All teachers in my district are taking the opportunity (are being required by the Dept. of Justice) to spend many hours on an online course about how to teach English Language Learners (ELLs) in our classrooms regardless of whether we actually have any ELLs in our classrooms at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem taking the course and learning more about best practices/effective teaching strategies. If that’s what were actually happening, I wouldn’t have an issue at all. However, that is not what’s happening. I’m not learning anything new, but no one bothers to find out what anyone already knows before submitting us all to to the same training regardless of our previous experience or our current practices.
No one in administration either at the district or my school level ever visits my classroom to see that I do indeed have learning objectives posted on my board every day or that I am already using strategies like Think-Pair-Share, Graffiti Writing, or RAFTs in my teaching. This frustrates me to no end because the very lessons that I’m listening to in my online course keep hammering about the importance of differentiation and figuring out where learners are in their journey when planning lessons to help them advance. Anyone but me see an issue here? Do as I say, not as I do?
That’s often the problem with professional development: We sit through seminars/lectures about what not to do in the classroom when the very presentation we’re sitting through is exactly what they’re telling us not to do.
Is there a lesson here for my classroom? Several, in fact.
1. Do honor what my students already know.
2. Don’t treat them like imbeciles.
3. Don’t give the same instruction over and over and over and over again.
4. Don’t tell them to do things that they are already doing.
5. Do keep lessons relevant.
I’m sure there are more if I really dig, but I don’t have time for that; I need to get back to the ELL training, so I don’t have time to worry about what it is that is actually going to be going on in my classroom when the students return next week.
