Back in 2012, when I taught English Language Learner exclusively in Morocco, I began a series called "Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tips". The series was long before a variety of website changes, so I have decided to revise it. I will be sharing one tip each Tuesday, starting with the original tips and expanding on them with the additional knowledge I've added in the last 8 years. Today's TESOL Teaching Tip is to speak SLOWLY!

If you’ve ever tried to speak or understand another language, the first thing you notice is how fast every seems to speak.  Actually, most native speakers of any language speak at about the same rate, anywhere between 150 and 200 words per minute, (give or take some, depending on dialect and whose doing the counting).  However, when you are learning a language, and you don’t know all the words, your brain processes what you are hearing at a slower pace.  In TESOL Teaching tip #23, we will talk about why it is important to experience being the language learner when you are a language teacher.  For now, though, let’s do a simple experiment.  Watch these two videos.  The first one is a student who is just learning Arabic.  The second one is a native speaker of Arabic.  Which one are you able to understand better?

Now, I know you saw a difference in the speed of these speakers.  Remember also, that when you are being taped, you tend to slow your rate of speed.  Imagine that the native speaker wasn’t talking for a video camera, but was having a conversation with a friend, I am sure that his speech would then get faster.
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How do English Language Learning students feel ​in a classroom?
For 3 years, I was a non-Arabic speaker living in an Arabic speaking country, and I have had Arabic speaking in-laws for 18 years. I can tell you that Arabic still feels like it is spoken a million miles a minute to me.  This helps me to understand why my students tell me that they feel that English goes a million miles a minute.  Truly, it is just part of learning a language, the language we are learning, whichever language it is, travels by us faster because we are not understanding every word. 

Now picture the English Language Learners in your classroom.  Every day they sit and hear the language traveling around them so fast they feel that they miss more and more words each time you talk.  Frustrating – right?  Frustrating enough to make them start to tune you out, and maybe act up a little?  Frustrating enough to make them give up on understanding?  Frustrating enough for them to start daydreaming or talking to a friend in their home language? These are behaviors I have seen in my classrooms and that I have done myself when feeling overwhelmed in a French as a second language classroom.

​How can we help EL students feel less frustrated?
SLOW DOWN.  Don’t over-exaggerate your speech.  Language learners need to hear real language flow, not a simplified version of English. However, they also need to understand what you’re talking about. So pretend there’s a camera in front of you and slow down to a solid 130 – 150 words per minute.  Also, give a nice solid pause between sentences and an even longer one when you ask a question.  (Try counting to 50 or 100 Mississippis in your head after you ask a question.)  Language learning students are often still processing the words of the question when we are sitting impatiently waiting for an answer – give them a chance to finish processing before you move on and give them the answer.  (You may also want to train the other students in your class to be patient during this time.  I have some suggestions for this in Tip# 21.) 

Another thing that will help your students is recording yourself and giving them them the recording to have as a reference. For example, let's say you're doing a "lecture" based lesson on an important person for a Social Studies class. After the lesson, you are going to have your students complete one of my Digital Graphic Organizers to reflect on what they learned. While you are "lecturing", record yourself. It doesn't have to be fancy, FlipGrid or your computer's video camera would work. Then post that video to Google Classroom so that students can use it while completing the graphic organizer. This might not slow you down a lot, (Although being recorded does seem to slow our speech overall.) but it will give your students a chance to listen again. They can also be taught how to use the software to slow down the audio as they re-listen.

Real Life Teaching Example:
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One simple way to help you slow down when asking questions is to give students a 2-colored chip or card. I like to glue a red construction paper square to a green construction paper square, so that when flipped it looks like a stop and a go sign. While you are talking, the red side is up (this is also a great cue that they shouldn't be talking.) Then after you have stopped talking, they take time to process what you said and think of an answer to the question. When they have an answer, they flip the card over and you know they are ready to answer because their card is green. In addition to giving students additional processing time, this gives you a real life idea of how much processing time students need.

Pro-tip: This can be used with all students, regardless of their language learning status. If you have some students who are processing much faster than others, then have a notebook or sticky notes ready for them to write (or draw) their response on while they wait for the others to finish processing.

So often within our curriculum, we ask students to explore topics and cultures that are so foreign to their own lives that they cannot understand them. They don't have the background knowledge to grasp them. This happens a lot in Social Studies, but also in literature with historical settings or diverse characters. 

