Prompt 3: Goldenberg

One aspect of my advising teacher’s methods that I appreciated was her ability to change lesson plans according to the student. Almost every student in the classroom was on Hispanic decent, and many of which English was their second language. My main focus of tutoring was math review, where the teacher, Mrs. Smith, pulled the students with the lowest scores on the recent tests, quizzes, or homework aside to work with me for some small group activities. Because of this, I worked with some of the same students on a weekly basis, one of whom, Emily, never seemed to grasp the information. After every session, I would report back to Mrs. Smith on the students’ progress. Once I developed a relationship with some of the students, she stared filling me on the background of the students.


Emily, who always agreed that she understood the math problems, never could perform the problems correctly. After a few weeks of working with Emily, Mrs. Smith filled me in on the new way of grading Emily. Instead of looking at the final answer Emily arrived at, Mrs. Smith would study the process of how Emily arrived at her answer. Emily almost always used the correct formula and equation in her problem, but the simple math was usually wrong. Mrs. Smith would only take off a small amount of points instead of marking the question wrong because of Emily’s inability to do simple math. Emily was not encouraged to practice math at home, and because of the language barrier, math was not her main concern. From then on, I worked with Emily on addition, subtraction, and simply multiplication.


I appreciated Mrs. Smith’s ability to change her grading and assessment techniques in order to fit the diversity among her students and their sociocultural differences. I feel this related to Goldenberg in his article Teaching English Language Learners. Goldenberg writes that ELLs, English Language Learners, learn the same way as students whose main language is English; however, accommodations may be made to suit their needs. This student learned the same way as other students in the class, but because of her difficulties with other subjects, math often fell behind in her home studies. Emily shouldn’t have been punished because she had not mastered the basic math skills yet, but graded on the process she used in her work. Mrs. Smith altered the content instruction given to Emily and the “instruction [was] designed to promote content knowledge” (pg 42). I appreciated how Mrs. Smith worked with students of Spanish speaking backgrounds to achieve a common goal of content knowledge.