Post # 26 The Benefits of Multisensory Math for ELL's

As this course evolves to address the needs of all learners, I am continually reminded of the many students who are impacted by language deficits not only those with disabilities.  I have worked on occasion with teachers of a unique group of ELL students, those who have gaps in school attendance in their home countries.  Some of these students have had severe circumstances which have affected their ability to even attend school and thus, through no fault of their own, have huge gaps in content learning.  Many have suffered trauma.  They are in need of a safe learning environment and one which can nurture them to feel whole again.  They need a place where learning builds confidence and where they can feel safe to learn even basic skills. 

The multisensory approach is particularly appropriate for these teachers and students because of its emphasis on instructional language.  As I work with these teachers I am continually impressed with their willingness to embrace even difficult concepts.  In my most recent professional development session, we spent the entire day on pre-algebra and algebra, instruction intended for students performing at an elementary level of math.  Why?  Many of these students are adolescents, young adults who will be entering the work force sooner rather than later.  These teachers have a heavy load to bear.  They understand the importance of the vertical approach to content mentioned in the last post. They must navigate the curriculum with students who are often conceptually at the level of place value and regrouping and move them through multiplication/division concepts to fractions and decimal fractions in a very short amount of time. 

Again I am very impressed with the dedication of these teachers who see even older students in need of basic skills.  Even with this knowledge, we have students struggling to learn a new language, as they find themselves in a new culture with high educational demands.  How then do we address the need for filling those gaps and bridging the great divide between what they know and what they need to know. 

In our work, the teachers and I are exploring ways to use manipulatives to model and then ways to pair the instructional language of integers, linear functions, graphs and grids to those manipulatives.  We are finding that unifix cubes work well for many of these concepts.  We build linear functions with the cubes - which at this level I call "alge-blocks."  We use the state high school standards exam language of "constant rate of change" and "starting value."  The students explore real life applications of the algebra before we even introduce numbers. 

Many of the dedicated teachers who work with these students are not math educators themselves.  They are English as a second language teachers who are teaching content. They must find a way to teach the language while teaching content that is at more than a basic level.  We know that even many elementary school general educators tend to teach math the way they were taught.  So it may also be for the ESOL instructor.  The district has invested in professional development to support these teachers.  As I work with them, I see them embrace new methods to meet the demands of serving these challenging students.  There is immediacy to their work and though it is frightening to consider what some of these students face, the commitment of their instructors is heartening.