I’m always looking for teachable moments outside the lesson plan to reinforce my Foundation Literacy students’ language and to boost their confidence. Lessons are, of course, the basis of pedagogy. At the same time, they are like lab experiments — carefully controlled conditions. I always ask myself whether my students are applying what they learn in class to their lives?
I’ve been thinking lately that our classes are like the training wheels on bikes — useful and necessary tools to learn, but it’s still not riding a bike until they come off. How, then, to take the training wheels off the lesson and get students to use English in an unstructured way? I look for opportunities in class where I can push students to use the skills they’ve been learning.
Three Strategies
One way I do that is the sign-in book. It’s a useful tool for word recognition when reading the date, and for letter formation and writing on the line when writing their names. The binder opens up to two pages, so I write the current day’s date on one page and the next day’s date on the opposite page. Often, a lower-level student will look at the book and then ask me to tell them which page to write on. I shrug. Sometimes a student will check their phone for the date, while it also happens that they simply sit down and wait for one of the more advanced students to write their name on the correct page. The sign-in book isn’t a foolproof tool, but the students do understand that I want them to put into practice what they’ve been learning in the class.
Another strategy I use is having them sign in to Avenue. The more advanced students easily key in their emails and passwords, but it’s the lower-level students’ skills I want to strengthen. Again, I leave them alone. They know that while I will eventually help them, they must first try and try again, if need be, to sign in on their own. One reason the Cloudbooks we use are so useful is the keyboard, where the letters are not in order, so it aids the students’ letter recognition. The Digital Literacy team gives the students a paper like the Avenue sign-in page with the student’s name and password filled in, so a student can read the paper and copy the information in the correct section on Avenue. When a student is having trouble on their own, I fill in their information correctly, and then restart their computer and have them go through the steps to get to Avenue and then sign in.
A third strategy I use is when they ask me for the school’s Wi-Fi. I take a student to the bulletin board where the Wi-Fi poster is, but I don’t show them the poster, one of many in a sea of other posters. What I do is sound out the word Wi-Fi, getting the students to use the decoding skills they’re learning. I sound out “W” until they understand to look for W. Then, I sound out “F”. Now the student knows to look for W and F. This is a great chance for letter recognition. Once the student finds the poster, from there, we now look for email and password. They know email not necessarily by the word itself, but by the @ symbol. Sometimes a student can fill in the information on their own, sometimes not. At the very least, they know what poster to look for.
Struggle and Effort
To conclude, in each case, students struggle on their own. Struggle is a necessary part of learning — building the neural pathways in the brain needed to retain information. In Foundation Literacy, activities are structured, or scaffolded, but I believe students consolidate what they’ve learned in unstructured moments. There they have to draw upon their own knowledge and understanding to finish a task, be it signing in or reading a poster. They don’t always succeed, but that’s not the point. Their effort is the point.
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