Do you have English learners in your class for the first time? Or perhaps you are looking to refresh your existing strategies for supporting these students. You want to make sure that your English learners can access the same complex texts and tasks as the rest of their classmates, but how best to develop the supports to make that possible?
We believe that equitable access to rigorous, grade-level work is paramount for all students. Our curriculum is designed to provide teachers with the materials to teach challenging content to their whole class. We also provide guidance on structures that can help teachers succeed in the classroom. In the Teacher Tools section of our site, we collect these kinds of resources, including a Guide to Supporting English Learners.
Our favorite approach detailed in the guide is scaffolding, providing on-ramps to allow all students to access the same content during Tier 1 instruction, with the ultimate goal of gradually reducing the supports a student needs. The wide variety of scaffolding strategies are flexible enough to be used across all types of classrooms, subjects, and lessons.
We’ll explore three types of scaffolds: sensory, interactive, and graphic.
Take a look at some of the ways you might use scaffolds in your classroom.
Sensory Scaffolds
- Bring in real-life objects connected to a text to help students visualize key ideas.
- When teaching new vocabulary words, add a gesture or movement to illustrate the concept.
- Color-code or number paragraphs or sentences to help guide students to locate particular ideas or the solution to a problem.
- Show a video clip of an idea or concept to solidify necessary background information before reading a text.
- Have students listen to the audio version of a book in English or in their home language while following along with a visual support—either the text or illustrations.
- Break up long sections of text with illustrations that clarify key concepts, tricky plot events, or new vocabulary.
Download the full Guide to Supporting English Learners
Interactive Scaffolds
- Use a Turn and Talk format to pair students and give structure to how they formulate and share ideas. Think-Pair-Share, Write-Pair-Share, and other variations allow time for each student to build an effective argument before speaking.
- Consider grouping students who share a home language and offering the option of completing the assignment in either English or their home language.
- Facilitate group discussion among 3-4 students with Talking Chips. Each group member receives two talking chips. Any student can begin the discussion by placing their chip in the center of the table, and any student with a chip can continue the conversation. When all the chips are used, teammates each collect their chips and continue the discussion.
- Try the Rally Coach framework, which gives students a chance to think independently about a question or task, and then receive immediate feedback and coaching from a partner. This works best with a piece of written work, where Partner A can work on solving the problem while Partner B watches, listens, checks, coaches as necessary, and praises. Then they switch roles and Partner B takes on the next problem.
- Provide sentence stems or frames for all students to practice using academic language in their interactions.
Download the full Guide to Supporting English Learners
Graphic Scaffolds
- Create charts or tables with key information from a text, problem, or unit. Consider including definitions for key vocabulary.
- Provide graphs to help students interpret texts that include a lot of mathematical explanations.
- Have students create timelines to keep track of dates in historical texts. To model the format, pre-populate a timeline with a few key events.
- Employ a variety of graphic organizers (including the examples below) to help students keep track of their thoughts and ideas as they learn a new concept or work on a written or oral task.
We believe that all students, including English learners, can and should be engaging with rigorous, grade-level tasks. As you work with the English learners in your classroom, these scaffolds can help provide the additional supports they need to develop English proficiency, reading comprehension, and content knowledge.
Download our Guide to Supporting English Learners for a full list of sensory, interactive, and graphic scaffolds, as well as detailed oral language protocols, and more graphic organizer examples.
If you are using the Fishtank elementary ELA curriculum, you can get content-specific suggestions for language supports in our new Enhanced Lesson Plans, now available with a Fishtank Plus subscription. Download an example or check out the video below for a look at the elements of an Enhanced Lesson Plan.
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