On this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, Jessica is joined by EB Academics' Curriculum Writer, Pat, and together they dive into an innovative use of ChatGPT for your middle school classroom! Pat presents this engaging concept by explaining how you can use ChatGPT to generate task cards that are fantastic to use with your students who seem to always finish their assignments early! They showcase the ease with which you can tailor your task cards to different types of learners and how simple they can be to create with the help of AI. You'll learn how to create task cards that are flexible to meet the diverse needs of your students while fostering creativity and engagement in the classroom. With practical tips and insights, Jessica and Pat demonstrate how ChatGPT can enhance lesson planning and student learning experiences, making it a valuable tool for educators seeking to boost their efficiencies and support student growth.
Get ready for an exceptionally helpful episode!
Are you enjoying the podcast?
Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave us a review! To leave a review in iTunes, click HERE by scrolling down our show page, selecting a star rating, and tapping “Write a review.” Let us know how this podcast is helping you in your ELA classroom!
On this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, Jessica is joined by EB Academics' Curriculum Writer, Pat, and together they dive into an innovative use of ChatGPT for your middle school classroom! Pat presents this engaging concept by explaining how you can use ChatGPT to generate task cards that are fantastic to use with your students who seem to always finish their assignments early! They showcase the ease with which you can tailor your task cards to different types of learners and how simple they can be to create with the help of AI. You'll learn how to create task cards that are flexible to meet the diverse needs of your students while fostering creativity and engagement in the classroom. With practical tips and insights, Jessica and Pat demonstrate how ChatGPT can enhance lesson planning and student learning experiences, making it a valuable tool for educators seeking to boost their efficiencies and support student growth.
Get ready for an exceptionally helpful episode!
Are you enjoying the podcast?
Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave us a review! To leave a review in iTunes, click HERE by scrolling down our show page, selecting a star rating, and tapping “Write a review.” Let us know how this podcast is helping you in your ELA classroom!
All right, teachers, it is time to talk about a gem of an episode for today's podcast. So you'll hear Jessica welcome back our curriculum writer, pat, and together they introduce you to another member of our EB team, jay. Now, jay is fantastic at ensuring that what we create at EB has all of the support needed for every level of learner that you might have in your classroom. So Jay puts together adaptations for our materials. That includes adaptations for English language learners. So it is very special to have him joining us on the podcast today and he's going to just have this great conversation, as you guys listen in, with Jessica and Pat, all about creating effective and practical adaptations in your lessons to better support your students at every level. So this is just again, one of those gem of an episodes. Hope you love it and if you do, please let us know over on Instagram so that we can hear from you and just your thoughts and ideas around just bringing new voices and perspectives to the podcast.
Speaker 1:All right, you guys, let's go ahead and tune in. Hi there, caitlin here. Our mission at EB academics is simple Help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks and genuine support so that you can become the best version of yourself, both inside and outside of the classroom. So if you think you might be ready to try something new, because you know you simply cannot continue the way that you have been that, I'd invite you to take a moment to check out the EB teachers club, the writing program or the EB Grammar program by visiting the links in the description of the podcast. We hope to continue to support you within one of our programs in the future and in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast each week.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome back to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. So Pat and I are back with you today and we actually have a special guest. We have Jay Watson with us and he is a team member on EB and Pat and he actually used to work together. So I'm so excited to hear what you two have to say. But Jay is coming to talk to us all about what you need to know about effective adaptations for ELLs and students in special education. So welcome to the podcast, jay. We are excited to have you here and I'd love it if you just kind of give some background information about yourself.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you, jessica. Good morning Pat. It's great to see everybody and, yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It's very exciting.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I've taught special education in the high school setting for six years, for the most part in resource room and co-taught settings, but I've also led general education courses.
