Skip to main content

ELL Intervention Series Part 3: Meeting Your Students Affective Needs


In the final part of our three-part English Language Learner series we talk with an ESL specialist who spent the last five years turning a large 5A high school from an intimidating gauntlet into a home for our beginner level and new-to-the-country English Language Learners.

She shares her journey of discovering that - just because high school students don't cry when they arrive at your high school in the morning - it doesn't mean they don't need your emotional support just as much as that clinging elementary school kid. Her compassionate system of affective intervention with both students AND teachers has resulted in impressive increased academic success - increased rates of credit completion, increased STAAR passing and the achievement of some pretty lofty higher education goals.

Listen to our podcast here!

Music courtesy of The Creative Commons.
http://www.bensound.com

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @Intervene4Real.

You can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher or your favorite podcast app!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Texas Holds Students With Disabilities to a Higher Standard on State Exams

Let’s just call it like it is. 2016-2017 was not a great year for student assessment in Texas. Between the scandal of mis-graded STAAR tests, graders hired for peanuts on Craigslist, and large numbers of parents and students conscientiously objecting to even taking part in our state’s annual testing rituals, many Texans have been left wondering where, exactly, IS the accountability in our state accountability system.    But if there is one person who is keenly aware of where the accountability is, it’s the high school senior who’s taking a STAAR End of Course test. That senior needs to pass that test in order to graduate in that same month. That student is painfully aware that the STAAR test doesn’t care where he grew up, or who her parents are, or whether he is dyslexic or learning disabled or gifted and talented. Regardless of what challenges she faced or what advantages he received, everyone all sits down and takes the exact same test. That’s what TEA promises. All stude...

Episode 24: Why do you STAY a teacher?

All of us have been asked the question at one point or another. What made you decide to become a teacher? You've been asked it in job interviews, where the right answer seemed critical. You've been asked it by incredulous family members, where the right answer seemed impossible. You've been asked it by students, where the right answer seemed loaded. We've all got our response memorized. Whether that response reflects your deeply felt, inspirational path into the classroom, the safe-for-work, sanitized version of your winding road towards respectability, or is simply a rehearsed tale that carefully avoids saying "I don't know why I do half the things I do." I don't know about you, but I'm bored by my story. It's not particularly inspirational, and, frankly, it's not particularly interesting. You want to see into a teacher's soul? Don't ask us why we started. Ask us why we  stay .  Why do we stay in a career that...

Episode 23: The Curious Case of Gender in Educational Leadership

 In the midst of our wider, cultural conversation about women, and power, and leadership, and power, let us pause for a moment to consider the quite curious case of gender in education. Of course, education is an historically female driven profession - for much of the last century it was, in fact, one of the few jobs a woman could even realistically perform. That history continues to influence our profession today. 76% of classroom teachers remain women.  As women slowly take on larger and larger roles in industries all over this country, education sits as an - actually rather large - island. An experiment if you will, of sorts - an enormous, functioning machine -  a bureaucracy, a power structure - inhabited almost exclusively by women.  The lazy among us often joke how the world would be different, how much better it would be, if it could be run by women.  Well, education gives us a glimpse into what that world might actually be like. ...