Teaching with and through Maps

Teaching Strategies

While creating this unit and each lesson within the unit, I relied heavily on practices I learned in West Ed’s Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) trainings, which I attended over the course of the 2024-25 school year. A QTEL impact study, which took part in Austin Independent and San Diego Unified School Districts from 2006-2010, found that the trainings resulted in “improvements in student engagement, motivation, and classroom interactions” as well as a “decrease in the achievement gap between ELLs and all other students in all content areas.” In Austin, specifically, there were “substantial gains in the state standardized test pass rates, especially for ELLs” as well as “standardized test [performance] growth that outpaced statewide growth.”³. 

Another, more recent QTEL impact study took place from the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2024 at Pauoa Elementary School in Hawaii. Strong support from the school’s complex (Hawaii’s district-equivalent) coupled with QTEL training from WestEd resulted in a drastic increase of students on track for English proficiency; originally at 44% in the 2020-21 school year, the school’s EL population was 71.4% on track by 2023-24.⁴ I am hopeful that similar gains will take place in my classroom through the dedicated use of proven QTEL strategies.

QTEL relies on strategies involving communication. A 2018 study of native English speakers from the University of Madison-Wisconsin who were learning an “artificial” language found that those who were assigned to production learning of a second language (expressing oneself through writing or speaking) learned more of the second language than those who were assigned to comprehension learning (interpretation of language through listening and reading).⁵

The following are teaching strategies designed to encourage full participation from all students in the classroom via production learning:  

Anticipatory Guide

An anticipatory guide is a method of activating prior knowledge in which students are provided a list of statements with which they can agree or disagree and explain their reasoning. Students can first complete this guide independently to allow for think time. Then, students discuss their guide in partner pairs. One student will start by reading the first statement. This student will use sentence starters “I agree with this statement because…” or “I disagree with this statement because…” to communicate their reasoning with their partner. Once the first partner is finished, the second will respond using the same prompt. Then this student will read the next statement out loud and the process repeats itself.⁶

Reading in Four Voices

This reading strategy involves a text that has been written in four different fonts: bold, italic, underlined, and plain. Each student selects which font they will read. Students read through the text together at least twice (if not three times) to improve reading fluency. According to the New Zealand Ministry of Education, because this strategy focuses on chunks of words instead of entire texts, language learners can process overall meaning of the reading at a greater depth.⁷  

Sort and Order

Sorting tasks involve providing student groups (of four, if possible) with envelopes filled with pre-cut cards. Taking turns, without showing the others, one student selects a card from the envelope. This student must describe verbally what they see on the card before putting it face-up on the table. The next student repeats this procedure; however, this student must also state whether they think the card they have should go before or after the card that is already placed on the table and situate their card accordingly. This process repeats itself until all of the cards are face-up on the table. Once all cards are visible, students can decide as a group if they think any cards should be moved.⁸

Gap-Bridging Activities

Gap-bridging activities are partner activities during which students are given unique sets of information, which are effectively two distinct pieces of a puzzle. Without showing their partner, student pairs must verbally communicate their information to one another in order to successfully complete the task at hand.⁹

Jigsaw Activities

Developed in 1971 by Elliot Aronson, jigsaws are cooperative learning activities in which small groups of students collaborate to learn about and become “experts” on their assigned or chosen topic.¹⁰ Within each group, students are assigned either to be teachers or learners; the teachers stay at their original station and communicate their newfound “expertise” to their classmates, while the learners rotate between stations to learn about what the other groups became “experts” on. Once the learners return to their original groups, they become the roles are reversed, and the “students” are teaching the “teachers” about what they learned from all other groups. Studies of jigsaw activities in undergraduate courses show that jigsaws are most effective when structured to include “positive interdependence between students, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, emphasis on interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing.”¹¹