PORTFOLIO OF AN EAL TEACHER by Svetlana Mikhaylichenko

The most revolutionary idea I learned as a result of my studies for the IAMLLs course was the idea of scaffolding assessments. I regularly hear the "we need a baseline" referring to assessing students, and the biggest takeaway for me as an EAL teacher is using assessments to inform my teaching, gain as much information about students as possible by means of assessment to give them what they really need, not just what the test scores provide the information on.
We as a school were just starting to move away from "English only" philosophy, I heard less of "no Russian", but other outdated practices continued to strongly influence our assessments, data collection, and everyday functioning: we discontinued providing accommodations to emergent multilinguals during standardized assessments because again "we needed a baseline"; classroom teachers did not speak Russian to clarify their students' understanding even though the majority of teachers were Russian, because "English was (is) our language of inclusion".

As a "promoter of change", I can do the following to advocate for change:

- familiarize and provide my team with multilingual resources I have access to (books, articles, etc.)

- try to get more information about how my students learn by trying to incorporate the ideas from week three readings (summary in two languages during the reading assessment to see whether the student needs to work on comprehension or vocabulary, analyzing the students' miscues to learn where reading difficulties originate from (pronunciation/vocabulary), etc.

-promote the use of scaffolds not only during instruction but also during assessments.
- train students to take specific tests so they know what to expect and have less "assessment anxiety".

As for the standardized assessments, we need to resume providing accommodations. My first action suggestion is to start questioning ourselves: why are we testing using both norm- (because they are worldwide recognized?) and criterion-based (student-centered) assessments? Second, we need to document accommodations and purposes for parents, teachers and administators. Administrators should be aware of current practices and promote those changes. And the most important actions must be driven by the notion that "education is about collaboration and support, not punishment". (D. Clausen, 2017)

Also, please see my work on scaffolding assessments here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ZKc7q4RV9S6qhBtpNxyF0STiDvo-vFIzDXP0IdgOT8/edit

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