ESL and content teachers’ collaboration

Previous studies attest to the benefits of this collaboration, such as teachers’ shared expertise (Peercy, Ditter, & DeStefano, Reference Peercy, Ditter and DeStefano2016), strengthened collaborative partnerships (Peercy, Martin-Beltrán, Yazan, & DeStefano, Reference Peercy, Martin-Beltrán, Yazan and DeStefano2017), and positive influences on the ESL students’ learning outcomes in content area classrooms (Dove & Honigsfeld, Reference Dove and Honigsfeld2018). However, the benefits have not been achieved without challenges, such as the ESL teachers’ perceived inferior status when compared to the content teacher in the content area classrooms (Ahmed Hersi, Horan, & Lewis, Reference Ahmed Hersi, Horan and Lewis2016), conflicting teaching schedules (Peercy et al., Reference Peercy, Ditter and DeStefano2016), and insufficient collaborative planning time (Giles, Reference Giles2018), especially with rigorous discipline-specific standards in secondary classrooms.

ESL students’ participation

This study views ESL students’ learning outcomes through the lens of students’ participation in co-taught classrooms. More directly, it defines ESL students’ participation through their observable classroom behaviors, speech acts, actions, and work samples. Earlier studies show how content teachers’ beliefs (Yoon, Reference Yoon2008), positionings (Harklau Reference Harklau2000), content-specific pedagogical practices (Klingner & Vaughn, Reference Klingner and Vaughn2000; Duff, Reference Duff2001; Pappamihiel, Reference Pappamihiel2002), and perceived students’ language proficiency (Martin-Beltrán, Reference Martin-Beltrán2010) afforded or constrained ESL students’ participation in content area classrooms. This participation influenced ESL students’ affective factors (Pappamihiel, Reference Pappamihiel2002), anxiety levels (Duff, Reference Duff2001), and interactions with other students (Miller, Reference Miller2000) and teachers (Harklau Reference Harklau2000). Thus, little attention has been given to ESL students’ participation, and no known studies report ESL students’ participation as an outgrowth of ESL and content teachers’ collaboration.

Methodology

Building on this earlier research, the following research question guided this qualitative case study: How does ESL and content teachers’ collaboration influence ESL students’ classroom participation in four collaboratively taught eighth-grade content area classrooms in the Southeastern U.S.? This study drew from data generated through an ESL teacher's collaboration with four content teachers in language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies who taught the same four ESL students. Data collection spanned two collaborative cycles with each content teacher separately. The qualitative data methods included three semi-structured teacher interviews, two collaborative planning sessions, two collaborative teaching sessions, two collaborative viewing sessions, and ESL students’ work samples.

Data analysis comprised of three coding cycles (Saldaña, Reference Saldaña2013) and employed grounded theory techniques (Charmaz, Reference Charmaz2006), which involved coding the data with each content teacher separately and then examining the similar themes across all content teachers.

Findings

The findings showed that teacher collaboration became a space for ESL and content teachers to adopt planning and teaching acts that afforded opportunities for ESL students’ participation. To this aim, this paper does not intend to describe fully the outgrowth of ESL students’ participation through ESL and content teachers’ collaboration (see Giles, Reference Giles2019 for a more detailed explanation); rather, this paper summarizes how content and ESL teachers’ planning and teaching acts contributed to ESL student's increased participation. ESL and content teachers’ collaboration led to the creation of collaborative and performance-based lesson activities that created opportunities for ESL students’ increased task completion and work quality in the content area classrooms.

To exemplify, the lesson activities in language arts involved a collaborative group handout and a performance-based skit about A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. In the second collaborative lesson, students performed their understanding of the play's conflict in a student-created skit to meet the content and language objectives. First, students worked in collaborative groups to write a skit and then imagined they were on a reality television show to resolve the characters’ conflict. The script shows that the ESL student accessed and mastered the content objectives by assuming an imagined role, analyzing one of the play's main conflicts, and using appropriate declarative and interrogative sentence structures. The language arts teacher commented on an ESL student's engaged expressions and increased participation in the following Collaborative Viewing Session (CVS) #2:

The language arts teacher noted the ESL student's heightened participatory behaviors (e.g., ‘not straight reading off the page,’ and ‘looking at them’). The teacher thought these behaviors conveyed the ESL student's ‘confidence’ in demonstrating his understanding of the lesson objectives. This ESL student's skit shows how the creation of performance-based activities promoted opportunities for ESL student's participation in a collaboratively taught language arts classroom.

Another example took place in the collaboratively taught mathematics classroom where the lesson activities ranged from scientific notation practice to a kinesthetic dance activity to learn geometric vocabulary related to parallel lines cut by a transversal. During the last interview, the mathematics teacher attributed ESL students’ increased vocabulary knowledge to the collaborative lesson design saying:

Following the ‘moving’ activity, students used an adapted vocabulary four square as the ‘justification’ activity and a ‘coloring sheet’ to construct sentences and visually show their vocabulary comprehension. The lesson design enabled students to participate in multiple learning modalities (e.g., auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) to meet the content and language objectives. Hence, this lesson design ‘really helped them,’ which indicates the math teacher's perceptions that ESL students participated and showed increased vocabulary comprehension (e.g., ‘this group has been the best at knowing their vocabulary’).

Further, in the collaboratively taught science classroom, students engaged in activities, such as a turn-and-talk partner activity about covalent bonds and a collaborative group game activity to learn about transverse and compressional waves. In commenting on the turn-and-talk activity, the science teacher reported that an ESL student ‘participated way more than usual’ (Reflective Journal #1). When asked to explain this participation in more detail, the science teacher credited the language strategies learned in collaboration with the ESL teacher, stating, ‘I've learned that some little tricks from you as far as when you were using the pictorial explanations on that document for the kids and the turn and talk thing’ (Interview #2). Thus, the ESL students’ increased participation is attributed to the lesson activities that afforded them opportunities for participation.

Lastly, ESL students participated in activities, such as a jigsaw reading activity and a partner debate, which contributed to increased participation in the collaboratively taught social studies classroom. The social studies teacher lauded one particular ESL student's ‘leadership role’ during the debate, stating, ‘Her quality of work was great, and when she shared, she did a good job of further explaining her perspective’ (Reflective Journal #2). The social studies teacher elaborated on the ESL students’ participation during the debate and believed that clear directions and the language strategies influenced the ESL students’ participation. She remarked, ‘I think the way we set up the sentence frames and walked them through it … like I think the confidence aspect was a huge reason why they shared with their partner’ (Interview #3). Therefore, the use of language strategies and the scaffolded instructional method paved the way for a fruitful debate where students displayed ‘confidence’ and shared with their partners.

Pedagogical implications and future directions

This research study affirms how teachers’ collaborative pedagogical practices can serve to increase ESL students’ participation when teachers share expertise and work together for the shared goal of ESL students’ increased learning outcomes. Moreover, ESL students’ participation is socioculturally-constructed (Harklau Reference Harklau2000; Kayi-Aydar, Reference Kayi-Aydar2014) based on the content teacher's beliefs and perceptions. This participation manifests itself through affective characteristics, such as the student's ‘confidence’ in content area classrooms. Lastly, this study attends to the content and ESL teachers’ planning and teaching acts that paved the way for ESL students’ increased participation. For this reason, this study calls for additional studies across multiple content areas in secondary schools about the influences of ESL and content teachers’ collaboration on student participation.