Podcast on Professional Plan

Katherine Kostner, a language arts and reading teacher, discusses her work with English language learners. She highlights the importance of creating a classroom environment where students feel valued and seen, which she achieves through a diverse curriculum and collaboration with teachers and administrators. Kostner also emphasizes the need to accommodate instruction and assessment for English language learners, focusing on their strengths and providing support through various grouping strategies. Lastly, she stresses the significance of family connections and communication with parents. Hi everyone, this is Katherine Kostner. I'm just going to give a little bit of background information into my work with English language learners. For the past four years I have been a sixth grade language arts and reading teacher at a school where 25% of our population are English language learners who speak Spanish at home. Spanish is the only other language that our English language learners use at home. For the past four years I have had classes with English language learners and them, but for the first time this year I have been fortunate enough to have a ESL teacher who comes in and co-teaches two of my three classes with me. So that has been really great, especially with what I'm learning in this class to be able to use with her. I will start my professional plan with the history of bilingual education and then I'll go into the goals that I have for myself in the classroom. I specifically wanted to highlight that the reform for bilingual education began because of parents advocating for their Spanish-speaking children. We know that from Porter and seeing students' language as an asset and that everybody is different and all our differences make us unique and special is a big theme that I like to focus on in my professional plan and in my teaching as a whole. So going from that, my first goal in my professional plan was to create a classroom and school environment where students feel seen and valued. I do that in a few ways in my class and then also have started to implement a couple of ways after what I've learned in this course. So just as an overview, not to go too deep into it, I have diversified my classroom library with texts from individuals who look like my students, who have had experiences like my students, and just diverse people from all around the world coming from diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences. I ensure that the curriculum I use in my class comes from a diverse group of texts that we read together and analyze together. I also like to collaborate with the teachers and administrators at my school to ensure that all of our Spanish-speaking families feel seen and valued. So those are just some of the ways that I'm working towards making my classroom and school environment be a place where our English language learners feel seen and valued. My second goal would be to accommodate my instruction and assessment for my English language learners. Coming from the Empowering Minority Students text by Cummins, we have seen historically that assessment is inhibiting students from actively participating in their learning by seeing their differences as problems. I believe that we can only see these differences as differences and that everybody's differences make them unique and special and we need to focus on that rather than it as a problem. So I try to see it in that light when I am assessing and providing instruction to my students. I will look at my students' strengths and draw on their strengths during the assessments. So maybe reading the assessment to the students instead of having them read it themselves and then allowing them to give answers verbally instead of having to write them is just one small example of a way that I can do that. And then another way would be through homogeneous groups to focus on specific deficiencies that students have. I could utilize that with my ESL teacher. And then finally heterogeneous grouping, allowing students to use their language skills and be able to work with other peers to work on those skills. And then finally, family connections within the classroom or my school. The most influential people in a student's life are typically their parents and then also the teachers that they have in their life. So just making sure that I'm actively communicating with parents positively and keeping them in the loop as to what is going on and involving parents by asking them to participate in after-school activities. I have loved being a part of this course with you all and I look forward to continuing to learn and service our students better as we continue through our program. Thank you.