EP221 — Formative Assessment for ELL Students: How to Know If They Are Actually Getting It

[upbeat music] Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Bossche, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. [upbeat music] Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. I am so excited to share this topic with you today because it was one of those things that really became a game changer in supporting multilingual learners. If you are a few weeks into the school year now, you probably already are familiar with your students, you probably have them in groups, maybe you have some routines running. Hopefully, you're meeting with your groups. I know sometimes it takes a while to get those groups formed at the beginning of the year. So hopefully, you're at least getting to consistently meet with your students, and you're starting to teach. And probably at some point in the last few weeks, you have probably looked at a student and thought, "I am not sure if this is landing." They seem to participating, they're completing the tasks, they sit through the lesson, but are they actually understanding the content? Are they actually acquiring the language, or are they going through the motions with enough surface compliance that it is easy to assume everything is fine? Now, if you're at this point of the school year and just asking those questions, that is totally okay and totally normal. What we wanna do, though, is start asking these questions now and put things in place so that it's not the middle of the school year or the end of the school year when we start asking these questions, right? So, how do I actually know if my students are getting it? Is what today's episode is all about. And the answer is more specific and actually more actionable than you might think. You're probably already doing a lot of these things in your classroom already. So let's dive in. Let me name two opposite mistakes that some ELL teachers make with formative assessment, and both are totally understandable. Both limit what you can learn about your students, though. The first mistake is using language-heavy assessments to measure content understanding. You might give your students a written exit ticket in English. You might look at the writing and conclude the student does not understand the content. But what you are actually seeing is the student's English writing level, which may tell you almost nothing about whether they understand the science lesson. A student who cannot write a paragraph about ecosystems in English might understand and comprehend ecosystems really well. But the assessment did not separate content understanding from language production, and so you draw the wrong conclusion about what the student needs. I have been guilty of this so many times. That's why this subject is really important for me,