May 2013 Featured Educator: Magali Williams

Where do you teach currently and what is your district like?

I work in the Schaumburg School District in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. There are 27 schools that comprise the district, with 4,083 students enrolled, and 19 percent of students (qualified as) low income. My school, the John Muir Literacy Academy, is located in Hoffman Estates. It has 525 children, which includes early childhood, with 33 percent Hispanic, 23 percent Asian, 21 percent African American, and 19 percent white. Right now, I'm a general-education teacher at John Muir, meaning I teach all subjects. I have 22 students overall, including quite a few ELL students. The make-up of my class is pretty representative of the school population.

Why did you decide to become an educator?

I was born in Puerto Rico. I came to the U.S.—New York City—when I was 6 years old, so I am an English language learner myself. I knew how to read, add and subtract, and even though I was a first grader, they put me in kindergarten with my sister. That does have an effect on you. Then I just sat in the classroom. Literally, I just sat there, because no one could help me, no one could communicate with me, and because I was bored I said, “I know how to do math, I'm going to do my math problems.”

When the teacher saw my work, it was almost like a light bulb went off in her head—she said, “Oh, she can do something!” Not knowing or having the ELL background or expertise, she used math to help me learn, and we took it from there. But until she saw that I was capable of doing something, there was no effort made to help me out in any way.

I realized even back in high school that there were gaps in my learning as a result. Sometimes I would speak to people and they would say something that I kind of got, but some words escaped me, and that made me realize that when I was in school, I didn't understand as much. Soon after I started work as an elementary substitute teacher, I saw students leaving the room to get support to help them transition into English, and I decided I wanted to contribute and be a part of that.

I'm now in my 16th year of teaching, and I spent 14 of those 16 years as a bilingual resource teacher and ELL teacher. As a teacher, I do use my story to connect with my students. They need to see I have been in their shoes and I have succeeded. I tell them, yes, it's difficult for you now, but you will get there. It just helps them see that if their teacher can do it, they can succeed, too.

You teach fourth grade. What's unique about that stage of development for kids, especially ELLs? How do you address their particular needs?

To me, third and fourth grade are really critical because in the lower grades they learn to read, and in fourth grade they begin to read in order to learn. So that really has an impact on their learning and language development—they need to have the language in order to understand the concepts that they are reading about. My classroom is usually never quiet unless they're reading independently, because I try to offer lots of opportunities for speaking. I provide guided practice. My responsibility is to scaffold, to shelter, to frontload, to reinforce.

I personally make sure I define and model the academic terms. I use them in my everyday communication with my class. They need to see how I use the academic language in the classroom and how to use the academic language in their everyday discourse. And there needs to be a gradual release of responsibility.

There is a lot of strategic planning in that, which is where our Professional Learning Community comes into play, as we develop content and language objectives together. In our planning sessions for shared reading and for guided reading, our ELL co-teacher is there to co-plan with us as well, so whatever linguistic support needs to be added to lesson, they are there to provide that knowledge and expertise.

What is your approach in your classroom/school towards ELLs? What techniques/strategies have you found to be most effective in teaching ELLs?

In order to learn language, my students need to know they are safe taking risks in the classroom, so I try to take risks in the classroom as a teacher. I ask for their input and ideas. They know if I don't know something. I'm not afraid to say “I don't know the answer, but let's try to find it together.”

I make a point of marking where students are at the beginning of year. I assess their language by the structure and complexity of sentences they're creating and formulating in our classroom discussion. I note if they're at the word/phrase level, or at the sentence level. If they are at the sentence level, then I need to assess the vocabulary they are using... Is it social? Is it academic? If not, it's my job to build a bridge to be able to produce that language. I also set a learning goal on a daily basis.

One essential goal we have for the year—and again, it always has to do with language learning—is to communicate our thinking using complete and complex sentences. We make sure our sentences and questions are very specific and clear so others can understand.

I really try hard to get my students to understand that it's their responsibility as speakers and writers to have a clear picture of what they're trying to say. We do use a classroom signal (putting the tips of my fingers together), so if they're beginning sentences with “Because...” or have an incomplete thought, they see me give the signal and they know they need to rephrase it as a complete thought. If they need support, I offer it, but it's critical for them to develop that linguistic complexity. I understand we do have some students in the earlier phases of language acquisition, but that's why we scaffold and shelter and support with sentence starters and sentence frames, so they can use those to get their thinking across.

In general, I try to be very visual developing movements, using my hands, trying to make it kinesthetic. Our school now, most teachers are Quantum trained, which is a holistic approach to comprehension and retention of content, so it's very engaging and so they're involved with curriculum that is presented in a meaningful way for each student. That's another approach that we use for all of our students, but it's especially helpful with ELL students.

What benefits or strengths do English language learners bring to your classroom/school?

They bring a lot to the classroom, starting with a background of knowledge and experience that other students have been exposed to. They bring their culture and that alone brings up great classroom discussion. If you think of skill and strategy of comparing and contrasting, it's great for that, because it brings it to a personal level students can relate to when they're comparing and contrasting different cultures. Because of that, it helps students bond and be more understanding of others. They realize there are more commonalities than differences.

ELLs bring other thought patterns, other ways of figuring things out because of the way they may have learned in their own countries, and they bring their language, which is a tool for English language learning, and we learn from each other. Right now, I have a Japanese student, and my other students trying to communicate with her have made a strong effort to try to learn some Japanese words to help assist her along. It's a shrinking world and we live it every day in my classroom.

How do you use ACCESS for ELLs and the WIDA standards to assess language learning formally and informally? 

ACCESS helps me understand where my students are linguistically in the four domains. It's important to know where they are in all four, not just reading and writing like other standardized assessments, because all domains affect one another. It's important for me to know what their strengths are and to use those strengths to develop the other areas. ACCESS lets me know where they are proficient in order for me to help them develop their language. 

The model performance indicators, the MPIs, are important to look at, because they provide examples of the assessable language skills, so it helps me know on a daily basis what to look for. To me, they're essential in the day-to-day formative assessments because they really connect the content with the language function and what linguistic supports the students can and will use to assist in that development of the language, so you can see the progression from level to level.

What is the state of ELL teaching in this country, in your opinion? How has the country advanced in this field?

I think WIDA has taken it to the next level. It really makes us critically look at what we're teaching, how we're teaching, and it's not just about content, because how are the students going to communicate the content that they're learning? They both go together, we can't separate one from the other. That's how we learn, and if we can't communicate what we are learning, what use is it?

WIDA has fine-tuned my teaching, and made me think about what I'm doing as a teacher every day to get the student to develop academic and content-related language. And it's not just the language, but the linguistic complexity, the language control, the vocabulary. So we look at all those aspects now and look at them in four domains. We still have a long way to go, but we're definitely going in the right direction.