Thursday, March 30, 2017
Monday, March 27, 2017
Why The Art of Speaking Should Be Taught Alongside Math and Literacy
Why The Art of Speaking Should Be Taught Alongside Math and Literacy
Students at School 21 practice structured verbal tasks in every subject and class. (Edutopia)
Classrooms in the U.S. often focus most attention on literacy and math, largely because those skills are considered foundational and are tested. However most people will also need to communicate their thoughts and ideas to other people through oral language, and yet effective communication strategies are often not taught with the same precision and structure as other parts of the curriculum.
School 21, a public school in London has made “oracy” a primary focus of everything they do. From the earliest grades on up teachers support students to find their voice, express differing opinions politely, and challenge one another’s thinking. These are skills called for in the Common Core, but can be hard to find in many classrooms because students haven’t been taught how to make “turn and talks” truly effective.
The Edutopia team visited School 21 and captured some amazing videos of students practicing their communication skills with support from teachers.
Another key element of the School 21 program is “well-being,” a social emotional learning curriculum that is once again embedded throughout students’ experience of school. In the following video, the communication skills teachers have helped foster become supremely important as even young students grapple with difficult topics like race, difference, diversity and kindness.
Because oral communication is a core tenet of School 21, students continue to build on their skills throughout school until arguing an opinion and defending with research are almost second nature to them. The school also tries to help students see the progress they’ve made by offering culminating moments when they can show off their public speaking skills in front of real audiences.
Speaking is a part of almost every classroom, but it can be easy to assume that students already know how to do things like challenge an idea or back up an argument with evidence. In reality, those oral communication skills must be explicitly taught like other core skills in school. And a well-spoken, confident young person will have occasion to use those communication skills throughout his or her life. Peter Hyman, School 21 cofounder and executive head teacher, says, “We need to elevate speaking to the same level as reading and writing.”
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Friday, March 24, 2017
WIABE TEACHER OF THE YEAR
Heyer Elementary School's Martha Smilanich will be recognized at the Wisconsin Bilingual Teacher of the Year. Her Principal Mark Schnieder wishes to thank her for her leadership of the Dual Language Professional Learning Community at Heyer, and for her impact and relationships on learners, families and colleagues.
Congratulations Ms. Martha!
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Ode to My Teacher: "Ms. Zamorano, you just went like BOOM!"
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Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Discourse is ONE aspect of Oracy-what other aspects are there?
When we believe our learners to have the linguistic capacity for dialogue around the content, we tend to focus on the Social Emotions and Cognitive aspect of Oracy known as Discourse. When we approach discourse from the lens of students learning languages, we include also the linguistic and physical. Reflect on your current ORACY practices. How might your practices meet student need now, and what might you need to do more learning about to meet student's needs in the future?
Why Dual Language isn't successful without ORACY!
Explainer: what is oracy and why should every child be taught it?
Disclosure statement
Neil Mercer has received funding for the Oracy project work from the Education Endowment Foundation. He has also received research funding from the ESRC and the Nuffield Foundation.
Ayesha Ahmed has received research funding from the Education Endowment Foundation.
Paul Warwick has received funding from the Education Endowment Fund.
Partners
University of Cambridge provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.
A recent report confirms that the alumni of British “public schools” still control politics and many top professions. One reason those people are so successful in public life is, of course, that their shared history gives them privileged networking connections. But they are also commonly very confident, fluent public speakers.
They were not born that way. Their skills were developed through their school experience of debating societies, discussion groups and engaging in dialogues with their teachers. Although the term might not have been used, their education included oracy – skills in using spoken language – as well as literacy and numeracy.
For the sake of social equality, all schools should teach children the spoken language skills that they need for educational progress, for work and for full participation in democracy. Our research is beginning to show that children who are taught these skills, perform better in maths, science and reasoning tests.
Politically neglected
For most of the British population, oracy has never really been a subject in the school curriculum. And with the recent downgrading of “speaking and listening” to “spoken language” in the National Primary Curriculum and the removal of the oral language assessment from the GCSE English examination, the message seems to be that spoken language skills only need to be mastered by the privileged few.
Yet skills in oracy will be more important for most people once they leave school than, for example, skills in long division, which schools minister Nick Gibb suggested in 2012 have been so woefully neglected by teachers in recent years. Although anyone can use their smart phone to calculate, technology companies such as Apple are yet to invent a speech maker and discussion generator.
The government view seems to be that “talk” does not need tuition and that if children are talking they are not learning. This view has little connection with reality. Employers in the UK regularly say that they want to recruit people who are effective public communicators and team workers. But they also complain that job candidates often lack such skills – not surprising if they have not been taught them.
Pioneering oracy-led curriculum
Some people learn how to use talk effectively at home and through various out-of-school activities. But many children are rarely encouraged to present their ideas or to take part in a “reasoned discussion”. Some teachers are trying to change this.
We have recently been working with a free school in East London, School 21, which has pioneered an oracy-led curriculum with very positive results. The school received an outstanding Ofsted evaluation in July 2014, and the value of such collaboration between schools and educational researchers was recently noted by a House of Commons select committee.
