The teacher uses understanding of individual differences and diverse cultures and communities to ensure inclusive learning environments that enable each learner to meet high standards.
My work:
I created this brochure to address the specific needs of Korean American students in a classroom context. It is important for teachers to be aware of cultural considerations for their students in order to promote an inclusive and respectful classroom environment where all students feel safe and welcomed.
This paper was written as an extra assignment to receive honors credit in my Teaching ESL Methods course. Because I had spent the previous summer teaching English in Bulgaria, my professor and I talked about a possible topic and decided that I would research the Bulgarian language in order to find specific difficulties that Bulgarian learners of English might face. As an ESL teacher, I believe that researching students’ heritage languages is important to understand their backgrounds and possible difficulties they might face while learning English.
Note: This paper won a $1500 scholarship from the Alpha Chi Honor Society. The rights to it are theirs, so please do not reproduce it.
Teaching_Bulgarian_Learners_of_English
I chose to complete a senior honors project at Bridgewater, in which a student chooses a topic of interest to him or her and completes a full independent study of it. I chose to research how English language learners are selected for gifted programs, since ELLs are often underidentified for those programs. I interviewed eleven gifted and ELL program coordinators and synthesized my literature review, results, and discussion into a final research paper. This project not only greatly increased my knowledge of this topic, but it also helped me learn skills of time management and professionalism as I carried out the project over the course of a semester under the supervision of my academic adviser.
Evaluating Gifted Program Identification Procedures for English Language Learners
Rachael Sloan 