This class has impacted my teaching philosophy in several ways. As an aspiring Math teacher, I tend to focus on inspiring students to love and enjoy learning about my content area. After learning more about English language learners and second language methodology, I believe it is equally as important to inspire and motivate ELLs to achieve proficiency in English. It is important to motivate ELLs to participate in the content area classroom just as you much as you need to motivate native English speakers. As Wright (2015, p. 316) states, "effective teachers take advantage of the positive aspects of federal and state policies for ELLs to obtain needed resources and create effective programs." I realize that the efforts made by teachers to support ELLs in their content area classroom can make a great impact on ELL's progress with learning English and learning class content.
Learning about the variety of program models developed for ELLs is extremely important to me as a future educator. Knowledge of the various programs available for ELLs goes hand in hand with becoming familiar with the speaking, listening and writing strategies discussed in the text book. It is in fact state law that teachers accommodate to their ELL students’ needs, so learning about programs and strategies teachers can implement to help ELLs develop English proficiency are relevant to my future as a content area math teacher. Regardless of the laws concerning ELL instruction, as Wright (2015, p. 117) mentions that "teachers must fully commit to implementing [the programs, or] ELLs will be left behind." Implementing programs and strategies to support ELLs is the responsibility of the teacher and is essential to student learning. I can use the practices I learned about in this course regularly within my content area classroom to support and motivate ELLs in my classroom.
One of the benefits of this classes format was that students were able to gather and share a wide variety of perspectives and experiences from both English language learners and ELL teachers. The use of the Vblog makes it convenient for students to share and view multiple resources focused on the Second Language Methodology (SLM).
One of the challenges of this course being online is that deeper discussions concerning SLM topics could be held if the class met as a group. Sometimes, using the online discussion format, responses can be delayed, and discussions of key concepts left unexpanded. Nevertheless, I was able to learn more about course concepts through reading my peers responses and carefully constructing my own responses.
The way Vblogs were used in this course helped me make connections between course readings and real-life classrooms. The Vblogs helped develop a sense of and online community because after completing an interview and considering the topics discussed in the interviews, it was nice to see how interviewee responses compared to those from my own interview. I also feel that the Vblog assignments not only helped me develop my online writing skills, but also helped me become more proficient with recording and editing videos and sharing them across an online format. Teaching and learning through videos have become more common and is a great skill to become familiar with in the field of education.