Speaker 3:But first, my first four years were teaching in Michigan alongside Pat. For the last two of those years we were co-teaching together, so we were able to connect for those two years, which was great. But a lot of those first four years were in the resource room and then co-teaching. And then the last couple of years my wife and I moved to Chicago where I took a job to do some co-teaching but also ended up taking on the general education course to myself, just based off of teachers having to leave and other jobs. So that was like a middle of the year type of thing, which was a lot of fun. It was an interesting transition to have to kind of like switch mid-year, but I really really happy to have taken that on because it was, I think it really helped become the teacher that I'm going to take it to be today. Really good to try and, yeah, just a lot of different things which have been great.
Speaker 2:And now we are so lucky and happy to have you on the team creating our support lessons for our teachers, and I really think that's been a game changer. So if you're an EB teachers club member and you've noticed that our issues and our resources now include those support lesson plans, that's all, jay, offering the ideas, the tips, the tricks, the accommodations, like everything in there, so we hope you're utilizing those. So thank you, jay, for your diligent work on all of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and thank you, pat, for looking me up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, worked out, huh.
Speaker 3:Yeah, flattered yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, we were like anyone who Pat recommends, we're like. We know we're going to like him.
Speaker 4:When I heard that we were looking for someone in special education to help us with supports, my first thought was everyone could have Jay as a co-teacher. If I asked him to come and write these supports because when I'm looking at all these support, ideas like our time in the classroom just comes back to me because I'm just thinking these are all the things that Jay would be doing while I was teaching that I would be forgetting to do.
Speaker 4:I think those ideas on the boards are helping with those small groups and those little things that you forget to do when you're in the middle of all of the action. You know.
Speaker 2:Well, that makes me think, Pat, can you kind of explain the situation of what your classroom was like when you and Jay were co-teaching together, just so listeners have an idea of that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I'll let Jay jump in too. It would totally depend on the day, but Jay and I would kind of we would talk about what the week would look like and also what the day would look like, and then I would kind of come up and do like the quick mini lesson or whatever you know little bit of instruction that kids would need. In the beginning we tried to avoid like long lectures and things like that, but whatever little thing the students needed, jay would jump in with whatever support. I was missing writing, like if I was asking the students the question, he would write the question on the board. If students were giving responses, he would write the responses on the board. He would organize the information, you know, give the visuals, so the students would have the visuals there and things like that.
Speaker 4:And then when we would do group work, he would oftentimes take a small group and work with them.
Speaker 4:They were not always the special ed students that he would take with him. He would take what he would call his students, which would be his caseload of students but also any students who wanted help. So I don't even think I mean, obviously the students who were on his caseload knew that they were, but not everyone in the class even knew who was on his caseload, because so many students got help from him that were not Really. And I think that's important also to think about as people are listening to this podcast is that the things that are helping your special ed students and that are helping your ELL students are also helping your general ed students. So all the supports that Jay was giving to the students in special education, they were helping the entire classroom. All of the kids were benefiting from the visual aids that he was giving them, the small group help that he was giving them, any ideas that he had for special handouts or graphic organizers, and all of that stuff. It helps everybody.
Speaker 4:So you don't have anyone in your classroom who has special needs currently. I mean listen anyway, because this will be very helpful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think that was the. I think the big thing that worked well with you and I, pat, when we worked together is, yeah, we managed to find a flow pretty early on and I think you, you know, you definitely had your classroom established when I came into code teach. So you had, you know, you had your plans, you had the big picture set up, I think, and that allowed me to obviously see what you had and we could. We could work off of each other and I think a lot of what I was able to do was just anticipate where, I mean, students might need that support, right, and I think that was huge, which you and I and the visuals are something that I I mean that's how I like to learn, so I think that's why I pushed it a lot, but students really grasp on the different type of things as well. I think we're gonna get into a lot more of that that you just mentioned. Certainly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, that being said, I mean it sounded like you guys had a great dynamic in the classroom and how cool for your students. But, jay, like how did you come up with, then, the strategies that you used to assess these students? Like, how did you decide, okay, what accommodations are appropriate for each particular student?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you could be. You take a lot of different approaches and everyone certainly is different. I think you latch on to what you think is like who you are as an educator and I guess you essentially establish your own routine of finding that. I guess that path. I'm a little jumbled right now, sorry, but really I look at all facets like how's your bill work? You know, what parts of the lesson are they engaging throughout the day, what portions are they grasping on to more effectively and where are they struggling, and I think a lot of that.