I also see this often happen with Holidays Around the World programs. Kids "visit" a country, learn very little because they have no way to connect what they are learning to their previous knowledge, and then walk out with very odd misunderstandings about that country. For my part in Holidays Around the World, I always taught students about Ramadan and Eid al Adha in Morocco. The one year we were asked to have the kids create a craft, so we designed prayer rugs. Many, many kids drew crosses on their prayer rugs because in our 30 minute "class" we hadn't had time to really explain the religion of Morocco wasn't the religion they practiced. So these kids had this misunderstanding in their heads about what a prayer rug in Morocco would look like. (There are many other problems with Christmas Around the World programs, which you can read in my previous blog post - Christmas Around the World is Harmful to Students.) 

Teaching History Strategy #3 - Use Historical Fiction

There are so many amazing books that will put the kids in the shoes of the characters living in different time periods or different countries. Use these books to their fullest. Choose 2 or more books for each topic so that students can "feel" what it was like to be in the shoes of different people during that time period. If you can't read the entire book, share a section or a chapter with the whole class and then make the book accessible to kids to read on their own.

For example, when learning about the American Revolution, you might sample from the books: Felicity, American Girl 1774, George Washington's Socks and Chains. Or you could bring in an even larger sample of books and allow students to each choose their own book (or a book per group or pair) about the time period, and complete a Historical Fiction Book Report on the topic. As they share their projects, students can compare and contrast the viewpoints of the various books they read.

Teaching History Strategy #4 - The Devil is in the Details

Because we all come at life from our own point of view, students will often gloss over details that would never occur to them. That is why I use my Time Machine Presentations to introduce time periods. In each Time Machine Presentation, I talk about things like not having bathroom facilities indoors for the majority of American History and how people would get from place to place. It wouldn't even occur to students to consider things like chamber pots being used or whether rail roads were in use during this time. However, these things come up sometimes in stories. So bringing up these details helps students better understand the reality of a time period.

Teaching History Strategy #5 - Connect, connect, connect!

One of my favorite memes talks about the fact that Ann Frank, Martin Luther King and Dianne Sawyer were all born in the same year. The reason this meme blows our minds is that people in general will compartmentalize facts, especially about history. So helping students to find connections is very important. When I taught in Georgia, we taught about 8 different people who were important in American History. It felt very disconnected to my students, so we built a life size timeline around our classroom. Every time we learned about a person, we added important events from their life to our timeline, so that students could see who lived at the same time and who didn't. They could see overlaps and progression. (I then made this into a handy printable for their interactive notebooks that they could refer back to. You can download this from my Teachers Pay Teacher Store.) 

Maps are another important way to show connections. Having students label maps with the names of people (or groups of people) that were there can help them see why some people interacted and others didn't. History is the story of people interacting. We need to teach kids how to see that.

I know that Social Studies isn't very high on the priority list when it comes to most curriculums. But over and over we talk about how we need to understand history in order to prevent from repeating it. In order for our children to learn history, they have to build their background knowledge and understanding of Social Studies. Our future and theirs will be better if we can get them to understand history and what they can learn from it.

Recently I have had resources removed from Teachers Pay Teachers for these two reasons: "Resources where students are required to speak from the perspective of victims of or participants in traumatic events may trivialize the experiences of affected individuals or groups" and "Activities where students write from the perspective or otherwise roleplay as people from specific cultures may disrespect or marginalize individuals from associated communities."

Now I would understand removing resources that are disrespectful of certain groups, but I don't understand removing resources that CELEBRATE the heroes or culture of marginalized groups. Specifically, my worry is that so much of our curriculum already barely mentions other cultures in a positive manner. If we now take down the resources that we do have, teachers are even less likely to teach about these cultures in a positive manner.

Why are we removing celebrations of other cultures?
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There are hundreds of Christmas plays available. In these students can act out the Judeo-Christian Christmas story and no one blinks an eye at it. However, my Light Up the World with Celebrations holiday play which has students pretending to be various students from all over the world celebrating different celebrations, in different ways, all with the joining theme of light, was removed. So now when a teacher is looking for a way to include diverse ideas into her classroom, they will have one less option. But none of the Christmas options are removed. This means that rather than making these other holidays, like Kwanza, Hanukkah, Eid and Diwali less marginalized, it makes them more so. Now I have other resources for these holidays - Vocabulary Packets, Presentations, and Cookbooks. However, this play is what the teachers actually use during those crazy, harried, days before winter break.

