Abigail Mattson

TEL 410
November 17, 2017
L6 Assignment Coding

Three Insight Statements:

1. Peer Support Aids Advocacy Process

2. Observation of Servant Leadership Traits Inspires Action
3. Personal Goals and Action Can Positively Impact Others

Important Themes From Coding:

- Personal Passions
- Peer Support Helps Process
- Observed Servant Leadership Traits
- Identify a Challenge First, Then Take Action
- Learning Brings Empathy

Key for Code Colors:

Empathy
Conceptualization
Foresight
Commitment to the Growth of People
Identifying a problem/Looking for a solution

[Brackets will be used to summarize and encode specific themes in the text.]

Coded Assignment # 1: Interview Transcription with Ginger Skelton, ESL Teacher

1. How long have you been an ESL teacher?

Mrs. Skelton: I got my Masters Degree in Bilingual and Bicultural Education 11 years ago,
the same year my oldest son was born. I worked as a Bilingual teacher for several years in
Colorado, and have also worked as a general classroom teacher in a couple different
grades. This is my first year as a pull-out ESL teacher.

[Summary of past experiences]

2. What is the ESL curriculum in the Fayette County School District like?

Mrs. Skelton: There is no curriculum for ESL in our school district. This means that I
have to choose all of the resources for my students. They do get to spend some time
working on an online literacy program called Lexia Core 5, but there is no set, specific
curriculum that I must use. My students are at very different levels of learning how to
read and write English and their native language, so it would be hard to follow a set
curriculum.

[Description of initial problem]

3. How many students do you work with every day?

Mrs. Skelton: I pull out students from almost every grade in the elementary school every
day, which is usually between five and ten students per grade. I also push in to a 4th-grade
class every day. I work with an average of 30 40 students every day.

[Specific details of student population]

4. What kinds of languages do the students you work with speak?

Mrs. Skelton: Most of the students speak Spanish as their native and home language. I also
have a student who speaks an Indian language, a student from Pakistan, and two Haitian-
Creole speakers.

[Specific details of student population]

5. What kinds of activities do you use with your students?

Mrs. Skelton: With the kindergarteners, I do a lot of phonics and sound or letter
recognition activities. With the third graders, I try to incorporate reading as much as
possible we go through short chapter books together. My fifth graders are really
struggling in social studies right now, so I use short games that are related to their social
studies material to help them in their other classes.

[Explanation of understanding levels of various students]

6. How does your school measure your students progress in English?

Mrs. Skelton: My students participate in a test called the AXIS test for English Language
Learners once a year in January. They also take the other tests that students at their grade
level complete for the state and for national education standards. If they improve on their
other tests, that shows that they are improving their English skills. Students who do very
well on the AXIS test may actually test out of ESL services.

[Summary of Assessment Methods]

7. What is the hardest part about your job?

Mrs. Skelton: I wish I could spend more time with my students. Some of them need more
help, and I am not able to give them the support they need. I have ten kindergarteners at
one time, and they need a lot of help that I cant give to all of them at once. I see that my
fifth-grade students are struggling in their other subjects, but theres only so much I can
do.

[Education Challenges]

8. If you could change one thing about your job or about the ESL curriculum, what
would you change?

Mrs. Skelton: I would push in to a different class for 4th-grade. Right now I go to math,
because that was the only time it worked for me to help those students. But math is not a
great time to support them with literacy, and they need more instruction.

[Desire to help students more]

9. How much parent involvement is there with your students?

Mrs. Skelton: My students parents are not very involved, and this is one of my personal
goals right now. Im working on ways to involve the parents in their childrens education
and to support them in knowing how they can help their students. I had the chance to
translate a parent-teacher conference for some of my parents who speak Spanish, and this
helped them connect with their childs general classroom teacher. Those particular
parents wanted to help their child, but felt like they couldnt because they didnt speak
English.

[Lack of parental involvement]

[Personal Goals]
[Empathy and translation helped parents connect with teacher]

10. How do students become a part of ESL services?

Mrs. Skelton: All parents fill out a short language survey at the beginning of the school
year. If the parents indicate that any language other than English is spoken in their home,
their children are screened during the first two weeks of school. Kindergarteners are
interviewed, and 1st- through 5th-graders take a test. Depending on their school, they are
identified for ESL services. The screening process is not always accurate or useful in
showing the level that the students are at, and the way that the school assesses progress is
not helpful. It does not use accurate or effective testing to determine if students are
improving at a good rate.

[Self-identify for screening]

[Description of assessment methods]
[Problem in education identified]

Coded Assignment # 2: Action Plan Journal Entries

Week 2, Date: October 21, 2017

 This week I got to work on my Design Challenge and my Advocacy Action Plan
documents. As I completed the design challenge, I noticed that I dont have a very clear
direction for my project. I know Im passionate about students who have special needs,
and want them to have equal access to education and to materials in the classroom. But I
dont have any connections with special education teachers in the school district near my
house, and I am having a hard time figuring out what I could do to really make a difference
in such a short amount of time. I struggled with this problem for a while, until one of my
group members posted a video in our discussion board. She said that she believes we can
definitely make a difference, no matter how short of an amount of time we have for the
class. That is right! I do believe that even one day can make a big difference in the life of a
student, but I just forgot about that. Im really glad she posted this video in the discussion
board.