Speaker 3:I was able to find success in how I was able to present purposeful prompts when it came to writing, being very intentional on the questions that's being asked, but also how I formatted assignments. I was lucky enough to be a co-teacher with another educator starting at our high school that I taught with Pat and he had a really incredible set of vocabulary worksheets and I think you can actually buy these just via Amazon. It's like a book called 1000 SAT Vocabulary Words that you need to know and essentially it was a worksheet that had like five new vocab words a day and these were all you know with high school. These are all very. These are words essentially that you would encounter on an SAT type, you know, or something like that. So the essential task was to you identify these words. You're breaking them down to their parts of speech. So nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, how do those function, how do they relate to each other contextually, their meanings, their definitions, and then you get to actually to see how they put in play, because you do some fill in the blank with sentences. So the worksheets themselves were kind of multifaceted and you're able to just by kind of you know, monitoring the room and working the room where students were showing success.
Speaker 3:So Billy might have been really really sad on his parts of speech. He can identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, without you know, without skipping a beat. He might not be so successful at finding out what these definitions of the words are contextually because he didn't do so well in the fill in the blanks. So you can kind of use that as a kind of sipping off one Cause. Those are all very, you know, very necessary skills to have and they really grow into the primary skills that we're trying to teach this language arts teacher. I think when you're able to establish, like, what skills you're really trying to focus on, you can really begin to make a huge difference because that starts going into what's in your routine. I think the routine is what really is a huge film. But as far as assessing students, I think that's really the big key for me was adding kind of multifaceted assignments, being personal about the questions you're asking and seeing how they respond, outside of the traditional formats of you know. Here's your quiz how you do.
Speaker 3:And I think I remember, pat, you mentioned last episode. No, last episode I listened to about not necessarily everything needs to go into the grade book and things like that. I totally agree, you know. And what opportunities are there? I mean, I remember, give those students any opportunity they possibly can to read or write something and if it goes in, great. If not, then use it as an opportunity to see just how they're doing Check in. I think that's just still important to do, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, what I'm hearing you say too, it's like you need to know your students, right, you need to know your skills and then you can build in the differentiation, and I think that's key. Yeah, you don't need to grade everything, but every single thing you're doing in class is a learning opportunity, so we need to give our students those experiences. So it sounds. You started to talk into this like how you could differentiate the instruction, because it probably would be different depending on each student. So if you mentioned this earlier, like you're teaching a lesson and you're a society like, this is what I'm writing on the board, or these are the questions I'm coming up with to support this lesson. Are you doing that on the spot or are you like reading through a text in advance, coming up with support questions like how are you differentiating for students during a lesson?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're absolutely previewing the content before if you want the most success. That's my big belief, because I've certainly done it where I haven't.
Speaker 2:Previewing.
