Why Collaboration Matters in Literacy Interventions for ELLs

What's important is that we really develop interdisciplinary teams, that we really are collaborative. I don't do anything without team of folks, and we all learn from one another because we have different perspectives, we have different specializations, and it's so important to really get the perspective and really integrate what we're doing. The success of the student really will depend upon how well we use what's going on in the classroom or what's going on in these extra specialized classroom or small group settings. When we align what we're doing in those small group settings to what's happening in the classroom and vice versa, the classroom to the small group setting, the small group setting to the classroom, the more we align and support those concepts and the practice, the better outcomes we get for our students. We get far better what we call effect sizes when we take the time to collaborate, know the students and have that reinforcement across that tier one, tier two, tier three.

And what I want to tell you is students in the general education classroom and the small group interventions, 30 minutes a day, and in that intense work in tier three, what we call tier three might be in special education services. Each and every one of those profiles improves in literacy, improves in language, but some of them improve at a faster pace. Some of them need more intensity. So the person in that most intense environment needs that work in a smaller group, with a person who has extreme amount of specialization to know how to teach language and literacy to our students. And what we don't want to see is separating out and working in silos. "Oh, this is my language time. This is my reading time. This is my writing time." No, it's listening and speaking, reading and writing, all integrated in everything that we do. And even if I'm working in English language development, it is stronger when I bring literacy to that.