[Personal passions]
[Identifying initial difficulties with assignment]
[Peer feedback and support provided a solution]

My favorite part of the lesson assignments for this week was the document about servant
leadership. I have always found it interesting to learn about different leadership styles,
and to try to apply the concepts and strategies for being a good leader to myself. But I
didnt know that there was an actual theorist and journal article about the concept of being
a servant leader. This style of leadership really connects with me, but I can see that I will
have a lot of work to do in order to actually become this kind of leader. The part of being a
servant leader that I would most like to work on is empathy. I have a hard time being
empathetic at times, and other times I am really good at this. I would like to practice active
listening skills at my current jobs, so that I can learn more about actually working as a
servant leader in my own life.

[Learning new ideas]

[Initial plan to apply new concepts]

Week 3, Date: October 29, 2017

This week I learned about leadership styles and created my own video on GoAnimate. I
had a lot of fun with the video, because I chose to do it about transactional leadership. In a
transactional leadership relationship, both the boss and the employee have a give and take
relationship. The employee does what the boss says for a reward. The video was a fun
assignment!

[Assignment description]
[fun]

I also worked on the literature review. This week I called one of my friends who is an
ESL teacher in the Fayette County Schools. After I heard her talk about her experiences
and some of the changes she wanted to make in her classroom, I decided to change the
focus of my advocacy project. Instead of doing my project in a special needs classroom, I
will now focus on ESL classrooms and the form of assessment that teachers in the local
school district have to use. My friend told me that she has students of all different levels of
English speaking ability. She said she has to use a specific type of assessment with her
students, and it is not a good test. The test uses nonsense words, and types of information
that they would not be familiar with after only having a limited time learning English. As a
result of using this kind of test, it is hard for her to accurately measure her students
progress. I feel strongly that her students should have access to useful testing materials so
that she can best support them, and want to make this topic the focus of my advocacy
project. My articles for the literature review were all about this topic, too.

[First step toward interview]

[Change of advocacy topic]
[Identified problem to work on]
[Personal goals and passions now align with project]

Week 4, Date: November 4, 2017

This week I posted to the discussion board to let my classmates know that I had changed
my advocacy topic. I had wanted to stick to one topic for the whole project, but decided
that it would be better to change to a topic that I could actually complete during the class.
My classmates were very encouraging, and were happy for me that I was able to narrow
my project focus. I noticed that some of them had also started with a general idea, and
were able to focus more on individual cases or specific locations instead.

[Description of discussion board post]

[Supportive peer feedback]
[Other peers experiencing similar process]

As I worked on my interview guide, I started to get excited to spend some time with my
friend, the ESL teacher. I called her and asked if I could also observe her classroom and
spend some time there before the interview. She said yes! So we scheduled a date for next
week, and I will have the opportunity to spend time in her classroom on Monday morning.
Im looking forward to exercising some of the skills I learned through watching Katie
Courics interview skills video, and am also glad to spend time in a classroom again. I
really enjoy being with kids and getting to watch them learn. One of my favorite moments
is seeing a kid understand a new concept, which I hope to experience on Monday!

[Personal passions involved in assignment]

[Application of course concepts to assignment]
[Conceptualization of interview and observation time]

Week 5, Date: November 13, 2017

This week I was inspired as I read over the powerpoint lecture and noticed that there are
a very wide variety of communities of practice. I had never thought about the fact that a
community of practice could be the parents who hang around a soccer game while their
child plays, or a group of gang members. The quote from slide 4 made me realize that I am
a part of many different communities of practice all at the same time. I got to write in the
discussion board about some communities of practice that I will be a part of someday in my
future job. When I work at a school, I will be a part of a community of practice. I also
found some examples of communities of practice for ESL teachers. One of them is an adult
education program, which one of my friends works at. She teaches English to adults of all
different language and ethnic backgrounds. I hope to spend time with her at her job one
day, too.

[Learning new ideas]

[Learning affects my understanding of my own world]
[Example of a friend who is committed to supporting a community]

I also got to spend a couple hours at my friend Gingers school this morning! The
experience was great. I have a lot of respect for Ginger and what she does on a daily basis.
As the schools only full time ESL teacher, her days are packed full. She has kids from
every grade level, kindergarten through 5th-grade. She pulls out groups of kids, as many
as ten at a time, who are all working on their English and can be at widely different levels
of understanding. She also pushes in to a 4th-grade math class, which she told me is not
the ideal hour, but is the only time she can get with the 4th-graders. Ginger really cares
about the parents of her students, and wants all the teachers at her school to know that just
because a childs parents dont speak English doesnt mean they dont care about their
students and really want to support their son or daughter. Ginger also speaks Spanish, and
had the chance to translate a parent-teacher conference recently. She told me that the
general classroom teacher had a positive experience during the conference, and could see
that the childs parents really did want to help them succeed. Ginger wants to make a
difference in a much greater way than just with her students, and it inspired me to spend
time with her. I want to be an ESL teacher like Ginger after I graduate.

[Description of interview and observation time]

[Respect for teacher]
[Commitment to supporting people leads to changed mindsets and attitudes]

Week 6, Date: November 16, 2017

This week, I plan to put together the information Ive learned from my research and my
observation hours in Gingers classroom. I want to understand more about the forms of
assessment that Ginger uses, and to do some brief research to find out about other options
that are available to teachers. Then, I plan to write a letter to the school district
superintendent, to inform him or her of the situation and to ask for support in adding
materials to the assessment curriculum. It is my hope that this form of advocacy
speaking up when I notice that something could be changed for the better will impact
Gingers students and many ESL students in my local school district. This will also be
good life experience for me as I learn how to speak up for my future students, and as I start
to make connections with school district personnel in my area. Im looking forward to
learning more about my advocacy topic and to finishing the course out strong!

[Culminating project plan]