I am going into my third year of teaching Geometry at a school in which at least 40% of the students are designated ELL and the majority are learning academic English. I have come to a place as an educator where I am able implement strategies into my instruction that might not be considered immediately content based. A large part of my planning this year is based around making the Geometry content comprehensible rather than merely the teaching of content. I suppose that I should have seen this earlier, but I have come to the realization that this is the way to teach the content – if I don’t make the content available to students, I will not be successful as an educator.

Though these ideas are new to me, they are far from new ideas. I am focusing on research-based practice for making content comprehensible: the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol as developed by Jane Echevarria of CSU Long Beach and Deborah Short of the Center for Applied Linguistics. As I enter my fourth week of school and begin the necessary real-time reflection in order to make my lessons increasingly effective, I will be focusing on this protocol in its three broadest swaths, rather than in its standard eight sub-groupings. These swaths are: Preparation, Instruction, and Review/Evaluation. While the SIOP was originally designed as an observation and evaluation tool for teacher practice, its has since evolved into a “tool for lesson planning and reflection”. It is in this capacity that I will be using the SIOP.

I am no veteran educator, but in my fifth year of teaching in urban schools, I feel comfortable and confident in my preparation of content lessons for mathematics classes. In particular, I feel that I have strength in preparing lessons for students who are deficient in their basic mathematic understanding. Still, I feel that my lessons could be more efficient, that is, I can definitely get more out of the time that I spend in the classroom. Toward this goal, I intend to use the SIOP as a preparation tool for structuring my classroom time toward maximum use of instructional minutes. Some considerations here might be: How can table talk/student discussion time be used efficiently? How can student presentation time be used efficiently? How can I make sure that all students are practicing when the class is engaged in practice time? How can pacing be considered so as to maximize student engagement? How can student grouping be used to differentiate instruction?

While the majority of SIOP practices are simply what many educators will call “good teaching”, the SIOP is perhaps most distinguished from traditional practice in its implementation of an explicit language objective. Where a content objective will focus on the specific standards-based, subject area content students are expected to learn on a given day, a language objective will focus on a specific language skill – that may have little direct application to the content- that students will be learning or exercising on a given day. A language objective may be as simple as explicit discussion of vocabulary or as complicated as a debate or development of a content thesis.

In the past, when considering the implementation of language objective, I often considered the achievement of language objectives as counter to the achievement of content objectives. This year, I have come to an understanding that language objective may be the key to students actually learning the content. Put another way, mere coverage of content may not be nearly enough to ensure student mastery of content. Having an explicit language objective means that attention will be paid to the way in which students will engage with content. By putting time into thinking about the way that students will read, write or discuss content, I will be devoting time to finding the best way for student to engage with content.