE THE SAGE

1. The teacher polls the class to see which students have a special knowledge to share. For example the teacher may ask who in the class was able to solve a difficult math homework question, who had visited Mexico, who knows the chemical reactions involved in how salting the streets help dissipate snow.
   
2. Those students (the sages) stand and spread out in the room. The teacher then has the rest of the classmates each surround a sage, with no two members of the
   same team going to the same sage.
   
   3. The sage explains what they know while the classmates listen, ask
      questions, and take notes.
      
   4. All students then return to their teams. Each in turn, explains what
      they learned. Because each one has gone to a different sage, they
      compare notes.
      
   5. If there is disagreement, they stand up as a team.
      
   6. The disagreements are discussed as a class and resolved. 
      

Fan N Pick

Oct. 15 - Instructional Strategies

Teachers need to make their classroom as the home field advantage.  When students enter the classroom, they need to feel like they are getting the home field advantage.  Here is where I can create and be the most successful.

Cummins

• 4 stages of Acquisition
• preproduction (the silent period) 6 mos to a year
• Early production - sentences are very simple, not complete
• Speech emergent - they will get most sentences right
• Intermediate Fluency

Sheltered English

• Hand on
• visual cooperative learning
• guarded vocabular - protect the number of new vocabulary words that are introduced, and repeat them.

I hear I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

Learning Pyramid - average  retention rates

Lecture 5%

Reading 10%

Audio Visual 20%

Demonstration 30%

Discussion Group 50%

Practice by doing 75%

Teach Others/Immediate Use of Learning 95%

Cooperative Learning

• keep groups small
• needs to be done with careful planning
• is not easy to jump into

With Cooperative Learning research shows that you will have:

• higher achievement
• more time on task
• improved higher level thinking skills
• greater retention
• improved skills for working with others

Great example of solving a problem using cooperative learning and going down the learning pyramid.

Setting up a Coop Lesson - 6 Key Concepts

1. Teams 
1. keep them small
2. developmentally appropriate
3. heterogeneous, homogeneous, random
4. assigned by teacher
5. You need to do bonding activities to get those students to want to help each other out
2. Will
1. Students must have the will to cooperate
2. Team building and class building activities
3. Team and class recognition systems
3. Management
1. Quiet signal
2. Assigning roles
3. Team questions
4. Skills
1. Listening
2. Conflict resolution
3. Tutoring skills
5. Basic Principals
1. positive interdependence - a gain for one is a gain for another
2. individual accountability - individual performance is required
3. equal participation - equal participation is planned
4. simultaneous interaction - a greater percentage of students are overtly active at once
6. Coop Strategies
1. Structure how students interact with each other
2. have the 4 basic principals built in

5 reason to do team building

1. Creates teams in which everyone achieves
2. promotes real work team work
3. created the will and the skill to cooperate
4. builds positive student relations
5. creates a positive classroom climate

Preparing the students 

1. explain directions
2. offer suggestions
3. help each other without interfering
4. encourage each other
5. paraphrase
6. request a justification 
7. extend each others utterances
8. express emotion
9. resolve conflict
10. criticize other w/out giving offense

Cooperative learning rules groups

1. you are responsible for your own behavior
2. you must be willing to help anyone who asks
3. you may not ask the teacher for help unless everyone in the group has the same question

Oct. 1, 2012 - Learning Objectives

Class Activity - Matching content objectives and language objectives

Language on left, and Content on the right

Components of English Language Development for ELL's (Linguistics)

1. Levels of Language Knowledge
2. Oral Language
3. Phonology
4. Orthography
5. Morphology
6. Grammar and Syntax
7. Vocabulary and Semantics

Levels of Language Knowledge

• Receptive Skills (listening)
• point to shapes
• Expressive (speaking)
• Name shapes
• Oral 
• written

Components of Oral Language

• content
• any component of language that carries meaning such as vocabulary or discourse
• Use
• refers to pragmatic language functions or how language is used as a social tool
• form
• component of language that follows a rule system such as syntax and grammar or sequence of sounds within a language

The use of the language is the hardest for this students

Content is difficult for this student

Grammar and Syntax is difficult for this student.

