Transcript
1 turns · 27 minTeaching 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 Beauches, 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. Hey there and welcome to another episode of the Equipping ELLs podcast. I'm so glad you're here today because we are going to be talking about something that I feel like many ELL teachers are familiar with, have had training on, but it still tends to be an area of maybe confusion or just not really utilizing the impact that can have on our students and incorporating it daily in our lessons. So we have been building toward this for weeks, right? We've talked about understanding who our students are, learning the stages, the language acquisition stages that they are in, how language is actually acquired. We've also talked about what to teach, how to stop waiting for test scores and start using what you observe every day to really drive instruction. And now we are deep in the how. So how do you actually design and deliver instruction that reaches your ELL students? And today, the specific answer we are talking about is sheltered instruction. Now, I know. What some of you might be thinking, right? That you've heard this instruction before you, this term before you've had training it. As I'm recording this podcast in my office, I can look on the shelf and see my PSYOP books that I have from many, many years ago when I had lots of training on it. So it's probably very common that you're very aware of sheltered instruction. Now, that doesn't mean though that you are implementing it and using it to increase language acquisition. But here's the question that I really want to sit with today in today's episode. Are your ELL students actually getting sheltered instruction? Not are you doing something called sheltered instruction or you're pulling pieces of this and that to add in pieces of sheltered instruction, but are the students in your room, your specific students at their specific language levels actually accessing the content the way sheltered instruction is designed to make possible? Because in my experience, there's a significant gap between schools that claim to implement sheltered instruction or have had training in sheltered instruction and classrooms where sheltered instruction is actually happening. And today I want to close that gap. Now this might be a tough episode to hear because this actually really, in my opinion, falls a lot on the shoulders of the homeroom teachers. Now, yes, as an ESL teacher, you are going to be a big part of this and a lot of probably doing the implementation, the coaching, the modeling, all of that stuff. But we want that content to be accessed. And a lot of that content, the grade level content is taught in the homeroom classroom, right? So we need homeroom teachers to also
Episode notes
In Episode 209 of the Equipping ELLs podcast, Beth Vaucher tackles one of the most widely trained-on and least consistently implemented concepts in ELL education: sheltered instruction. Most ELL teachers — and many homeroom teachers — have heard the term, sat through the professional development, maybe even have the SIOP books on their shelves. But there is a significant gap between schools that claim to implement sheltered instruction and classrooms where ELL students are actually accessing grade-level content the way the framework was designed to make possible. This episode closes that gap.
Beth opens with a scene every ELL teacher will recognize — a fifth grade science lesson on ecosystems where the teacher has a word wall, speaks slowly, uses images on slides, and gives students a graphic organizer. All good things. And yet at the end of the lesson her ELL students still do not know what an ecosystem is or what a food chain does. The teacher would say she used sheltered instruction. And she is not wrong — she used some sheltered techniques. But what she delivered was not truly sheltered instruction. That distinction, Beth explains, is exactly what this episode is about.
Sheltered instruction is not one technique. It is not a word wall or a graphic organizer or slowing down your rate of speech. It is a comprehensive set of intentional practices that work together across