Bridging The ESL Divide

by | Feb 16, 2012 | Blog, Education, Teacher's Corner

Like many international schools in Asia the classroom’s in my school seem to be swarming with English language learners.  We have an ESL department that works hard to bring students up to mainstream requirements, yet I find myself constantly battling a divide in my classes between strong English speakers and English language learners… By the way, what’s the deal with all the different terminology, ESL, ELL TEFL, LEP, etc.  It seems like every school has their own phraseology for this population.  Maybe I should create my own new term and see if anyone can tell the difference.  How about IPLLSP for In-Progress-Language-Learning-Student-Population?  Sounds good to me. Here are list of strategies I recommend to improve your IPLLSPs? Divide and Conquer–Avoid placing similar level IPLLSPs in the same grouping.  Hopefully they’ll be challenged to work with others who can raise their language ability. Keep Talking–Too often we allow these students to fall back on their written ability.  We need to ask questions and expect responses. Discussion-Based Teaching–This year I’ve started a discussion-based model in many of my classes from Philips Exeter Academy in the US.  Known as the Harkness Method it emphasizes community-learning and the Socratic Method.  Everyone is expected to speak and if done correctly it creates an environment were all levels of IPLLSPs can participate.  Philips Exeter does a training seminar over the summer for teachers who are interested in learning more. Translation–Allow for monitored translation time in discussions so everyone can catch up and reset. Slow Down–I know this sound a little contradictory to the idea that the students should be mainstream.  But sometimes we speak too...

Harvard Study: What Makes Young Leaders…

by | Feb 3, 2012 | Leadership News

Is the student who organizes tag during recess or chooses to help a classmate with math on track to be a senator, a CEO, or a community leader? He—or she—may well be. Behaviors like embracing novel experiences, supporting peers, even pestering parents for lessons can predict whether a child will emerge as a leader in adulthood, according to researchers who say they are the first to plot a pathway from childhood experiences to adult leadership. The research may also help educators encourage leadership—a commonly heralded “21st-century skill”—if teachers know what behaviors to look for and support, they say. Theories abound about what makes one child develop into a leader and another not, says Ronald E. Riggio, Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College and editor of a special issue of the Leadership Quarterly, which last year published four studies of leadership development based on data going back to 1979. “There are these crazy ideas like pushy mothers or pushy fathers” feeding adult leadership success, he says, adding that research on leadership is often retrospective beginning with questions like, “What was Churchill’s mother like?” Rather than looking backward, the new studies use longitudinal data to test hypotheses about the relative importance of factors such as the role of parents, inner motivational drive, intelligence, childhood social skills, and personality traits like extroversion in shaping future leaders. To do the studies, researchers contacted the parents of every child born in Orange County, Calif., in 1979. They then tracked a sample of 106 subjects (whose parents agreed to participate and who stuck with the study) from the...