Speaker 3:We all have Right and there it's like yeah, it's so very important because, especially on things that you've read year after year we've all read, I mean Romeo and Julia I say I know that in the back of my hand. But then you read it for the fifth year in a row and suddenly like wow, benvolio said this and this scene, like the message, just like opens this up. That's great. You're always going to find something new, right, and you should always have that idea. You're almost learning along with them because you're shooting to become an expert on the content and that's a huge step. And you could even inform the students Like yeah, guys, I was reading through this last night or the other day and I formulated this question because, you know, not because I've had this in my bank for the past 10 years as a teacher I think if you're able to showcase that you're growing with them, that's really that's the academic greater, showing a huge way. Like wow, mr Watson, he is developing these ideas with us. It's really huge.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think in a way it ties into what you're doing now for EB, right Like you get to preview the content before it goes out to teachers, which is so cool, and that's how you're coming up with all your support ideas. So I would love if you can just share some of those ideas that you're adding onto the lessons, like are they question stems? Are they different ways to group students, whatever that might be? So just any of the modifications you're making or accommodations to give teachers some ideas of what they can do for a lesson.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I will say, in some cases my job's kind of tough because the lessons themselves are already very, very detailed and they offer a lot of supports themselves. I think that's great. So initially I kind of look at what supports are already there. So I don't often find myself, I guess, offering the same idea. But when it comes to that I'm always looking at how can we chunk, chunk whatever reading we're doing for that assignment. What's the most manageable type of piece we can chuck that into in order to deliver that information to the students? I want to try my best to make sure that the whole text is being delivered as much as possible. We want to try to keep that grade level text as in focus as we can. So I think a lot of that just comes with just reminding. When I'm looking at these lessons, I'm looking at those opportunities to where can I remind whoever's doing this lesson? Hey, this is four pages of reading, this is seven paragraphs. Think about stopping every two to three paragraphs, maybe bracket that and just what was going on right here. And I think if you establish that into your routine, your students are going to latch onto that type of process very quickly. I think that's an incredible way to unlock a text from a student read point and once that works, done in the forefront, you kind of, if you have to revert back to the text, those annotations are there waiting for you and it's all very well. I'm thinking about and anticipating where those paragraphs might be and you pay now so you can play later. You do the work up in the future. I think the I'm just kind of a little bit sure. My notes here Offering students, offering opportunities for students to participate, I think it's huge.
Speaker 3:So and giving them different ways to do so. So if it's oftentimes it's raise your hand and you can respond and discuss, but maybe students might be a little nervous, so give them a sticky note. They can write down their response and have them go slap it on the board. Now we're tactile, now we're getting a little more kinetic with how we're learning and stuff, and I mean these are fifth through eighth grade lessons through EB, so I think kids are going to really always get the kick out of that. In the younger standpoint, I think, when it comes to writing, what skills are we trying to measure? I'm really thinking about quality over quantity, especially when it comes to the amount of the amount of counts we're giving them. If we're giving them seven prompts and two of them are comparing contrast, if they can really showcase that first one comparing contrast and do it well, maybe they don't necessarily have to do the next one and then we can focus on all the other skills that are being looked at and that's fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love what you're saying here, because I'm just thinking like, whether it's an EB lesson or a lesson from a textbook or whatever, I feel like so often at least I did this as a teacher I follow what's there. If there were four questions, I gave four questions and it's like this is almost encouraging, forcing you whatever to stop and say you know what do I need to do it that way, just because that's what the lesson plan says. So I love that, pat, you brought it up earlier. But it's like now everyone, if you're an EB teacher, a school member, you have Jay on your side helping you, saying try these things out or consider this, and the teacher doesn't have to use that brain power because they're already probably a little scattered in class, there's a lot going on, but now they can say, oh yeah, I could chunk these questions or I could eliminate this one, and I think it's just like it stops us and it causes us to refocus on, like what's important in the lesson. So I just love those ideas that you were sharing.
Speaker 3:So thank you. Yeah, it's never too bad to have too much right, and you can always take things away a lot faster than you can develop them on the fly. For sure, it goes back to being intentional, having a good plan in place, which you know. Educators are always trying their best to think about what we could do yesterday, so tomorrow can be so much easier. Always going to be an uphill battle, but I think if you're thinking about that mindset, you're doing a great job.
Speaker 2:For sure. Okay, so my next question was actually about how you collaborated with Pat, but we kind of spoke into that already. So, pat, if you have some questions that you want to ask Jay, I'll turn it over to you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I was just so funny because, like when Jay's talking, I'm just like nodding vigorously as if everyone at home can see what I'm doing. Love it, I just love not over talking.
Speaker 4:Especially when you're talking about, you know, when there's so many questions, yeah, it's okay to delete some questions and not. I was just telling Jessica my son accidentally forgot his math homework the other day and he had two, so he had two times the math homework and it was such a slog last night going through so much math with him and that's not the norm for us, but if that had been the norm, I mean that would have just been. He never would learn it math that way. If that's how we did it every single night, and with some students they will get so much more out of answering three questions really well than six questions, especially if some of those questions are really asking.
Speaker 4:You know a similar skill of students, so you have permission teachers to delete some of those questions for students and you'll have less to look at and they'll have less to write and everybody wins.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, whatever you take out, you can always. It's always in your backpack, it doesn't necessarily go away.
