I've been thinking about my practicum hours a lot lately, and I've really been focusing on all of the strategies that are being implemented in the classroom. I truly believe that all of these strategies are excellent and that the students will be able to apply them in the ESL class, but more importantly they will be able to really apply them when they get into their 'regular' classes. The only thing that I noticed is that the students have to do so on their own and they are not guided on how to use them in their other classes. Because obviously in the 'regular' classes, the teachers do not place the emphasis on using any given strategy to achieve the learning material, but rather they present the material and expect the children to find their own independent ways/strategies to contextualize it, learn it and apply it. I observe in the classroom of a "co-taught" science class, in which my co-op is present in the classroom and catering to the 6 ESL student's needs. To describe what I mean by 'catering to the ESL students needs', I mean that she is walking around the room making sure that they understand the task at hand, or making sure that they are caught up on their project that is due. However, I do not see the teacher making extra handouts with much needed vocabulary for them, or differentiating the worksheets/homework to make them more understandable to the students' low English proficiency. More importantly, and focusing on strategies, I do not see the ESL teacher providing examples of how to take the strategies which they learn in their ESL classroom and apply them to the science class. Therefore I question the effectiveness of the students learning such strategies, since they only learn how to apply them in their ESL classroom readings and activities. This means that the students need to take an independent role of deciding how to apply the strategies they learn to the material in their 'regular' classrooms.
Also, as we have discussed in class, just because a student is presented how to use a certain strategy, does not mean that the strategy works best for them. Rather, I believe the goal of implemented strategies is to expose the students to different ways of learning and understanding material. This means that the student has to make an independent decision on which strategies that they wish to use in their regular classrooms. For this reason, I believe that content-to-strategy is really effective because it provides the students with different content, new vocabulary, and an opportunity to choose which strategy they wish to apply to achieve the learning goal. Wherease strategy-to-content, they are forced to use the strategy that they are learned and apply it to the content. I believe that in the beginning, it is okay to teach using the strategy-to-content approach because you can make sure that the student understands completely how to apply the strategy correctly. However, I believe that once the students have established a solid base of knowledge about numerous strategies that the teaching approach should change to content-to-strategy so that the students can take a more independent role in deciding which strategy works best for the task at hand. I really liked the article that talked about the ESL class where they did science experiments and constructed paper planes, but they were constantly asked which strategy they thought was needed to be used while learning the material. I think that this is important because the students need to learn how to be independent in making choices about which strategy they should use, since they are not told which strategies to use in their 'regular' classroom. This is what I see in my clinical observations. The teacher teaches the strategy in the ESL classroom, but outside the classroom the students need to know how to use the strategies and which works best in x situation, etc on their own.
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