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Teacher Tips: Effective Collaboration with ELL Paraprofessionals

By: Barbara Law and Mary Eckes (2010)

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Paraprofessionals (teacher's aides) can play an important roles in the success of English language learners. They may work with ELLs or bilingual students in a variety of settings, including:

  • in the ELL classroom, content classroom, or mainstream classroom
  • during class, before school, or after school
  • in small groups or one-on-one

Establishing a positive and mutually supportive relationship with your paraprofessional can make a critical difference in how well you work together. One of the most important steps in that process is to clarify roles and establish expectations about topics like interpreting from the beginning. Authors Barbara Law and Mary Eckes offer classroom teachers some tips for getting started in this excerpt from The More-Than-Just-Surviving Handbook. (Portage & Main Press, 2010) Additional suggestions are available in Tips for Paraprofessionals Working with ELLs, an article written for Colorín Colorado by veteran teacher Michelle Lawrence.

The Ideal Aide

The ideal classroom aide has all of the following characteristics:

  • Good English-language skills — not just "some" English, but proficiency in reading and writing
  • A positive attitude
  • A working knowledge of classroom management: how to motivate students, how to discipline, how to reinforce what you teach
  • Cultural savvy; enough understanding of both cultures to work, at ease, with both
  • Patience

An aide with all these qualities would be wonderful, but you may not be able to find someone matching this description in your district. Certainly, the decision to hire an aide should not be based solely on his or her knowledge of the ELL students' language. Good English skills are far more essential. Other useful skills are a working knowledge of reading theory and some knowledge of basic ELL principles.

Although most of our discussion relates to working with paid aides, parent or bilingual volunteers may also be used in the same capacity.

Using Your Classroom Aide

You must first decide whether the classroom aide is there merely to be a clerk or will have a more responsible role within the classroom. We believe that your aide is a valuable resource, and though keeping records, grading papers, and running off photocopies are all useful tasks, your aide can be used to advantage in many other areas.

Some teachers give their aide complete responsibility for their ELL students. This may be tempting, as you have many other students to work with, but the aide, who lacks both training and experience, is not the teacher. Your aide should be there to complement your role, not to take over and work exclusively with ELL students. You, the teacher, must be the driving force and role model, give clear directions, set expectations and parameters, and use the aide to your advantage, capitalizing on his or her strengths and personality.

The Teacher's Role

Your main role with regards to an aide is to offer guidance and supervision, as well as to provide an environment that is conducive to rapport and open communication among you, your aide, and your students. Here are some suggestions for going about it:

Strengths and weaknesses

Find out the strengths and weaknesses of the aide and what he or she feels most comfortable doing. Ask your aide for written (rather than verbal) responses to the following questions:

  • What do you — or could you — do especially well in this classroom?
  • What do you feel unprepared to do in the classroom?

Expectations

Clarify your expectations of the aide. We suggest that both you and the aide respond, in writing, to the following four-part question (provide space on the paper for four or five different thoughts):

What do you see as each person's responsibilities in the following relationships:

  • Teacher's responsibility to the teacher's aide
  • Teacher's responsibility to the students
  • Teacher's aide's responsibility to the teacher
  • Teacher's aide's responsibility to the students

The answers to these questions will alert you to your aide's expectations of you and to possible differences between your two sets of expectations. It will also help you define your perception of your own role and responsibilities. There is nothing as destructive to a good working relationship as two people operating under different assumptions about their roles. If these aren't spelled out and clarified at the beginning, frustration and resentment can lead to job dissatisfaction, unhappiness, or an inability to work together, which may lead to the aide resigning his or her position.

Roles and responsibilities

Clearly define duties and responsibilities for both yourself and the aide, and draw up a written contract that outlines these. This contract can be renegotiated from time to time and referred to throughout the term. In "The Aide's Role" section, we give suggestions for appropriate tasks.

Building a positive relationship

The following steps will help your aide, particularly if he/she is from another country, become more comfortable with your school and classroom.