Speaker 4:Yeah, use it like this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'm sorry, pat, I was just going to say I had a as far as like you and I working together and just co-teachers in general.
Speaker 3:I had a couple thoughts of and maybe this kind of goes without saying, but I'm not going to allow me. I think it's just really important to find understanding of who you're working with and how they want to work through them. If you are the special ed teacher going into the room, you know I guess it goes without saying but really be that team player and really establish the flow, have as much discussion as you possibly can, because I think that's where the idea is really really stout and especially when you're stressed out on a particular day, I think you've really got to release that stress and rely on that other teacher. Yeah, and just going back to having a plan, understanding roles, and I think you and I really trust each other. When the torch was passed, I think the idea is like the students don't really know who's the lead. At least that's what I feel like worked for us and I think we saw a lot of success with that. So I'll go back into the class with you again any day.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:If we weren't in the States. Yeah, all right, yeah if you're.
Speaker 4:I mean, not everyone's lucky enough to have a co-teacher, but if you can co-teach I would just highly recommend it. And communication, whether you're co-teaching or not, is just so key. Just a good community of teachers. Find your people for sure.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, let's establish a community.
Speaker 4:All right. So how do you suggest teachers scaffold instruction to help students access grade level content? So, even though a lot of teachers, I think, jump to you know my student is reading at a third grade level but my student is in, say, seventh grade, how do you help them to access the grade level content and participate meaningfully in the classroom activities?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean a lot of. I think a lot of just goes back to a little bit with previewing the text, and that's where you're really you're better able to identify. You know, if we're going to stick to a grade level text, we want to identify that chunk that we can really kind of take a close read at and break down. Perhaps I think that's a really good one. And establishing maybe some rest stops throughout your units where you know you're looking at a grade level text the main text, I should say and then you take a break and you look at something else that's related, I think that's also a good idea because you'll be able to, you know, kind of understand where you're, in a sense, assess where your students are at and with the main and how they perform on the rest stop, I should say the.
Speaker 3:I mean I think the frequent check-ins are huge as much as you can possibly do with students and I think that goes back with, like you know, you're establishing a personal relationship with them. You're really going to see a lot more effectively how they're handling the grade level content and I think they're going to be honest with you whether or not they're getting it, and that's a lot easier to read than just kind of like the nonverbal cues. You want to really establish a comfortable setting and I can't help but push establishing a routine within your day as much as the students can anticipate what's coming, and I think that keeps them ready to go and it keeps them not nervous about what to come, I suppose, and it keeps them more involved and more one with the class and I think that keeps them more engaged in a future work.
Speaker 3:But I think the more intentional you can be when you're previewing those texts, those tougher grade level texts. You know I think that's going to find the most success there, because that's where you're finding the important chunks or the vocab words that you're going to run into that you know students are going to. You know maybe fumble up there going to fumble on and you have to identify those. I think those are. That's always been a huge stepping up point for me.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I know in our class we did a lot of. If it was available, we would show them like little film clips if there was a film of the book, or we would listen to audio. Let them listen to the audio like we would do the read alouds in class. Maybe let them listen to the audio version at home and do those kinds of things. What I really liked about your response is that the kids were still accessing grade level materials. It wasn't one student was reading a fourth grade book while the rest of the class was reading the eighth grade book, that everyone was still reading the same books but just kind of accessing them, maybe in a slightly different way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it's, if you're you know like you can read a whole act of Romeo and Juliet and it's, and it is great and I would love to do that and I do. But I guess in a sense, you kind of got to be realistic and you want to, if that's what you got to keep at the forefront, sure. So now we really got to break down like what are those? I guess, what are those important points that we want to hit?
