Margot Gottlieb. [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Margot Gottlieb has devoted her professional career to improving teaching and learning through assessment. She specializes in designing assessment and accountability systems for English language learners in pre-K to 12 settings, evaluating language education programs, and developing English language proficiency standards. Having been a teacher and administrator for the past several decades, Margo has provided technical assistance and professional development to governments, school districts, publishers, universities, and professional organizations internationally and across the United States. In addition, she has served on numerous national assessment and expert advisory panels. Margo is the director of the evaluation and evaluation for the Illinois Resource Center and lead developer for the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment consortium. She has a Ph.D. in public policy analysis, evaluation research, and program design.
[MUSIC PLAYING] MARGO GOTTLIEB: English language learners, as you know, have been this burgeoning population. And for so many years, assessment has not been treated equitably for these students. And so, to me, the rest of the world must see in the evaluation of English language learners as making a difference in terms of how we can better educate this very important, viable, and growing school population. Suppose we want to educate English language learners with fair measures and ensure that instruction and assessments are performance-based and authentic. In that case, we also have to realize that our formative assessments have to be as thoughtful as our summative assessments. And that all our educational decisions on English language learners are based on multiple criteria, collected over various points in time, through numerous data sources, if nothing else. And so, we gain multiple perspectives on who these children are and how we can best serve them. In identifying English language learners, we have to move beyond just using a single data source. Yes, it’s true that most school districts now have home language surveys, but there might be a limited amount of information. And coupling that with a single test or a screener won’t give teachers the information they need to make instructional decisions about how to group students. What is the student’s English language literacy? Do they have literacy in their native language? And so, upon initial entry into a school district, I always encourage, to the extent feasible, to try to collect assessment information in the native language as well as English. Because we know, first of all, the instructional approaches will be different for students who have a stronger foundation in their native language than those who may not have had formal schooling in that native language. We have to look at not just a screener, which would be considered a test at one point in time, but gathering assessment data from multiple data sources. So you might have an extended literacy survey, even though it’s self-reported data, a sense of the child’s use of language, inside and outside the school. The parent’s perceptions of language use inside and outside of school. The continuity, where students have gone to school both inside and outside the United States. So all that information is gathered to make that initial determination whether this linguistically and culturally diverse student is indeed an English language learner and would qualify for language support. One critical piece that should be part of any initial identification of English language learners is to ascertain their proficiency in not one but two languages. Irrespective of whether you’re implementing a transitional bilingual education program, a transitional program of instruction, a dual language education program, if you’re in a rural district, an urban community, or a suburban district. Upon initial entry, when parents or other family members are appearing along with the student, it’s at that time you must get some information about that native language because that’s going to impact placement, and it’s going to move instruction.
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