Mary Jo Montenegro

I thought that Mary Jo Montenegro’s presentation was excellent and incredibly interesting. I have enjoyed all of the presenters that we have encountered this week, but Mary Jo was additionally fascinating to me. One of my close friends teaches in CPS and I was aware that CPS’s ELL student population was growing, but I had no idea how diverse the actual population is. I had never even heard of Wolof before today and, as a teacher, I believe I would feel quite intimidated if I had a student speaking a language I had never even heard of enter my classroom.

I found the statement that it takes 2-3 years to socially master a language and 7 years to master it academically to be very interesting. I think that many of the ELL students that I know are well on their way to achieving “social mastery,” but far from being able to academically master English. Of these students, quite a few are content with social mastery and aren’t striving for anything past that. I wonder, as an educator, what we can do to further interest in full, academic mastery of English.

I was also surprised that they rely so heavily on DIBELS and AIMSweb to identify need. Our district has made it a requirement that all special ed students are tracked through AIMSweb in the junior high and high schools and while the program provides good data, there are times when we feel that the information we get (primarily in reading and writing) isn’t relevant to our high school students’ needs. However, I can see where these tests would be very applicable for a student working on the truly basic English skills. This may be something to suggest to our ELL teachers.