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Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 1

Linking Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) Strategies to the Close of the Achievement Gap

John Parker November 29, 2012 University of Washington

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 2

What constitutes an effective teaching lesson? Should emphasis be placed more upon the purpose or target of the lesson, the degree of student engagement in the task, or are both required in synchronicity to provide the greatest degree of learning efficiency? Moreover, what instructional strategies are linked with closing the achievement gap? Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) represents a method of constructing a unit of instruction around a content topic that accesses effective strategies for English Language Learners (ELLs) to acquire the English language. Research on the holistic impact these strategies have on language acquisition for ELLs is still being complete, but the impact of individual GLAD strategies is shown to increase English language capacity in ELL students if done effectively. The question follows; do these strategies positively impact the academic achievement of ELL students and other populations in the class in which they are used? Specifically, when GLAD strategies are used, does the achievement data of non-white populations improve thus narrowing or closing the achievement gap in the process? The purpose of this writing is to connect the teaching components within an observed lesson of a GLAD-trained teacher and support the claim that these strategies close the achievement gap. The Classroom and Setting Rachel Smith is a 5th grade teacher at Sunrise Elementary in the Puyallup School District and there are 29 students in her class. The student population is approximately 50% free and reduced lunch, and 23 are white. Rachel began working at Sunrise this year, and has spent time moving from programs and different teaching positions to land a 5th grade position at Sunrise. In the past, Rachel taught 5th grade and was an ELL elementary specialist who, last year, completed her Tier III certification as a Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) trainer after eighteen months of training along with three other fellow Puyallup elementary school teachers.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 3 The lesson occurred from 10:05 am to10:50 in the morning on Wednesday, November 14, 2012. As I walked into the classroom, teacher and students were transitioning to the next lesson. Desks were grouped in pods of four and classroom was bustling with activity. Rachel was moving around the classroom but staying close to the front. The class of 16 females and 13 males was busy completing tasks and exchanging items in preparation for the next lesson. I have observed Rachels classroom before, and she frequently states her belief that all students can learn. GLAD strategies, she believes, are a large part of engaging all students in the classroom; and among her core beliefs, Rachel believes that GLAD strategies are the best common denominator to providing language to students new to the English language while simultaneously providing effective instruction to students already fluent in English. There are two students who are ELL on her roster, one ELL student in the other 5th grade classroom, and 25 ELL students in the school of 551 students. Teacher created posters line her classroom walls in an organized fashion. The teaching station is close to her desk, and two computer stations which appear to serve as an intervention stations are on the opposite side of the classroom. A free exchange of conversation occurs between Rachel and her students. The students within Rachels class have the following achievement results from their 4th grade year. % Meeting Reading Standard 72 50 85 73 % Meeting Writing Standard 56 20 68 58 % Meeting Math Standard 52 33 82 52

Group White Non-White Non-Low Income Low Income

In her previous assignment of teaching 27, 5th grade students at Brouillet Elementary, achievement from state assessment data among the same cohort of students over a two-year period was as follows.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 4 22 of 27 Cohort Students in 4th Grade White Non-White Non-Low Income Low Income % Meeting Reading Standard 60 50 66 66 % Meeting Writing Standard 40 25 58 31 % Meeting Writing Standard Not assessed Not assessed Not assessed Not assessed % Meeting Science Standard Not assessed Not assessed Not assessed Not assessed % Meeting Science Standard 94 64 84 75 % Meeting Math Standard 36 50 57 43 % Meeting Math Standard 69 50 63 56

27 Cohort % Meeting Students in Reading Rachels 5th Standard Grade Classroom White 75 Non-White * 55 Non-Low Income 63 Low Income 75 *11 non-white students