Phonology  - a study of the sound patterns of a language

• phonemes
• phonological awareness
• phonics

English Demons for ELLs

• Short vowels
• "sh" sound in shoes, mission, nation, ocean, chef, special and sugar
• One sound, but 6 different spellings

Language Distance

• some languages are easier to learn than others, depending on the complexity of their symbol system and their degree of transferability and or transparency

Orthographies - the symbols and the rules for writing them (spelling)

• transparent - allow a few or just one association between symbols and sounds
• opague - allows many ways - including combinations of symbols - of associating symbols and sounds.

Morphology

• study of word origin, formation and structure
• how words are put together from their smaller parts and the rules of governing the process
• morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning
• Cats contains 2 morphemes
• cat and the plural s

September 24, 2012

There are more people out there in the world who speak English as a second language as their first language.

Comprehensible Input Features
(From the SIOP text)

1. Speech appropriate for students proficiency levee
• Slower rate of speech
• Careful enunciation
• Simple structure for beginners
• Paraphrasing and repetition 
• Use cognates
• Pull from their prior knowledge
• Avoid using idioms 
2. Clear explanation of Academic Tasks
• Step by step directions
• show example of finished product
• oral and written directions
• opportunities to practice what has been explained
• need more guided practice
3. A variety of techniques use to make content concepts clear
• Modeling
• Visuals 
•  have pictures and label pictures
• Hands-on Activities
• Demonstrations
• Gestures
• Body Language
• Graphic Organizers

Read the lesson scenarios, create a T-Chart list effective and non-effective 

Tea Party Strategy

Can be a good strategy to use with students especially ELL students

Language and Content Objectives

• NCLB requires that we measure progress in both areas
• Academic Achievement (CRTs)
• English Langauge Proficiency (UALPA)
• Content knowledge cannot grow if we only focus on learning the English language
• Language learning cannot occur if we only focus on academic subject matter

4 Reasons to Combine Language and Content

1. language forms and vocabulary will develop as students study areas of interest
2. Motivation plays a role in learning complex language structures
3. Teachers can activate and build on students' prior knowledge in the content area
4. Language structure and form should be learning in authentic contexts rather than through contrived drills in language workbooks

Generating Language Objectives

1. Four language domains
   ...to demonstrate the "what" or content that they will learn
1. Reading 
2. Writing
3. Speaking
4. Listening
2. key vocabulary
3. language functions
1. agreeing and disagreeing
2. asking for permission, directions, help, questions
3. explaining
4. expressing likes, dislikes and opinions
5. describing and denying
6. classifying
7. commanding/giving instructions
8. identifying
9. sequencing, suggesting
10. planning and predicting
11. enquiring/questioning
12. asking for assistance or directions
13. wishing and hoping
14. refusing
4. grammar or language structures
1. particular verb tenses
2. possessives
3. plurals
4. adverbs
5. vocabulary words
6. sequencing words
1. first
2. second
3. meanwhile
4. next
5. third
6. after
7. before
8. finally
9. then
10. last
7. pre-fixes-suffixes
5. lesson tasks
6. language learning strategies

September 17, 2012 - Theories of Language Acquisition

Sheltered Instruction
an approach to teaching English language learners which integrates language and content instruction. The dual goals of sheltered instruction are: # to provide access to mainstream, grade-level content, and # to promote the development of English language proficiency

Sheltered Instruction is More Than Just Good Teaching

• Wait Time - give 5-7 seconds before having students respond.  You will receive better responses when you provide wait time
• Key Vocabulary
• Adapted Conent
• Language Objectives
• Clarification in L1
• Appropriate speech for proficiency level
• Supplementary materials
• Student background experiences

SIOP Text Summary
     Each group took a chapter of the text and shared the main idea, drew a picture of visual of key concepts, classroom connections and a summary.

Lesson Plan Checklist for the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP)

Why is English so difficult to learn?  
     We have many words that have multiple meanings.

