Who are your English learners? Where are your English learners? Lurking in the corners? All seated front and center for easy teacher access? Or next to the strongest Spanish speaker in the  class?

 

Once we have identified our English learners, we place them with a purpose, but current research suggests that academic conversation among peers with higher academic language and grammatical understanding has a dramatic, positive effect on our ELs.

That means, we need to disperse our English learners so their seat gives them access to a high achieving student to use as a linguistic model in conversations. If say, your groups are in fours, the other two students could then be mid-range achieving students.

What about high achievers not having access to their equivalent peers? Studies show that growth in learning for high- achieving students when paired in a heterogeneous group as compared to a homogeneous group of similar-ability peers, creates almost no change in the amount of learning they achieve.

So what’s your next move? Locate your ELs and other target students and ask yourself, “Are these students sitting among students who can maximize their learning?” Homogeneous groups can be pulled for targeted instruction, but an EL’s home group should be one surrounded with students who can act as the linguistic models they may not otherwise have access to.

For more information about the data I mentioned above you can access chapter five:”Procedures for Classroom Talk” from the book Content Area Conversations by Fisher and Frey on the ASCD website  at http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108035/chapters/Procedures-for-Classroom-Talk.aspx, or chapter seven: “Cooperative Learning” from the book Classroom Instruction That Works by Marzano.  I’m happy to print either resource for you if you’d like- just let me know.