Narrative of teacher and student interactions During this lesson, Rachel begins by asking students to join her on the carpet upon calling out a signal word. The signal word is Organism. The teacher states the signal word and students immediately restate the signal word followed by saying, Its alive, and moving quietly and quickly to the carpet in the front of the room. Rachel then states students are going to look at the story they have been reading and complete the story map graphic organizer that is taped to the front wall. Rachel also stands in front of a large green hand-crafted poster that appears to have been created previously for this lesson depicting several animals. Under each picture of each animal, a separate label is placed next to each picture naming the animal. Rachel references the poster and indicates the poster is a reflection of the story they are currently reading. Rachel then identifies two students, Marley and Justin, to be the two monitors today. She asks the class what behaviors the monitors will be looking for. The class in unison says good listening and problem-solving skills. Rachel responds, Very good. She then re-directs the students to the green poster and the white poster that has stacked empty boxes and the title, Story Map, is at the top. Rachel asks the students, What is the setting? Several students raise their hand and Rachel calls upon Johnny to answer the question. Johnny answers Its a place where the story occurs and Rachel responds, Very good. The teacher writes the forest into the white poster under the empty Setting box. Then,

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 5 Rachel asks for the characters, and more students raise their hands to answer the question. Rachel then says, Who are the characters of the story?, waits for a moment, and requests Heads-together. Students immediately turn to the person next to them and begin stating the characters of the story. Rachel asks for their attention after two minutes of student discussion. Students take longer to quiet down. Rachel puts her finger to her mouth indicating students to be quiet and waits. Students quiet down very quickly. Rachel asks, What are the characters?, and a student calls out park ranger, Rachel responds, Yes. Another student raises their hand, Rachel selects this student and the student responds with a farmer. Rachel pauses and asks the student if by stating farmer, whether or not they are making an inference. The student says that all the tasks the person is doing in the story are related to farming. Rachel appears to think for a moment, and responds, I suppose that could be true; however she does not write it on the story map. Then Rachel transitions to the next portion of the story map, which are labeled main events. She states, There are events that happen in a story, we have to put the events in our story into five main events. She then describes what the term, main event means. She then asks them to put heads together to describe the main events of this story. Students, once again, turn to the person sitting next to them and all students are talking to another student. One group has three students in it and all three students take turns explaining their answer. Rachel raises her hand, and the students quiet down quickly again. She asks for the first main event in the story, and a student states: went in search of food for his family but the rattlesnake took the rat. Rachel affirms this response and writes it into the story map. Rachel asks for main event two, and several student hands go up. Rachel selects one student to respond, and that student says the park ranger yells at him. One student is up and going to the back of the room, apparently following a procedure that appears to be the process for going to the restroom. The student completes the task, and exits the room. While this is in progress, Rachel asks for student input to complete the remaining two events and she enters them on the story map. The students continue to remain in the front of the room on the carpet while Rachel moves back and forth between the story map and the green animal diagram. Rachel then asks students to describe the resolution of this story; and once again, requests that students put heads-together to do so. All students appear to be engaged in the heads-together activity.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 6 After a moment of pair-share, Rachel brings students back together, asks for the resolution; however, the response is somewhat inaudible (for me), but Rachel records the response on the story map. Rachel thanks the students for their input asks the scout, Alyssa, to identify two students who earn an award for making good decisions or being a problem-solver. Saje, the other student scout is asked about awarding a student. Students are quiet and looking at both Alyssa and Saje as they select students. Rachel then points to the wall containing a poster of a chant (singing poem aimed teaching vocabulary in context). She asks students to help her once again sing the chant. Teacher and students both sing the chant together. For the next task, Rachel tells students they will be creating sentences using the sentence strips. Students will work to develop a sentence then sing their sentence to the teacher when she comes around. Students are expected to start after she says the signal word. Rachel says the signal word, Organism. Students respond by also saying Organism along with Its alive, organism. Then, they all move back to their tables. Rachel distributes five words that contain the five parts of speech. She appears to draw on the students understanding of a poster at the front and side of the classroom for reference. The poster lists columns for nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, adjectives, and adverbs. Students move back to their desks and into their groups and quickly work in groups constructing a sentence with the sentence strips given by the Rachel. In about four minutes, Rachel asks for students attention by raising her hand. Students quiet down and turn their attention up front. Student groups are called upon to sing their chant. Groups sing their chants when called upon. After the students chant their sentence, Rachel asks each group, How do you know the sentence is right? Students respond to the teacher to discuss why the song is correct and then one person goes to the board to give their team the points. In some cases, Rachel asks the question, Is it correct?, and the students in the group simply respond, yes. Rachel then moves on to the next group. A student from each group goes to a poster in the classroom to give their team points for an appropriate response. One of the groups use the term, photosynthesis in their sentence chant and Rachel responds after the chant by asking students to use their hands and clap to determine the number of syllables.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 7 Rachel then asks for students to engage in the trading game where each group must work together and cooperate to trade sentence strips. She explains that groups will trade to get the items you need. She says one rule is that no one can read up-side-down., and when you are trading, she cannot hear I do not have a blue or a purple. She clarifies that she should hear, I need a prep phrase, and this should be what I hear. Rachel then indicates students will move back up front to the carpet upon hearing the signal word. She says the signal word and students do not say the word in unison. Rachel says that was terrible, and that it hurts her science heart. She repeats the signal word again, and students move to the front of the room. Rachel then transitions to science with a pictorial on Ecosystem of the desert. She holds up yellow sentence strips that include phrases and vocabulary for the story she is about to tell. She gives students yellow strips and asks students to put up yellow terms on the chart as she describes aspects of the story chart. She begins the story narrative and periodically, a student will stand from sitting on the floor, approach the story chart, and place the yellow strip onto the story chart under the appropriate image within the chart. The yellow strips placed all seem to correlate to the narrative Rachel read to the students. After she is done with the narrative and the strips have all been placed, she commends the students on the work they did with the appropriate placements of the yellow strips. She then, indicates that they are going to read from one of the new Journeys reader books and will need to take those books out. This concluded the portion of the lesson I observed. Interpretation of lesson Likely, when an achievement gap exists in student achievement data within a classroom, all students are not learning. If students are not learning, they are not being afforded powerful learning opportunities (Fink, 2011). In utilizing these powerful learning opportunities, the purpose or instructional goals are should be clear and reflect classroom expectations consistent with the standards students are expected to learn at the appropriate grade level (Danielson, 2006; Fink, 2011; Marzano, 2001). Furthermore, these