  • Meeting with the aide: Before school begins, meet with the aide (let's call him Mr. Chun), and help him to become familiar with the classroom, the materials, and textbooks. Make sure he also knows the school jargon, such as what CTBS, and SAT, and so on mean.
  • Getting to know the school: Give Mr. Chun a complete tour of the school, and introduce him to support staff, the secretaries, the principal, the nurse, the counselor, and so on.
  • Introducing the aide to the students: Introduce Mr. Chun to the students. Use the same title they use for you, to demonstrate that they are to treat him with the same respect. If you are known as Mrs. Burton, he will go by Mr. Chun, not Martin.
  • Helping the aide become familiar with the U.S. school system: Make sure he knows the philosophy of North American education, as well as your own personal educational philosophy. Many aides come from countries that have philosophies much different from ours. To an immigrant from Japan, for example, American classrooms can seem overly noisy and chaotic, children rude and disrespectful, and discipline nonexistent.
  • Discussing ELL best practices: Make sure Mr. Chun has at least a basic knowledge of the principles of ELL teaching and learning. When Barb taught in a self-contained classroom, she welcomed the assistance of an ELL intern from the local university. He worked two days a week for 10 weeks, participated in planning sessions, and carried on many conversations with Barb concerning learning styles and philosophies of education. But after he had left his internship, his final report to his professor stated unequivocally that there should have been many more drills and that the teacher should have been focusing on grammar. Even after 10 weeks of involvement, he was unable to accept established second-language teaching theories and continued to compare Barb's teaching methods unfavorably to those methods used when he was a student in his own country. As a result, Barb was never quite sure how much he had tried to undermine what she had been doing while he was working with her students — a discomfiting feeling.
  • Discussing classroom planning: Discuss lesson plans, objectives, and the implementation of your long and short-term goals. Make sure Mr. Chun knows exactly what you want him to do, either in conjunction with what you are doing in class, or as extension and enrichment. Figure 9.2 below provides a sample planning sheet you can use with either paid or volunteer aides. The "comments" section is to be used for observations and perceptions of how the day went, who did particularly well, and who had difficulty with the material. These comments are particularly useful if your time is limited, or if the aide leaves each day before you have a chance to discuss work with him. His assessment will also be useful when planning new activities.
  • Explaining the lesson's objective: Make sure your aide knows the why as well as the how to. Often good ideas go awry because the aide doesn't know the reasoning behind the lesson plan. For example, if you ask Mr. Chun to do a Total Physical Response activity with some students and, without understanding the principle behind it, he has the students repeat every command after him, he is defeating the purpose of TPR.
  • Discussing first language use: Clarify when it is important to use the first language. Having someone who is able to jumpstart comprehension by explaining in the first language, build background knowledge, clarify misunderstanding, and affirm the validity of the first language is an invaluable asset in a classroom. But there is a fine line between being an asset and being a crutch — one that you and the aide need to work out between yourselves.
  • Asking for input: If your aide works consistently with small groups of ELL students, he may know them better than you do and may have a clearer insight into their strengths, weaknesses, and possible reasons for behavior problems.
  • Capitalizing on his strengths: Find out if he has any special talents. For instance, Barb's aide, Emma, had abundant artistic talent and enjoyed making posters, wall displays, and awards for the students. Midori was a librarian and could always find a book appropriate for each child.
  • Tapping his knowledge of his own culture, traditions, and values: He has the special perspective of a member of a specific culture and can bring an understanding and richness to the classroom that would be lacking otherwise. He can help you and your students understand how culture influences people's way of perceiving things, and how different behaviors result from language or cultural differences. For example, when Mary was teaching a lesson on body parts, the students were not responding as enthusiastically as she had hoped. This was suddenly made clear when her aide pointed out that she was touching them on the head and shoulders, sacred areas to Buddhists.
  • Assume responsibilities: If he is comfortable with it, allow him to assume responsibility in his area of expertise. Some aides enjoy responsibility, others prefer to be led. Still others are very conscious of what-is-aiding and what-is-teaching and will not cross that line.

Teacher-Aide Planning Sheet

Teacher-Aide Planning Sheet

The Aide's Role

Your aide's principal role is to complement you in the classroom, helping to carry out your lesson plans, and supplementing and enriching what you have taught. The most helpful areas are:

Translating (if the aide is bilingual)

  • When there is a breakdown in communication or a problem, acting as interpreter to explain or sort out the difficulty
  • Translating school notices, permission slips, and so on
  • Providing initial orientation, and explaining school and classroom rules and regulations to students and parents

Working with individual or small groups of students

  • Developing LEA stories
  • Developing reading readiness skills
  • Reading to students
  • Working on math concepts that ELL students may not understand
  • Breaking down activities into smaller, more comprehensible units for students who need extra explanation
  • Coordinating with content-area teachers, previewing a lesson, then recapping it for ELL students in their language
  • Reviewing and reinforcing concepts taught to the class as a whole

Acting as a bridge with the community

  • Attending parent-teacher conferences and acting as translator
  • Getting permission slips signed
  • Accompanying parents to school

Community Aides

Community aides, who liaise between the school and the community, play quite a different role from classroom aides. They can be a powerful force and can exert much more influence on parents and community than you can, so English-language skills are not as important for community aides as the ability to command respect. In many Asian neighborhoods, a man who has status as a respected member of the community is far more influential than someone whose English might be better, but who has no status. One elementary school in northern California has an older Hmong man as a volunteer. He is a clan leader and so receives great respect and deference from the local Hmong population. When there is a discipline problem, Mr. Lee steps in, and the problem no longer exists. He is the community liaison, interpreter, and elder, and is, by all accounts, a man to be reckoned with. His pervasive influence is invaluable to the school; he is an ally they both appreciate and depend upon.

Video Interviews: Paraprofessionals and ELLs

These interview excerpts highlight the important roles paraprofessionals play in supporting ELL instruction and family outreach. The following educators are featured:

The More-Than-Just-Surviving Handbook, 3rd edition,. ©2010 by Barbara Law and Mary Eckes. Pgs. 298-303. Reprinted by permission of Portage & Main Press. 1-800-667-9673.

Browse in:  ELL Topics A-Z > Teaching & Instruction

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