[MissESL]

I am trying (still!) to move my ELL program to more of a push in model, especially for those students who are nearly ready to exit the program. What does push in look like at your school?

[cms0620]

We don't have it for ELL but we do for EC. Basiclly for those who are almost on grade level the block is 90 mins. long and 45 mins. of those are done with the 2nd teacher pushing in to help reinforce the new concept in a small group setting.

[luv2teachkids]

The last school I worked at had an ELL program that was all push-in except for newcomers. In some classrooms, the push-in was while the classroom teacher was doing reader's workshop and working with small groups anyway. I know several grade levels had every class do reader's workshop at the same time, and the ELL teacher just did another group in one of the regular classrooms, but a number of ELLs from several classrooms "came" to her.

I know that a few other classrooms had the push-in during science or social studies time. The regular ed teacher would teach the concepts, but the ELL teacher would teach vocabulary, not just content specific vocab, but the process vocab. So the ELL teacher was often leading the vocab lesson, but then also setting up sentence frames or teaching a language piece specific to the text for the day on days when the regular ed teacher was leading. So each had specific lessons or parts of lessons that they would teach whole class. Then if they were reading a difficult text or writing a lab report or something that needed more language support, the ELL teacher might take a group to a separate table. Or if everyone was working in small groups, each teacher might "take" half of the groups in the class.

I also sometimes did a flip-flop where we split the class in half and we each taught a lesson and then flipped groups for the following day. Or sometimes we wouldn't flip, but would set up a debate, depending on the topic.

I loved the push-in model at my previous school, but I know not all the teachers were ready for it. If possible, I would try to target a few who you think are ready for that type of collaboration. If you can get it going successfully in a few classrooms, I think it will be easier to build on.

[MissESL]

Thanks so much for the suggestions.
I have been trying to implement it a little more -- and only with teachers that are more flexible, but I find they think I am an aide in their room, rather than another teacher. Often the partnership goes badly, simply because I try to explain my purpose and goal rather than fall in line. Thanks for the examples!