TIPS FOR LANGUAGE AND LEARNING SUPPORT STAFF

Where is the curriculum? A good question, a bold query, one often asked by language and learning support staff, and rightly so – if they are expected to help students access the curriculum,  yet have no idea what is being taught in classes, how can they do their job? Sadly, more often than not, this is the case for support staff: they enter classrooms blindly and are expected to jump in mid-way through a lesson to help, or they are handed assignments to be completed by students during a pull-out session that is going to take place that instant. But what if this didn’t have to be the case? What if language or learning support staff could take some measures to ensure that this constant feeling of playing catch-up could be changed to their feeling in control and being able to enter classrooms prepared with the differentiated/scaffolded materials necessary to assist learners? Here are some tips on how!

1. Find the Curriculum

To be able to support the curriculum, one first needs to find it, so go ahead and  look for it if it hasn’t already been provided to you. Ask around for copies of yearly planners and unit planners that apply to subject areas and grade levels you offer support to. If you can see a map of where students are headed, you will then at least be able to pull and/or create differentiated/scaffolded resources beforehand, come up with vocabulary lists of terms students will need to know in order to understand upcoming units, etc.

2. Ask for Copies of Resources

Unless working with a first-year teacher or a teacher who is teaching a new grade level, chances are they will be using repeat materials from the year before, which will make it easy for you as support to ask for copies of those resources as well as links to sites that will be used prior to the start of a new unit. With those in hand, you will be able to preview upcoming tasks and differentiate/scaffold as necessary. And wouldn’t it feel great not to be walking into a lesson blindly but rather having previewed resources ahead of time!

3. Ask for Copies of Rubrics

In addition to requesting materials and links to resources, one could also ask for copies of the rubrics that will be used and permission to modify them to better suit the needs of learners one supports. For example, if one is offering language support and using the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) or its equivalent as a means of measuring student progress, one could incorporate those objectives into the rubric as well. In this way, one would know prior to assisting a student with their task what the objectives were both curriculum and support-wise.

4. Create a Planning System

In an ideal scenario, support staff would be able to frequently meet with teachers to discuss their upcoming lesson plans; however, more often than not this isn’t possible, but given the number of options for creating shared documents, like Google Docs and Microsoft Team, you will be able to create a collaborative document in which teachers can easily fill-in their upcoming plans on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, without having to meet face-to-face. And to give you an idea of what this document would look like, we have created one below that would require teachers to note activities and assessments they would like support staff to assist students with. In this way, support staff would never again enter a classroom blind!

5. Suggest Shared Spaces

Support staff could find themselves weaving in and out of classrooms all day, offering assistance here and there, but instead, what if they could maximize their impact by leaving differentiated/scaffolded materials behind for students to work on/with when they were not available? If this is an option for you, simply ask teachers in whose classrooms you work if you can have a dedicated space to store resources for your learners – perhaps a designated shelf, or a few baskets on a table, or a section of a classroom’s library to put books on; it doesn’t have to be much and yet it would make such a difference for learners to have materials to work on/with when one wasn’t there!

While there may be challenges facing language or learning support staff, the whereabouts of the curriculum shouldn’t be one of them, and these strategies will enable support staff to walk into any classroom knowing full well what learners will be needing support with and the means to provide it! Do you have any other tips you would like to add? We’d love for you to share them!

Further Reading

Using Classroom Walls to Extend Student Learning
How to Run a Successful Brainstorming Session
How to Become a More Empathetic Teacher
How to Create Ebooks and Flipbooks for Your Students
How to Incorporate the Use of Mother Tongue in Your Classroom