Since Teachers Pay Teachers chose to remove the play from my store, you can now find it on my Free Resources page here on my blog. I want to make sure that teachers have a chance to use it if they feel as I do that all holidays should be celebrated for their importance, not just Christmas.

Does acting out interviews trivialize the heroes of other cultures?

The other three resources that I have had to update are my Mister and Me Novel Study packet, my Black History Project and my Women's History Project. All of these included an acting out element. Playing pretend. Looking at life from a different perspective. All of those higher level thinking skills that make critical thinkers.

I removed those acting out activities because I was told that this was trivializing an experience of a marginalized population. I would like to note that the activity I took out of my Mister and Me Novel study is the EXACT same activity that is in my Charlotte's Web Novel study. I was not asked to remove the activity from the Charlotte's Web Novel study, which means that kids CAN act out a chapter from a fictional book about a white girl, but CANNOT act out a chapter from a fictional book about a black girl. To me this increases marginalization, rather than decreasing it.

​Now, please don't get me wrong. I don't want students acting out a slave auction. I don't want them acting out segregation. But interviewing an African American hero about all of the success they have had? I think that is a great way to learn about the heroes of all groups. Again, no one blinks an eye at someone doing a mock interview with George Washington. Why is it wrong to have students create the same mock interview with Barrack Obama?

As a white woman, I always try to double check everything to make sure that my resources celebrate all students. I don't ever want to have students feel left out in my class, even inadvertently. But by removing these resources, I feel that many teachers will just not bother to teach about diversity. I wish we lived in a world where our African American, Native American, Asian American, Women and other marginalized groups were celebrated in our general ELA and Social Studies curriculums. But for the most part that is not true. So we as teachers need to bring that element to the classroom. We as teachers need to make sure that the heroes of all groups are celebrated, not just the heroes of white males. ​

Bulletin boards are a great way of having information readily available for student use. They can be used as a visual cue of information students already know - like the steps to solving a word problem. Or they can be used as a place for students to "grab" information they aren't sure of yet - like the meaning or spelling of a word.

However, bulletin boards can also be very visually overstimulating to students. This is especially true when we add multitudes of decorations, pictures, quotes, colorful borders and such to our bulletin boards. This overstimulation can cause the students who need bulletin boards the most to use them the least.  Often, sorting through all of the extra, pretty stuff, takes too long for students who are visually overstimulated. When it takes students too long to find what they are looking for, they often get frustrated and stop looking for the information they need.

3.) Consider color and design when choosing borders and background paper or fabric.
Sometimes the desire to have all of our boards match in a "theme" will cause the bulletin boards to be busy for the brain before we have even hung anything on it. Other times the background clashes with what we are hanging on it, or makes that information hard to read. Use contrasting colors, with little to no design to make the information that you want kids to access to "pop" out for them.

4.) Consider leaving bulletin boards blank at the beginning of the year.
Add items to your bulletin boards with your students, instead of ahead of time. If possible allow students to be part of the process. For example, when I add word family words to my word wall, I pass the word cards out to students. Each student "presents" their word to the class. We discuss the word (the phonics, the meaning, etc.) and then the student tells me where to put the word on the word wall. This buy-in will help them be more willing to use bulletin boards. It will also increase the likelihood of them being able to locate items if they have a visual and auditory memory link of you hanging it up.

5.) Make bulletin boards interactive whenever possible.
Using bulletin boards for items like Number of the Day posters that are reviewed regularly gives students another form of buy-in. If you can, have a student or two write the answers on these posters. However, even if you are writing, by going over it daily, students can more easily locate the information for various skills.

6.) Consider having interactive notebooks in place of certain bulletin boards.
Interactive notebooks give students the same information that might be on an anchor chart or bulletin board, but in each students' individualized notebook. In addition to being a great way for students to build organizational skills, as students write in their notebook, they are building visual memory links for themselves.

7.) Don't put everything on a bulletin board. Instead, try O-Rings.
Another alternative to bulletin boards, especially for word walls, is to have things like sight word cards put onto an O-Ring where students can easily and quickly reference them. These O-Rings can be hung on a hook on the side of a desk, or be kept in a pencil case, for easy access.

8.) Use O-Rings to "layer" anchor charts and posters.
This is great for things like the success criteria to different writing genres. At the beginning of the year, we can have the narrative writing success criteria (or rubric) on our bulletin board. Then as we move into informational writing, we can add that success criteria to the O-Ring. Students only see the front poster of the O-Ring, but they know additional items are behind it if they should need it.