Educator Cross-Share

Name: Aimee Galego

Modifying Fishtank Target Tasks to align with ACCESS and provide access for ELDs 1 & 2

The Challenge:

​

• EL students were not meeting their ACCESS targets. It was the one area on state data where targets were not being met.
• Student writing and writing instruction was not aligned vertically throughout the school
• Target tasks provided by Fishtank and the sample responses are not aligned with WIDA standards for lower ELD levels.
• Students were either copying answers from the board, or sitting and not engaging with grade-level text during the writing tasks

​

What challenge or need were you responding to?

• Aligning ESL support across the school and differentiating that support based on ELD levels

What were you curious about experimenting with?

• Using the format of ACCESS writing, how can we expose our students to the format while allowing them to appropriately engage with the text and build their language skills, specifically in the writing domain?

What We Tried

We tried these things

Create a co-teaching push-in planning template for ESL teachers to use to align content planning

​

Create modified target tasks, modeled after WIDA ACCESS

Modify Fishtank Content Assessments

Implement Thinking Maps

Push-In Planning Doc

template:

ACCESS Writing Sample Item

Modified Fishtank Target Task Samples:

Beginning of year, ELD 1 & 2

Nov/Dec ELD 1 & 2

Modified Fishtank Target Task Samples:

Modified Fishtank Target Task Samples:

Modified Fishtank Target Task Samples:

Fishtank Content Assessment

​

Modified Fishtank Assessment

​

I can be a good friend by

Thinking Maps:

​

The Eight Thinking Maps

Early impact

So with our students, we started to notice a shift...

• Students become more independent over time
• Having a consistent structure for writing, allowed for faster progress
• ACCESS writing was familiar
• Our school surpassed target growth goals for our EL population in year 1 of implementing these changes

What We Learned

Key ingredients: what made this work?

# 1 Collaboration: we arranged our schedule year 1 to include weekly CPT meetings for the ESL team (grade levels K2-6). During these meetings we shared our push-in plans and supported each other with planning, writing language objectives, and aligning our instructional focus on writing. Year 2 we had ESL teachers meet with grade level teams weekly, and as a Learning Specialist team monthly.

#2 Administrative support: regular meetings with admin; CPT meetings that focus on ESL supports

#3 School Wide Initiative: Making thinking visual using Thinking Maps and using those maps for writing support

Next steps...

I/We want to keep: Experiment with:

This year we changed our CPT model having ESL teachers meet with grade level teams instead of as an ESL team. We miss our time and hope to have our CPT back as an ESL team next year. Maybe we will alternate year to year.

Creating a bank of modified target tasks for each Fishtank unit for each grade

Next steps in how language objectives are best used with students; shared in a student-friendly and effective way