Reflection #1

After reading The Early Catastrophe, I too believe that the first three years of a child's life is the most important time frame to learn a language. I have always been under the impression that genetics and socio-economic status have a strong correlation with a person's overall intelligence, but I was still surprised when I read the outcomes of Betty Hart and Todd Risley's research.  The part that truly surprised me was the ratio or praise and prohibition that children of the three distinct subcategories of the SES experienced in their homes. Provided that the researcher's extrapolation of their data is correct, the alarming rate of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements for child on welfare should raise red flags to parents. We need to be very careful about how we interact with children at such a young age! All children learn to talk and act properly in any household, but we have seen that there are certain trends that will have a more positive effect on a child's vocabulary than others.

The article Reading Supports for All is full of useful advice for helping ELL students. As teachers, it is our responsibility to identify the needs of our students, support the students as they develop and apply their new knowledge, and for us to evaluate their mastery of the new knowledge. Therefore, if we have an ELL student (or any student who is performing below level in a content area) we must tailor our instruction to help meet the student's needs. This is not to say that we will just half the work load because the student is unable to read as much as the other students. Instead, we select an appropriate amount of work that still encompasses the key concepts that we want our students to gain at the end of an exercise. It is not that an ELL student is less smart than a student who is proficient at English. In fact, the ELL student may be using a much more complex thought process to read in a non-native language; however, the ELL student may just need a little more SRE's to help learn the skills that a native English speaker might pick up faster.

Lastly, after reading chapter 7 in Subjects Matter the phrase classroom environment has a new level of importance in my mind. From my personal experiences in the classroom (both as a student and as an instructor), I have noticed that a class is much more productive when there is a positive classroom environment. When students have autonomy in their classroom, they feel appreciated as a person with opinions. If they are under the impression that the instructor does not care about them, they are much more likely to shut off which leads to no learning taking place. Therefore, by implementing some of the strategies that are listed in chapter 7, we can have our students feel safe to take a risk to learn something new. Moreover, the more often we can incorporate activities such as a Jigsaw presentation or different stations around the round we are also increasing each student's individual accountability for his or her own learning, which was always our end goal.