Education Week’s Equity and Diversity gallery includes many short videos created to help teachers of English Language Learners. In this brief video, we explore Islington Junior Middle School in Toronto, Canada. According to the video, a third of the schoolchildren in Canada “are immigrants or have a parent who was born abroad,” and a portion of these schoolchildren “haven’t gone to school regularly in their home country.”
Middle school teacher Janet McCarol states that these gaps in education hinder fundamental learning: “If they haven’t had the chance to play, if they haven’t had the chance to explore, then they are lacking the fundamental basic building blocks that lead to the reading, the writing and the arithmetic.” In order to assuage these detrimental effects on education, this school has nine crucial steps:
- Learn each child’s story
- Use visual cues and props
- Provide small group interventions
- Build on what students already know
- Students are resources
- Repeat academic vocabulary words slowly
- Provide structured chances to develop writing skills
- Create a welcoming classroom environment
- Respect each student’s culture
The teachers of Islington Junior Middle School describe each of these steps in detail and explain how they utilize these tools in their classroom. Please find the entire video here!
-Melissa Hoppie, Graduate Research Assistant
