Using Sheltered Lessons Entry #8

A sheltered lesson incorporates reading, writing, speaking, and listening to benefit English language learners in the classroom throughout all content areas (http://www.learnnc.org/reference/sheltered+instruction). There are several essentials for planning and delivering a successful sheltered lesson.  They include:

• Preparing students by setting a purpose through the objective, rigor, and relevancy of the lesson
• Building background by connecting prior experiences and introducing them to new ones  (on a personal note- I believe that building and activating background may be the most crucial  strategy for instructing English language learners)
• Making lessons comprehensible by directly teaching vocabulary, orally and visually presenting information, modeling,and demonstrating or basically doing whatever it takes to help students understand
• Using explicit teaching strategies (predicting, questioning, problem solving, etc.)
• Interacting with the students and giving them opportunities to interact with their peers
• Practicing and applying new skills through hands on activities
• Successfully delivering the lesson by engaging the students 
• Reviewing and assessing through purposeful feedback and necessary reteaching
  (http://www.prel.org/products/paced/fall06/siop.pdf)

Teachers need to make sure they are considering the needs of English language learners in all content areas and a sheltered lesson plans make sure that this is considered and implemented by all teachers.  All of the components are important, but I believe that building background, explicit strategies, and interaction are extremely necessary.  The lesson I observed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REXecCISQYM&playnext=1&list=PL5651A086F796E232&index=9) demonstrated an effective use of these sheltered lesson components.  

At the start of the video the teacher engages the students in discussion of the necessary background knowledge.  She also states the purpose and objective for the students.
The teacher can also be seen interacting with the students asking them literal questions and challenging questions from the story they are reading.  She is very direct engaging the students with choral reading and rereading strategies.  The clip of the lesson is short, but to extend the lesson and incorporate more sheltered lesson strategies here are some things she could have done:

• used more visual aids (pictures and real life objects) to demonstrate the important points or vocabulary in the story
• include more peer interaction (discussing a question with their partner or reporting back to the class)
• including visual organizers and more cueing
• using hands on activities to apply the comprehension skills