AURORA | The first-grade class at Ponderosa Elementary School in Aurora has a sort of United Nations quality to it. Among Jami O’Bryan’s 20 or so students, five different languages are spoken — Spanish, Somali, Arabic, Russian and English. On a chilly recent morning, a girl in a hijab sat near a boy in a superhero shirt as the class learned about opinion writing.
The mix of languages is common at Ponderosa, where students speak 47 different languages, but it also poses a challenge: While many of the students are learning math and science, they’re also trying to master a new language.
Cherry Creek School District officials say a 7-year-old program that integrates English language learners into standard classrooms and pairs a language specialist with a classroom teacher has helped them tackle that challenge.
Dr. Holly Porter, the district’s director of English Language Acquisition, said CCSD English learners are far outpacing what the state expects from them on state tests, with their growth in English proficiency 36 percentile points above the state’s goals.
Last month, the Colorado Department of Education recognized the district’s ELA efforts with the first ever English Language Proficiency Act Excellence District Award and a $97,000 grant. The money will be spent on development tools for teachers, including creating a video about the co-teaching program that can be used by teachers across the district.
Porter said the co-teaching approach, which the district started using in 2007 at Ponderosa before spreading it district wide, is important because it allows English learners to stay in the classroom. Under the old approach, those students were pulled out of class for a short period of time each day to focus just on learning English.
“The longer you keep them pulled out, the more stunted their growth is, the more stunted their social skills are and the more they feel isolated,” she said.
Today, students spend their entire day in their regular classroom and an ELA specialist spends part of the day working with the entire class using a lesson designed to integrate English learning into other lessons.
Kari Workman, an ELA specialist at Ponderosa, said she works with teachers like O’Bryan to design lessons that teach the entire class, but also help English learners develop their language skills along the way. Sometimes that means making sure to use words that many of the English learners already know, she said.
Last week in O’Bryan’s class, before the students filled out worksheets about their opinions on a variety of topics, Workman wrote a handful of sentence frames on the board, essentially a fill-in-the-blank diagram that the students could lean on when they filled out their worksheets.
Many of the students won’t need the frames to help them craft a sentence, Workman said, but the English learners might find them helpful.
O’Bryan said that the students also benefit simply from being with their peers. While she and Workman help them learn the academic language they need, just being around other students helps them pick up on social language they might not get else where.
“They pick up a lot from the other students,” she said.
Very interesting! Thank you!