    
First Language Acquisition Theory

Behaviorist Theory of Language Acquisition (BF Skinner 1940's - 50)

• Imitation & Habit Formulation
• kids learn by imitating what they see and hear. 
• they form habits
• Stimulus, response, reinforcement
• "If you say "cookie" I will give you a cookie"
• Enforce "Use your words"
• Association
• associate vocabulary with actions
• Child's mind is a blank slate

Innate Theory of Language Acquisition

• Language is innate (Noam Chomsky. 1959)
• We have a universal grammar that allows us to be a sophisticated language
• humans are sophisticated communicators
• critical period for language acquisition

Interactionist Theory (Lev Vygotsky - Catherine Snow)

• Language develops as a result of interaction between unique human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops
• Language that is modified to suit the capability of the learner is a crucial element in the language acquisition process
• ZPD - Zone of Proximal Development
• "Motherese" or Child Directed Speech
• Slower rate of speech
• higher pitch
• more varied intonation
• shorter simpler sentence patterns
• frequent repetition
• paraphrase

Second Language Acquisition Theory

Learning - Acquisition Hypothese

• one learns a second language the same way they learned it.  By using it. They need to be immersed in it, and use the language for meaningful purposes.
• Acquisition vs Learning
• Acquisition
• focus on need to communicate
• errors are expected as developmental
• it's an unconscious process, a result of exposure
• student-centered
• Learning
• Focus on forms to be mastered
• error correction is a critical feature to promote mastery
• learning is a conscious process of memorizing rules, forms and structures
• Teacher - centered  
• Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning.
• Natural Order hypothesis
• linguistic forms emerge in L2 in much the same order ask they do in L1. 
• Verb forms
• Start with present and past progressive (is walking, was not walking)
• present perfect tense (have/has been walking)
• phrasal verbs (walk down the street. Walk up the path)
• conditional form (If we walk to the store, we will not...)
• the learner will "fill in" the blanks with a predictable and logical form, based on the rule-goverened patterns of language.
• The Monitor Hypothesis
• students begin to modify speech to conform to the speech and written language of native speakers 
• Comprehensible Input Hypothesis
• The learner acquires or learns language he/she understands by connecting to prior knowledge and known concepts.  Language not understood is just L2 noise.
• Affective Filter Hypothesis
• There exists a "filter" or "mental block" that impedes L2 from getting in.  A low filter is associated with relaxation, confidence to take risks and a pleasant learning environment.
• Code Switching
• The learner naturally develops an interim form of language that is a mixture of L1 and L2. ELL will fill with first language skills, where they don't know the form in L2.

What does it mean to be proficient in a different language?

• There are 3 dimensions of language proficiency (Jim Cummins)
1. basic interpersonal communication skills or BICS
• social language kids learn in social situations (contextual situations)
• communicate successfully with other native speakers
2. Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency or CALP
• language of the classroom.  Science, Social Studies, Reading, Math....etc
• skills that are associated with literacy and cognitive development and that are learned through formal instruction
3. Discrete Language Skills (phonological, literacy, and grammatical knowledge)
• grammar, syntax, phonics, ....
• Stages of Language Acquisition
  Initially, ELLS are able to comprehend more than they can express
• Preproduction
• Student behaviors:
• minimal comprehensin
• "Silent Period"
• Nods "Yes" and "no"
• draws, points, gestures
• responds to commands
• Strategies
• Use sheltered Instruction
• Ask yes or no questions
• show me...
• point to...
• circle the...
• where is...
• who has...
• put the___next to the ____
• Is this a ______
• Total Physical Response (TPR)
• Receptive before expressive language
• Imperatives used to transfer or communicate information
• students not forced to speak until ready
• Early Production
• Student Behaviors
• limited comprehensive
• one or two word responses 
• key words and familiar responses
• present tense verbs
• frequent errors
• Teacher Prompts
• yes/no questions
• either/or questions
• one or two words answers
• lists
• labels
• Speech Emergence
• Student behaviors
• good comprehension
• can produce simple sentences
• makes grammar and pronunciation errors
• frequently misunderstands jokes
• Teacher prompts
• Why....?
• How....?
• Explain...?
• Describe...?
• Phrase or short sentence answers
• Intermediate Fluency
• Student behaviors
• has excellent comprehension
• makes few grammatical errors
• may have difficulties in abstract, cognitively demanding subjects when high level literacy required
• Teacher Prompts
• What would happen if....?
• Why do you think.....?
• Describe/compare....?
• How do you think the story will end...?