Section 1: Instructor matching and collaboration

BHCC Research Findings on Best Practices for Teaching ESL

Characteristics of asset-based/accelerated vs. deficit-based/remedial approaches to teaching ESL

Finding a good teaching match can be a scary proposition.  A former director of Learning Communities at BHCC often talked about the difficult task of matchmaking and negotiating amicable separations between co-teachers.  Asking a teacher to co-teach with you can set you up for rejection.  In some ways, it is much safer to stay at home in your own classroom where your life is predictable.  Like entering a relationship, co-teaching can be an intimate experience that exposes your dirty laundry and can entail a loss of control as you are no longer the one in charge.  But it also opens up opportunities for learning from your teaching partner.  Like a relationship, it can help you bloom.

Research and discussions on collaborative teaching touch frequently on models, challenges, benefits and strategies, but we couldn’t find anything on initiating the collaboration or how to identify a good teaching partner.  But despite this absence, teachers cite the importance of trust between the instructors (Seabury & Hernandez-Fulch, 2011; Honigsfeld & Dove, 2013) and having positive expectations (Seabury & Hernandez-Fulch, 2011).  A survey of students enrolled in classes co-taught by ESL and content professors highlights the importance of a good relationship between teachers as a key aspect of team teaching (Gladson, 2013).  And finally Mandel and Eisarman (2016) argue that the biggest challenge to co-teaching is “to find teachers who are open to learning from one another and to the possibility of adapting their approach to gain a better end product” (As cited in Tasdemir & Yıldırım, 2018, p. 634).  It’s for this reason that it is recommended that teachers not be assigned as co-teachers (Crandall 1998), but rather be given the choice.  But how do you choose?

Jeff

Though I knew Aurora in passing and had even run into her a few times in my former Boston neighborhood, I didn’t know her that well when she popped the question out of the blue in a chance encounter in the campus halls one day.  “I hear that you are interested in teaching around immigrant experiences.  Do you want to teach an ESL Sociology learning community with me?”  I recall responding with a non-committal vague affirmation but, with time, the idea grew on me.  Perhaps most importantly, I already had a good impression of Aurora as a friendly face whenever I encountered her in the halls or the few times on my neighborhood streets.  But it was also Aurora’s suggested theme of immigrant experiences that sparked my interest.  It was a theme I had found to really resonate with my ELL students.  I was also attracted by her idea of framing the class around the city of Chelsea, an immigrant gateway city next to Boston and the city my family had just moved to six months earlier.  I saw possibilities of creating a richer, more meaningful and more challenging learning experience for my ELL students by partnering with Aurora in a shared learning community and a place-based framework. Another factor in my decision to take the plunge was the approval granted by a couple of my more trusted colleagues.  They knew Aurora and me well and assured me that we would be a good match.  For me the final selling point was sitting down with Aurora and discussing our vision for the class.  As we began brainstorming ideas for developing the content and defining shared essays, it became clear to me that we both had similar visions on teaching and developing a class.  It was also clear that Aurora saw me as a full partner in the development of this learning community.  Though it came after the decision, I knew I had found a good match when Aurora allowed me to choose the sociology textbook. 

Aurora

By the time I approached Jeff on co-teaching an ELL Sociology cluster, I already was an experienced co-teacher, having partnered with four other faculty members.  In that time, I’ve come to consciously refrain from assuming that I must take the lead in shaping the cluster.  If we have slow and deeper learning goals for students, clustering must be approached with the same slow and deeper learning goals for teachers.  It starts with learning about our individual passions and how they carry over into our pedagogy.  I had heard about Jeff and that he taught an ELL course thematically framed around immigrant experiences.  It seemed the perfect theme for drawing out the arrival stories of ELL students, whether they were residents or international students.  As an immigrant myself, I was drawn to this topic and curious about the readings he used to approach it.  I wanted to get to know Jeff and learn why he was interested in immigrant experiences. That is where I learned that he also had the experience of living in another country, which meant learning to be fluent in another country.  This was very important for me - the willingness to teach based on the concrete lived experience of making oneself vulnerable through living and working in another country and learning their language and culture.  In exploring a possible collaboration, I shared with Jeff that I had begun partnering with community-based organizations in Chelsea and incorporating that work in my teaching.  I then learned about Jeff’s own background in community-based work.  Through these common backgrounds and interests, we found the eventual topic of our learning community coming into focus.  In some ways you can say we built the foundation for our cluster course based on our disciplines and our common intellectual and personal backgrounds and interests.