Transcript

ANNE MARIE FOERSTER LUU

I was honored when a teacher would come and say, I’m doing this lesson today. How do I make this make sense to my students? And then she might go, oh, well, why can’t I do that for all my kids? And all that I’ve done is weave in the language objective with the content objective.

So that’s advocating on a very quiet and incremental basis. I think that ESOL teachers, if given the platform, should feel comfortable helping people discuss data in the school and how data is not always the full picture for an ESOL student. We have to have data. It doesn’t always give us good feelings when we get the data. But there’s reasons why the data reflects what it does. And having that critical conversation with school leadership is important.

Another thing is at the high school level, we have so many other teachers that interact with English learners. Helping them feel confident working with English learners I think is important. I’ve only been teaching for one year in high school. But in middle school, they felt comfortable working with English learners because it was an open conversation. It wasn’t a, those are your kids. It was a shared accountability. It was what can we do together to help these students?

I think that when teachers feel success with their English learners, they want more. It’s like a piece of candy. When you are successful with some of your harder students to teach, it feels good when you’re successful. So if you can reach out and find people to help you be successful, you’ll enjoy it more.

SPEAKER

It’s great.

ANNE MARIE FOERSTER LUU

And the kids will benefit.