SIFE: Meeting them Where They Are

Description

Finding the right place to start when working with migrant Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE) is important when designing an appropriate and effective instructional plan. In this workshop, we will discuss the useful resources about SIFE students available through the school (NYSESLAT scores and proficiency levels, SIFE screeners, Reading levels, IEPs) and how Migrant Educators can use this information, along with the MEP needs assessment, to inform their practice. From there, we will discuss effective activities and strategies that can be used with students from the first day. 

Engaging in informal, authentic oral practice in English is a good place to start, and helps students develop early English proficiency by giving them opportunities to practice saying the information that they are frequently required to produce in school.  Basic question and answer sequences and conversation starters will be introduced and modeled in the workshop, and participants will be encouraged to try them out. These serve to simultaneously break the ice of those initial meetings, and to give students the first building blocks toward meaningful communication.

The activities in this workshop are intended for use with SIFE students in middle school and high school, who are receiving regular instruction from the METS program.

The content in this presentation is geared towards serving the migrant populations in New York State as defined under Title I, Part C and the approved State Service Delivery Plan, and may NOT be appropriate to all situations.

Objectives/Learning Targets

Participants will

1. Learn how to use resources from the school district and MEP needs assessment to inform an instructional plan for SIFE students.
2. Practice question and answer sequences and conversation starters to break the ice and develop early English proficiency.

Presented/Developed by

Beth Clark-Gareca, Ph.D.

• Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the TESOL Program
• Director, Clinically Rich Intensive Teacher Institute
• Department of Teaching and Learning
• School of Education, SUNY New Paltz

About the Presenter

Beth Clark-Gareca, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the TESOL program at SUNY New Paltz. She also directs SUNY New Paltz’s Clinically Rich Intensive Teacher Institute in ESOL, a NYSED grant initiative designed to better meet the needs of ELLs in the state of New York. Her research interests include classroom-based assessment for ELLs, second language acquisition, and teacher education in K-12 contexts. Before coming to SUNY New Paltz, Beth was a lecturer in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Beth has taught ESL and Spanish in a variety of educational settings including K-12 classrooms, adult literacy programs, community colleges, and undergraduate and graduate academic programs. She enjoys international teaching and has strong ties to Wuhan University in Wuhan, China, where she taught for five summers, and to the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, in Córdoba, Argentina where she was a Fulbright Scholar. Her current projects explore the linguistic worlds of students with interrupted formal education (SIFE) in secondary classrooms, and focuses on assets-based thinking about students and their scholastic trajectories.