This case study focused on 4 students in 4th grade from Highland Elementary School in my mentor's classroom. These students were identified as CLD students based on their academic proficiency in English Language Arts. The students identified for this case study would benefit the most from the lessons and focused instruction strategies learned in this course. The lessons and designed activities included research-based knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to literacy and language development for CLD students. Working with my mentor teacher, I designed lessons that included strategies selected from course-texts that extended and reinforced student learnings for reading, writing, and communicating. By conducting biography cards and cultural quilts, the assigned strategies were adjusted to align with my students' background knowledge. This task also helped me document students' sociocultural, linguistic, academic, and cognitive demands for the targeted lessons.
Biography Cards support teachers as they document a students' sociocultural, linguistic, cognitive, and academic dimensions. Conducting the cards allows teachers to keep track of student' proficiencies in their L1 (oral, reading, writing) and their L2, English. For teachers, bringing in the students' identities into the classroom develops biography-driven design. The biography cards connect to the student's life on a stronger level. By acknowledging the home life of students we can design lessons that include accessing background knowledge. Tapping into student' background knowledge is aligned with the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol or SIOP model. Recognizing the background knowledge and cultures of students is essential as we ask students to meet the demands of Common Core standards. With rich informational texts being implemented in classrooms, we aim to transfer their learnings to working memory. Teachers can do this by initiating the task of completing biography cards with students.
Cultural quilts are used to celebrate and recognize differences in the classroom. After working through the accommodation readiness spiral and addressing the environmental readiness of the classroom for CLD students, cultural quilts can be used to recognize, explore, and maximize resources of funds of knowledge with students. Conducting cultural quilts gave me an understanding and appreciation for my students’ culture, heritage, and home life. I got a glimpse into their lives and how they see themselves. Though only my CLD students conducted cultural quilts, the concept has the ability to work for a whole class. A cultural quilt lesson can align with core standards in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Exploring similarities and differences among cultures and students develops and appreciation for cultural diversity in our global community.
Each of the lessons was designed using a specific language strategy. Targeted to CLD students, each lesson aligned with my mentor's curriculum but was refined to implement the targeted strategy. A major component of each of the lessons was acknowledging students' background knowledge and building new knowledge by proving or disproving what they already knew. The main goal of each lesson was to foster student' literacy and language development in school. The lessons incorporated concepts from the home-to-school connection for student success. Each of the lessons adapted to the WIDA Can-Do descriptors for each student. Adapted from Biography-Driven Instruction was the overarching theme of the lessons. With integration from the prism model, BDI was a successful teaching lesson for not just CLD or ESL classrooms, but for every student.