Ecological Transition

While taking the Foundations of Language, Literacy and Culture course we had to complete a PBA on a student that we had in class. Then we had to make a complete biography on the student’s culture and link it to the topics we had been covering in class. I selected this as my artifact for standard 3.a because through completing this assignment I began to question the supports she was receiving based on feedback from other teachers. The student I chose was a girl I would have never guessed grew up in Mexico. She is a US citizen but because of her family living in Mexico for most of the past 16 years returning only long enough to renew visas. Getting to know her taught me a lot about my own bias and in turn allowed me to deepen the planning …show more content…
“An ecological transition occurs whenever a person’s position in the ecological environment is altered as the result of a change in role, setting or both,”(Brondenbrenner p. 26). I see this in my students now as well many of them have relocated several times and because of this their skill levels in language and content are behind where they ideally would be. I now plan for this type of student in my classroom. I support content with visuals and readings of various levels of ability that cover the same content. I allow my students to speak to each other in Spanish as a support to what they are learning however, when they are participating in class discussions I provide them with a higher order thinking wheel and a few minutes of prep time then require them to participate in English. By doing this I believe they will begin to enhance their …show more content…
I do not teach English I teach Biology therefore I should be focused on whether or not my students are achieving the content from my class. I have struggled with doing this in my classes though because our school has such a push for improving writing skills. What I have done to combat this is I include in my rubrics that they need to include proper grammar. Then when grading the students papers I look at their skill level and tailor grading to what I should expect at their current ability level. Then I pick one item that would push their writing to the next level and make corrections on that one specific part of grammar. After they receive this feedback the routine in my classroom shows that I then expect to see that in their next writing task. This way I can show that they are growing in writing but it does not drastically impact my students