Lockdown is disruptive for all students – but especially for EAL learners

The Canadian School in Guadalajara is one of three in a chain of schools in Mexico that combined offer a bilingual education to just over 1,300 students from nursery to grade 9. Almost all the students are Mexican and almost all are English language learners.

In common with all schools in Mexico, the Canadian Schools in Guadalajara, Leon and Queretaro have been closed for in-person teaching since last March – with all classes being conducted remotely. They are not due to open fully until the next academic year. Naturally, this presents a challenge for any school, but particularly for one with students whose main language of instruction – English – isn’t usually spoken at home. Understandably, the school wanted to know how students’ language skills would fare during lockdown if they were not immersed in spoken English at home, what would that mean for their literacy and how could teachers best support them.

Adapting to lockdown

Maureen Baraniecki, Assistant Director responsible for instructional practice and assessment, admits that initially the school didn’t get everything right when it came to remote learning. “We soon discovered that the children didn’t fully engage if the learning sessions were 45 minutes long. There were too many distractions. Now we have shorter blocks of full-class sessions, with opportunities to socially connect as well as a focus on the learning topic. But with core instruction, particularly for elementary and early years, we’re grouping students into smaller groups for much shorter periods of time – usually 15, 20 or 30 minutes depending on the age of the child.”

The groups are small – typically with three to five students – and can be very targeted on areas like guiding reading strategy. Maureen says this is where the New Group Reading Test (NGRT) became invaluable. “Through analysis of NGRT we were able to decide how to cluster the students and based on assessment results we were able to determine the curriculum expectations that would best suit student needs.” Students can be in several overlapping small tuition groups and also receive one-on-one support for specific competencies.

“Once you go through the NGRT process you truly value how the analysis of data is applied consistently across the grades. We’re able to know what we’re looking for in terms of the components of literate behaviours, what are the students’ strengths, where there are gaps or missing pieces and what we really need to address.”

Using NGRT for curriculum adaptation

Until a few years ago, the school had relied on teacher assessment, which although benchmarked wasn’t applied consistently and tended to be subjective. NGRT was gradually rolled out across all grades in all three of the group’s schools and proved a much more reliable assessment tool. But it was during lockdown that its assessment strengths came to the fore – because the assessment allows teachers to pinpoint gaps in student knowledge, highlight where they might need help, and adapt the curriculum accordingly. “We now use this data to say, the writer’s perspective wasn’t something our students did well on,” Maureen explains. “Or when it comes to inference and deductive reasoning – not a lot of evidence of much of that happening.”

Maureen emphasises that NGRT is not just valuable for the Standard Age Scores (SAS) in the group report, it’s also “the analysis of the reading behaviours that are captured through that assessment process. It gave us a tool that allowed our teachers with guidance of our literacy coaches to dig and sort and question and look. And that is where NGRT has served us to the maximum.”

That in-depth interrogation was incredibly useful for her colleagues, Maureen explains. “All teachers understand differentiation. But the data allowed it to be very precise. We were able to see how assessment can truly inform and drive instruction.” It allowed teachers to see, for instance, the types of questions students were most and least successful in answering, and the thinking and metacognitive skills they tended to apply.

How to assess

Maureen advises, however, that teachers need to be given time to work with the NGRT data to allow them to dig in and extrapolate what it reveals about particular students. When schools do that, “because of the organisation of the NGRT, you’re able to break it into different areas of focus – reading to remember, reading to understand, phonemic awareness, word study – and a student’s name can show up in some or all of these areas. But from there we can target the most pressing need for the student and put that instruction in place for them.”

Mexico’s blanket school lockdown meant that NGRT in-school assessments weren’t possible. So, while fully aware of the potential difficulties surrounding the reliability of results, the Canadian School trialled doing them remotely: “We realised the integrity of the data was compromised initially because we saw huge jumps in the kids’ data – the parents were helping,” says Maureen. The school then adopted a more rigorous approach: “We booked testing sessions with no more than three students at a time and had the parents film their child doing NGRT independently – the child had to wear headphones so there was no communication between the two. That way we had real time evidence. And we saw a correction in the scores. In the mid-year assessment cycle, we only used marker students – not the whole class – to take the temperature. Come spring, we’ll assess everyone to compare scores to the beginning of the year.”

Interventions and impact

The school did, however, notice a chance in reading abilities during lockdown. Maureen says in pre-lockdown days students tended to be better at decoding but had more difficulties with recall and comprehension. “During lockdown recall skills not only held up well but improved – to the point where some of these kids are where you would expect native speakers to be. That tells us that we’ve done great work with vocabulary development and word meaning and their ability to capture the key idea.” Maureen says teachers will continue with that work to sustain that improvement, “but now we’ll start to get into the higher order thinking strategies and extending children’s understanding of the text.”

Was this progress true across all ability groups? “The progress of some of our lower ability students have been slower, but we’ve been surprised at how well the students who tended to need extra help with their English did… a high percentage of them met or exceeded expectations.” The school’s results replicate a top line assessment carried out by GL Education, which showed the reading ability in international schools barely declined last academic year.

Maureen puts the improvement down to two things: “The instructional strategies we selected for teachers to use in their reading classes – we use reciprocal teaching right from nursery school – and targeted intervention based on differentiated, small group instruction.” The NGRT data allowed teachers not only to identify areas where students were having difficulty, but also to choose strategies that would address those reading behaviours. It allowed Maureen and her colleagues to model “precise instruction and embed it not only in EAL but also cross curricula”.

One unexpected benefit is that targeted interventions have made it easier for students to access other areas of the curriculum. “Our teachers are attributing the improvement in math, which we were also quite surprised by, to the targeted intervention we put into comprehension strategies,” Maureen says. This finding from the Canadian Schools in Mexico is also backed up by earlier analysis done by GL Education of schools in the UK, which found that increased reading ability correlated strongly to performance in maths, science and other subjects.

What's next?

As to the future, Maureen says the challenge will be to try to keep doing what they’re doing “because it’s working”. It’s proved easier to deliver a differentiated programme remotely, for instance, but how will that work post-lockdown? “The challenge now is how do we keep the benefits of small group targeted instruction when there are 20 or more students in the room?”

When it comes to the NGRT assessment, she has this advice for other schools: “If leadership isn’t invested, your teachers won’t be either. If you only use data to see how kids are getting better without connecting it to the teaching – as well as who needs that teaching – then it’s very superficial and doesn’t really pay off.

“Use NGRT to learn more about your students as individuals not just as the cohort. And dig deeper to find out why students respond in particular ways to particular components within the assessment. Then as you start those questions you begin to understand more about the behaviour of that reader and can target instruction accordingly.”