Transcript
1 turns · 16 min[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, hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. I am so glad that you are here today. Now, I wanna start this episode with something honest. And I wanna say it before anything else so you know this is not gonna be one of those episodes where I describe co-teaching the way it looks in a textbook, and then send you off to implement something that bears no resemblance to your actual school day. [laughs] So I wanna get this really clear. Co-teaching, the way it is described in professional development, the research behind why it works, the way it looks in training videos, and the way that it is written into district documents, in my experience and in my conversations with many of our members with Equipping ELLs, this almost never looks like that in real classrooms. And if you have been an ELL teacher for more than a few months, you probably already know that, right? This is kind of the buzzword that's been thrown around is that we are moving everything to a co-teaching model. And that's great. There's a lot of great research behind why that works. But what's really lacking is them giving you the actual structure and plan time in order to actually make it work that way. Because the reality is that m- a lot of ELL teachers who push into general education classrooms, they're not treated as equal partners in a perfectly coordinated instructional dance. They are doing their best to support their students in rooms where they may or may not have planning time with a content teacher, where they may or may not be included in the lesson design, and where they sometimes feel more like a classroom aide than a licensed specialist. So that's what I wanna talk with you today, the reality of what this actually looks like. And I wanna give you a practical, honest framework for making co-teaching actually work for your ELL students no matter where you are starting from, okay? We wanna make this doable. Like I said, this is kind of the buzzword. A lot of people are moving to this model, but not actually giving teachers what they need to make it work. So we're gonna be talking through some of these things today. Now, let me name the three things that make co-teaching feel hard before I give you anything to do about them. I wanna validate your feelings because [laughs] naming these things really do matter. The first is role clarity. A lot of times, ELL teachers who push in have never had an explicit conversation with the homeroom teacher about their role and what it is during instruction. Are you there to support your ELL students specifically? Are you available to all students? Are you
Episode notes
In Episode 219 of the Equipping ELLs podcast, Beth Vaucher opens with something most professional development on co-teaching never acknowledges: the textbook version of co-teaching rarely matches the reality of ELL classrooms. No shared planning time. No clear role definition. Walking into lessons you did not design and trying to support students in real time. If you have been an ELL teacher for more than a few months, you already know this. Today's episode names it directly — and then gives you a practical, honest framework for making co-teaching work regardless of where you are starting from.
Beth opens by naming the three things that make co-teaching feel hard. Role clarity — most ELL teachers who push in have never had an explicit conversation with the homeroom teacher about what their role actually is during instruction. Planning time — or the complete lack of it. Real co-teaching requires co-planning, but most ELL teachers are spread across five, six, or eight classrooms with zero shared planning time with any of those teachers. And different priorities — a fourth-grade science teacher's priority is fourth-grade science, and an ELL teacher's priority is language acquisition. Those goals support each other beautifully when aligned, but when no one has had the conversation about how they align, they feel like competing interests in the same room.
The most important