Let Them Teach You!
Integrated Skills Civil Rights Unit for ELL Middle Schoolers with Nancy Nies
Last spring, when I was unexpectedly teaching a mixed class of middle schoolers from China whose Toefls ranged from 25 to 50, I was running out of ideas how to bridge the gaps in their abilities. “Hey Steve,” I shouted out to my colleague in the hallway. “What am I going to do for the next six weeks?” He replied, “have them teach you!”
This podcast covers the development of a surprisingly successful unit on integrated skill building for international middle schoolers that grew out of that snatched conversation with my friend.
In it, I’ll discuss how to build a unit that evenly develops the four foundational skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in a way that is developmentally sound for a mixed-level group, that repeats the lessons with incremental increases in difficulty to increase mastery, and is content rich.
Over a six-week time span, focusing on the topic of the Civil Rights movement, my students each read and researched three separate topics, wrote and revised three short essays, and gave three presentations all of which were practiced then presented formally where they taught the class what they had learned. Given the wide range in ability level, from early beginner to low intermediate, my goal was to help each student advance from where he or she was starting. Also, since the class was on American Studies, I hoped to give the entire class a basic working familiarity with the Civil Rights Movement with exposure to its key players, places, and events and with an ability to discuss those events using their newly learned and shared vocabulary.
While the focus of the unit was researching, reading, digesting and presenting material, writing clear simple explanations for the topics, and learning to speak clearly to convey that information, I found many other useful skills were practiced in the process. First, they developed their rudimentary research skills, learning how to find websites beyond Wikipedia that defined their topics; second, they learned how to create a slide presentation, receiving basic instruction in layout, content, and design; third, they learned how to create a works cited entry for the websites they used since I required it on both their researched paragraphs and on their slides, and fourth, they learned how to separate definitional content--the What of their topics--from the more challenging significance of their content--the answer to the question of Why this matters.
The other significant success for me as a teacher was how much I learned about how to create an effective assignment for both beginning and low intermediate learners. Since I was inventing this assignment where they taught their classmates as I taught it and since I was repeating the assignment three times, each time I could refine what I was asking for by seeing what pitfalls stymied their progress. And the pitfalls varied depending on the fluency level of the student. Learning how to better design a more effective and carefully structured assignment was a definite fruit of this reiterative labor.
I divided the topics into three sections:
Definitions
Causes & Effects
People & Solutions
Each section lasted two weeks and consisted of four separate tasks focusing on building different skills:
A reading component which consisted of Research into the student’s topic seeking answers to three overarching questions each student proposed.
A Writing component where the students answered the three questions and wrote short 1-paragraph answers using full sentences and explanations. This ran about a page.
A Speaking component where the students created slide shows which required editing the material on their essays into bullet points as well as designing slides that communicated clearly.
A vocabulary component where the students created a li...