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 8 expectations should be the same for all students in the classroom. Next, the effective use of culturallyrelevant teaching practices engages students from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and gives students deeper context and relevance to the academic content (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Finally, each lesson must engage each learner with strategies that align to the instructional outcomes and challenge student thinking (Danielson, 2006). One of the key assumptions within the Danielson instructional framework is that instructional decisions are purposeful; and activities and assignments are not chosen merely because they are fun, they are selected or designed because they serve the instructional goals of the teacher, as guided by the students' interests and strengths (Danielson, 2006). Danielson (2006) clarifies that in her framework, the purpose of the lesson is central and that instructional goals must be valuable and suitable to the students. Within Rachels lesson, the purpose was not completely clear. Though Rachel may have mentioned the task, she did not cite a learning target or lesson objective either verbally or in written form, nor did she mention to students the value of the task or convey the importance of creating a story map. While this lesson appeared to be in the middle of a larger unit, writing a learning target provides clear purpose to the lesson. Specifically, are students learning about setting, characters, main events, and resolution for the first time or is this activity solely an instructional strategy supporting multiple opportunities students have experienced about identifying these elements within a story? Given these learning objectives are not 5th grade expectations, it would appear Rachel is using an instructional strategy aimed at helping students identify these critical components. Based upon student responses and the number of students raising their hand after she asks for these components, I am inclined to speculate Rachel uses these GLAD strategies on an ongoing basis to reinforce how students can accurately determine the setting, characters, main events, and resolution of the story. To gain a better understanding of this, however, knowing the full context of when the story map was introduced and when students initially learned these components would be helpful.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 9 Indirectly, some evidence exists in the lesson supporting the statement that all students are expected to learn at high levels. On several occasions during the lesson, most, if not all, students were engaged in identifying setting, the characters, and the main events through another GLAD strategy called, Headstogether. Rachel commonly used this instructional strategy and its use provided an opportunity for each student to equally engage vocally to the questions by the teacher. This notable English language acquisition strategy, which promotes vocabulary and contextual vocal practice for English Language Learners (ELLs), is also a research-based strategy since it involves peer-to-peer feedback. Providing effective feedback is a strategy demonstrating some of the highest effect size on student achievement according to John Hattie and his meta-analyses (Hattie, 2008). What is unclear however, is whether each student understands the key targets of the lesson with this strategy. One question for Rachel would be the evidence she uses when listening to student dialogue during heads-together sessions and the extent her use of peer-to-peer feedback is effective to monitor whether each student understands, each student is acquiring English, or both.