Through the work of School 21’s teachers, our own research and that of others, we know there are some very effective ways of teaching oracy. For example, teachers quite often comment that children are not very good at working in groups. Some, like the education bloggers Robert Peal and Andrew Old, even find it so difficult that they suggest group work should be abandoned.
Set ground rules
Yet we have found that one reliable way to make group-work more productive is to ask students to agree on a suitable set of “ground rules” for how they will conduct their discussions. Unproductive talk is often the outcome of students (and adults) using the wrong rules: for example implicitly deciding to “keep your best ideas to yourself” rather than “any potentially useful information should be shared and evaluated”.
By using appropriate ground rules groups are more likely to find good, creative solutions to problems. By being taught how to talk and work together in groups, students are also learning the kind of life skills valued by many employers. Our research shows that when students learn how to use talk to reason together, they become better at reasoning on their own – as measured by their scores on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test of reasoning. They also significantly improve their attainment on SATs tasks in maths and science, compared with children in control schools who were not taught oracy skills.
Oracy toolkit
If teachers are to help their students develop their talking skills, then they need to be able to monitor that development and provide feedback that will help progress. A grant from the Education Endowment Foundation has enabled us to create a “teacher-friendly” toolkit for assessing spoken language skills. Our toolkit is based on an Oracy Skills Framework that covers spoken language skills in four areas: physical, linguistic, cognitive and social & emotional.
To develop and trial our toolkit we have been working with School 21 and several other schools. The toolkit consists of three initial tasks that teachers can use at the beginning of Year 7 to get an idea of children’s oracy skills when they arrive at secondary school.
One is a “presentation” task, in which students are asked to prepare a two minute talk for next year’s Year 7s about what life is like at secondary school. Then there is an “instruction” task in which one student has to enable another (who is out of eye-contact) to build a specific model out of Lego. And then a “group discussion” task in which three children have to consider and provide reasoned justifications for their responses to some controversial statements. Three suggested follow-up tasks can be used towards the end of Year 7 to evaluate progress.
During the year, teachers can use our “Assessment for Learning” tasks to monitor children’s development and provide useful feedback. The toolkit will only be useful if more schools begin to teach oracy properly – and that will need more enlightened recognition from those in charge of education policy of the importance of spoken language skills for all our children.
New Translation and Interpretation Services-Meet Natalie Bonilla
SDW Translation and Interpretation
Meet Natalia Bonilla, our district Spanish/English Translator and interpreter. She starts April 3!
Natalia's role is to translate and interpret district level information including:
- curriculum, correspondence to all families from the district offices
- site based requests if there is capacity
other services:
Confidential Issues Interpretation contact Maria Pieters
Maria's role is to interpret Spanish and English in healthcare, legal and other student services of a confidential nature. Maria also coordinates the interpretation of languages other than Spanish.
Technology Enhanced Interpretation contact Leticia Campos
Leticia can coordinate accessibility to technology that enhances interpretation to small groups up to 17 participants.
Friday, March 17, 2017
TRAUMA-Threat of Family Deportation
This valuable resource may give you the opportunity to support children, your school community, your peers and yourself through policy change.
Secondary Dual Language Trajectory
Fall 2017-2018 will feature the following Dual Language Customized Pathways in 6th-10th grade.
Dual Language is a Customized Pathway for students whose goal it is to be:
- Bilingual AND Biliterate
- Academically Achieving at or above grade level in 2 Languages
- Desire to demonstrate Global and Multicultural Competence
Students must apply and be accepted to the Dual Language Program as it is a specialty program in the School District of Waukesha. Students who have been participants in the Dual Language Program since Kindergarten as well as newcomer English Learners whose first language is Spanish will be participating.
Program participation is noted in Infinite Campus under the LEP tab. The Office of Multilingual and Global Education makes program placement at the time of enrollment. Requests for enrollment should be directed to Letica Campos.
COURSE TRAJECTORY
Dual Language Thursday Update March 17, 2017
Thursday Update March 17, 2017
News: We have 2 open Dual Language Positions in regular and special ed. Network with your peeps, and let me know if I can build a relationship with someone you know.
NEWS: 2017-18 we will grow our Dual Language Program into 9th Grade at South and North High Schools. The 9th grade track will feature AP Spanish IV and BIOLOGIA!
Celebrations
In March, colleagues got together on a Saturday to develop and deepen practice around Meta-Linguistic Awareness.
This year, we have held two day, four afternoon and two Saturday session to build our big rocks, ORACY and Meta-Linguistic Awareness!
Comprehensive Literacy Units-SPANISH
Maria Barreras and our Effectiveness Coaches have been working diligently to bring thematic groups of text together for next year's CLM units in Spanish.
Most of the text sets are complete (with the help of a little literature in translation). The team finished off the sessions at Custom Education Solutions in Illinois with coaches and teachers!
DL PLC-ADMIN
Admin and Coach PLC is next Thursday at Banting Elementary School. The team will focus on building their coaching skill around ORACY. They will be refining their ability to look for ORACY practices and Oral Academic Language Use, and then will use a coaching triad to practice their skill of face to face feedback!
Teachers are invited! Please see your admin to attend this morning to help our Admin team to grow! 9-11AM
SEAL OF BILITERACY
Watch for us on PBS's ADELANTE, NPR Lake Effect and Waukesha NOW!
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