Speaker 3:And how do we want to, I guess how do we want to format that too when it comes to delivering it. So I always found a lot of success in how I formatted my assignment. It took me a few years, actually, until I got to Chicago when I worked with another teacher, but she did a really good job at taking a small bit of text and just essentially put it up at the table. Here's the text on the left and then blank. It's either blank on the right or, you know, here's a prompt, here's a little cat word. So you're working through the text. It's kind of like a living document and whether you're looking at four paragraphs or writing or one, that's it's a really effective way to break it down and students, I think kind of they're really kind of more easily work with this. That's one way you know that's. I found that formatting assignments and being very intentional of how, what text you're choosing Yep, if it's going, yeah, especially if you want to keep up the rigor. I think that's really important.
Speaker 4:Awesome. How do you create a supportive and inclusive classroom environment for students, while promoting their language development? And cultural proficiency. So this is more for the ELL students side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I mean, your classroom is an extension of you. It's a really it's really important to showcase who you are, but it's also, yeah, it's very important to understand. I think it's important to understand the demographics of your, the school you're teaching into and in Latch on, I think I was, I think, when I first started teaching at the school you and I taught in Michigan, pat I was able to kind of put a, put a print on the room and that it was in. I don't know I'm not sure if you were, if you were in my, my first class or not, but I had a, I don't know, I had a couch in there and stuff. I wanted to make it really comfortable.
Speaker 3:I put out a bunch of like music posters, stuff like that, just to kind of showcase, I guess, who I am. But it was, it was a comfortable learning environment and I wanted to. I felt, I felt super awesome being in there, you know, and I think the kids got that too. I think that's, I think that's really important. Moving on, moving to Chicago, that's, I definitely had to think about my demographic a lot more specifically and with that, I think you, I was able to kind of latch on to what the students were were in tune with a little bit more, because they, they, they were in tune with a little. We were very much a lot.
Speaker 3:We were a lot more different, just straight up. It was a lot more easy to see, but also it was a lot. It was a lot. It was very exciting to embrace those differences and things like that and showcase that in the classroom as well. I think. Think about the small details of what you want your classroom to set up. It's just really important, even down to the lighting. I don't think I ever use the ceiling lighting. If I had the choice not to, I found different ways to set that up. I didn't like it and I found my students didn't. It's just those little things I think you've developed over. Unfortunately, it could take some years and some trial and tribulations. I guess that's the job when we figure out. It's a very trial and error, I suppose. Sometimes you and I I think we established some team building measures in our classroom early on.
Speaker 3:What was it? We had a solo cup thing with rubber bands and we had them big stacks.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they had a stack of cups with rubber bands.
Speaker 2:Just to build that community and that trust.
Speaker 3:Yes, because I think it was senior students, the literature circles. That was. A lot of work was on them.
Speaker 4:A lot of group work and helping them feel comfortable working together and sharing.
Speaker 3:We found different opportunities. We're not going to read through text necessarily. We're going to just see how you guys work together. We've established them before let's get these kids moving.
Speaker 4:Sorry, I was going to say if they can't just work together on a basic level, they're not going to discuss high level texts together. If they can't talk about their day, they're not going to talk about poetry. Yes, exactly, I think we have two more. If we have time for it. How do you monitor the progress of students and adjust accommodations? Adjust the accommodations of the structural strategies based on individual growth and development? I feel like we kind of already touched on that a little bit. Did you have anything more to add on that?
Speaker 3:I'm a young teacher. I look at it one way. I always think about outside of the traditional assessment techniques. I can't help but stress any opportunities, a good opportunity to just see how they're doing. I'm not stressing about putting everything in the grade book. I'm always looking at those individual pieces, going back to how Bell works, doing how they're doing throughout the day and really establishing a personal relationship. I'm a little nervous. I don't know if I'm necessarily answering this super correctly. That's my one perspective of the outside of traditional realms of assessment.
Speaker 2:I think that's totally relatable for teachers. You need to check in with your students. You're going to be changing things as you go. I think what you're sharing is super practical. We appreciate your perspective.
Speaker 3:Thank you, jessica, I appreciate that.