Using GLAD strategies like heads-together, sentence structure posters, chants, story maps, and interactive posters, are intentionally used to help ELLs acquire English. However, Danielson would call these strategies valuable and suitable to the students. Equally important, they represent culturally relevant teaching practices. Ladson-Billings (1994) identifies culturally relevant practices when students are apprenticed in a learning community rather than taught in an isolated and unrelated way. Another culturally relevant practice includes opportunities for teachers and students to participate in a broad conception of literacy that incorporates both literature and oratory (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Rachels inclusion of all students into this oratory community exercise certainly engaged all students judging from the level of engagement through the 45-minute period.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 10 In closing, the GLAD strategies used by Rachel were culturally relevant to students, employed the use of multiple learning modalities, and engaged all learners. Based upon state assessment data from Rachels assignment at Brouillet, the achievement gap between white and non-white students did not close and actually widened; but for students of poverty, the gap in writing and science closed somewhat and a negative gap for reading occurred. In that same classroom though, state assessment scores rose for all subgroups in one year indicating the strategies potentially made a positive impact on student achievement. In this case, I would ask why the white students are improving at a greater rate than the non-white students, even if all the students are improving. Diving deeper, non-white students who were proficient in 4th grade were also proficient in 5th grade, while the non-white students who were not proficient in 4th grade tended to not be proficient in 5th grade. In some instances, non-proficient non-white students improved their performance though they did not meet proficiency levels indicating that perhaps the GLAD strategies Rachel uses throughout the year did positively impact the white-nonwhite gap. Perhaps writing and continually referring all students to a learning target or objective throughout the year might enhance Rachels lessons by making the instructional outcomes clearer. Or, Rachel may want to alter her use of checking for understanding after a heads-together strategy to ensure each student understood how to structure a sentence or use a graphic organizer to identify the setting, characters, and events. Marzano (2001) cites the use of graphic organizers or representations as a classroom strategy that works; however, the use of organizers as well as other high-impact GLAD strategies are only effective if these strategies and the classroom strategies tie directly to how students meet the instructional outcomes.

GLAD strategies provide the powerful learning opportunities in the classroom and engage all learners. Explicitly connecting those opportunities to a clear lesson outcome or target is equally important, otherwise those activities are only tasks for students to complete void of a clear rationale for their use. Achievement data in this GLAD classroom suggests that these opportunities are positively impacting student learning and closing the gap based on poverty; however, a gap between white and non-white

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 11 students persists. Next steps would be a deeper analysis of how the lessons purpose is supported by these power learning opportunities and how this teachers high expectations are verbalized and modeled to students so every student understands their role in learning the material.

Running Head: LINKING GUIDED LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DESIGN (GLAD) STRATEGIES TO THE CLOSE OF THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP 12 Bibliography Danielson, C. (2006). Enhancing Professional Practice (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Fink, S. M., A. (2011). Leading for Instructional Improvement. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Hattie, J. (2008). Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievment. New York, NY: Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). Culturally relevant teaching Dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children (pp. 102-126). San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D.J., & Pollack, J.E. (2001). Classroom Instruction that Works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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