Speaker 4:If I could just add just one thing for ELL that I just take a note of for myself for grading, is that. One thing that helped me a lot for ELL students is when I'm grading their papers. It depends on their level of English proficient I'm having trouble speaking is sticking to when you're grading grammar, punctuation, sticking to one concept at a time when you're grading their papers, because if you have a student who's really struggling with a lot of concepts and you handed back and their paper is just full of red or purple or whatever color ink, it's so overwhelming that they can't zero in on. There's so much to fix that nothing gets fixed, and so I'll tell them. You know I only sit this time.
Speaker 4:We've been working on verb tense. I only marked verb tense on here, I didn't mark anything else and then fix the verb tense and then on the next essay, if your verb tense is great, we work on the next thing. I'm fixing one element at a time. We're gonna work on one organizational component, one grammar component, whatever it is. I find really helps in terms of assessment for students who are learning English.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say, to add on to that too, I like the focus on one thing, pat. And then I'm thinking too in terms of, like, academic discussions for ELL's, like how can we provide sentence stems right, how can we provide a ton of opportunities for conversation, maybe at different levels? Like maybe some students need visuals to support them, or some students are ready for a more academic conversation, and so just like thinking about how can we provide the same content but just adjust it a little bit depending on their needs. All right, do you have one more question, pat, or you do everything?
Speaker 4:Okay, final one is how do you involve students in their own learning process and encourage them to advocate for their academic needs and goals?
Speaker 2:I like this.
Speaker 3:I mean, really you want to ask those honest prompts, right, Like how are you feeling about this text right now? Like we're taking that break in the unit, and maybe that break is scale one to 10, where are we at? And you can, kind of you can choose to pivot or do anything from there, One of the ones I think are super important, and especially when things are going well too, you just keep that established Because then it's just normal. You're doing your check-ins once every one or two weeks or something like that, Because we can just get so easily lost in everything else that we need to do. So, going back to establishing things like that into your routine, and then it's normal, I think you're going to find, you know, just so much success with that, Because your mindset is anticipation. And where can I make that more positive next step? You know, I think that's just super important.
Speaker 2:Love it. So, just to wrap things up, I feel like I have some key takeaways, pat. I don't know if you want to share any as well, but for me it's like know your students, know those skills, and then anticipate how you can address those skills in the lesson. How can you chunk things, how can you break it down, how can you have check-ins. So it sounds like it's a continual process. Right, it's not just ever a one-and-done thing, which we know is, you know, the case in education.
Speaker 2:And then, that being said, like you'll adjust as you go and you have to remember you don't need to do everything, you don't need to grade everything. And I think kind of taking that pressure off of ourselves a little bit is the first step and saying, like anything I'm doing, if I'm aware of, like how can I help my students, is going to be beneficial. I don't have to do everything. And then again, eb teachers, you've got Jay in your back pocket helping you out. Take advantage of those ideas Like they are gold. I mean literally sentence stems that you can write on your board for a lesson, or vocabulary words with definitions that you can pull out of the text for your students. And I think, like Pat said at the beginning, even if you're not teaching in a special education setting, like all of your students are going to benefit from these suggestions, so take advantage of that. So, jay, thank you so much for being here. Pat, I don't know if you want to share any other takeaways that I missed.
Speaker 4:You are the takeaway queen. You mentioned all of them. I think the only thing I mentioned I put on here, is depending on where you teach. We taught in a public school, so depending on where you teach. Also, remember you may have an ELL director or a special director and you may have resources in your school or in your district. So see what resources you have. You may have technology at your fingertips that you don't even know about. So reach out to other teachers in middle school, because you know you talk to your students. Other teachers talk to supervisors and directors. There's so many resources you may not even know about, so reach out for those resources too. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I echo, echo, echo, all of that. I had that written down and skipped it. It was ELL. Yeah, we had an amazing translator in our school, pat my goodness and I was so fortunate to establish that working relationship. You get to understand the students at a much different level. Yes, I think it's so true. You don't necessarily know what you have until you dig for it. You see it in the circle of work part-term.
Speaker 2:Yes, so true. Well, Jay, thank you again for joining us, for taking time out of your day, and thank you for all that you do for EB. We are truly blessed to have you on the team. So, everybody, have a great rest of your week. Bye, wow, thank you.