Case Study

Ever since the beginning of this school year, I have been spending my Thursday and Friday afternoons in the Media Center of Jonathan Jennings IPS 109, where I work with Mrs. Jensen and her ESL (English as a Second Language) students.  The majority of my time in this little classroom shoved in the corner of the school is spent with one of the first grade ESL students, Estudiante A. Estudiante A (Estudiante A) is 6 years old and currently learning the different long-vowel sounds.  After spending over thirty hours with Estudiante A and his fellow classmates, I have gained a lot of knowledge and insight into the students, their school, and the community that envelopes them both.  Speaking of Estudiante A specifically, I have had the pleasure of observing and working with him in class, and I have come to identify what seems to work for him best in his learning environment.

Setting the School and Community Context

Jonathan Jennings Elementary school is just off of West 38^th Street in the Indiana Public School district.  For accommodating kindergarten through sixth grade students, the school is fairly small, with just over 350 children.  Mimicking the neighborhood surrounding the school, the majority of students are Hispanic (~48%) or African American (~42%).  Something unique about Jonathan Jennings is that nearly all students live within walking distance of school grounds.  Knowing the area that makes up this school’s population is so small, it is easy to see how this facilitates a close-knit community where family remains a priority among residents in the area.

Upon first driving up to IPS 109, I witnessed run down strip malls nearby and quite a few apartment complexes across the street from the school.  With over four-fifths of the students on free or reduced lunch, it is not surprising to know that the community is living in poverty.  While a lot of the students I worked with, including Estudiante A, show a general enthusiasm for learning, I know that they also most likely lack the resources needed to progress as academically as more privileged areas.

The school itself is a little, somewhat outdated building with children’s murals lining the cinderblock walls sporadically.  There is one, if not two, teachers per grade, as well as multiple aides who pull students out of class for extra support.  Mrs. Jensen’s ESL room is actually what used to be the storage closet for the library, but it’s definitely better than their former location on the auditorium stage. Teachers know most students in the building by name, and it is a very friendly environment.   A lot of the teachers also volunteer their time to help with student programs such as band, choir, after-school tutoring, and some club sports.  While this school is not making its AYP, it is definitely creating a setting open to fostering happy, healthy, and social students.

Student Buddy Background

Estudiante A is a 6 year old in the first grade, which seems average until you learn that a majority of his first grade ESL classmates are older than him by up to four years.  Estudiante A (Estudiante A, as he prefers the Americanized name) was born in California and is the second of three boys.  When I work with him one on one, he often gets sidetracked and tell imaginative stories about his brothers and cousins, who all live in his apartment with his parents.  His family seems to be very close and very important to him.

I was asked to work with Estudiante A because he is considered “high-energy” and Mrs. Jensen honestly just wanted him off of her hands as she worked with the eight other students she has.  I feel that Estudiante A is not as active physically as he is mentally and intellectually.  He is extremely observant of things the teacher has said, materials in the classroom, and even things I had mentioned about myself in the past.  A few weeks into working with Estudiante A, he commented on how I had a lot of shoes because I always came to tutor him wearing new shoes.  While this made me feel guilty for owning so many shoes, as he only has one pair of Velcro Sketchers, it also impressed me that he had paid attention and noticed something so mundane.

In regards to his school work, Estudiante A is not extremely focused on the different readings he is assigned.  If anything he read about is related to an event in his life, he will take the time to share.  Estudiante A thinks he reads very well, but knows he has some areas to work on.  When I first spoke with Mrs. Jensen, I learned that Estudiante A is actually one of the lowest readers in his first grade ESL group, which surprised me; Estudiante A seems so confident of his work and is very proud of what he’s done.  He often shows me his work hanging on the walls with little stickers telling him “Great Job!” and “Nice Work!” even if I had seen them the day before.

If you were to first meet Estudiante A, you, too, would assume he is very energetic and slightly uninterested in his schoolwork.  After spending time with him as I have, it is evident that he is just an average young boy who has an imaginative mind and a keen eye for the little details around him.  School is just another thing keeping him from spending time with his family at home, but with some extra attention, he excels in his schoolwork.

Assessment of Needs Analysis and Plan of Action

The reason I work one on one with Estudiante A is to provide him with more individual instruction time.  It allows me to more readily identify his areas of need and work with him on concepts he may struggle with.  When I work with Estudiante A, I usually have him read to me and complete some basic comprehension questions about the reading.  Other times I test him on his ability to identify different sounds and say them correctly.  In a group setting, Estudiante A often gets overwhelmed by his peers who are at higher levels of reading and comprehension; he gets lost in the crowd and becomes easily distracted.  I didn’t have the choice in working with Estudiante A, but I have definitely noticed that he needs to individual work time in order to get more out of the lessons, and that is something I will gladly help him with.

In order for Estudiante A to get more out of his ESL instruction with Mrs. Jensen, I feel that he needs to continue with the one on one time with another instructor or aide.  When someone is there to work individually with Estudiante A, he or she is more likely to pick up the specific struggles he has.  Something I had noticed Estudiante A had trouble with was the difference between in/on, and the multiple sounds the consonants “c” and “g” can make.  This is something Mrs. Jensen had not caught onto, and if it wasn’t for me saying something, it would have gone unnoticed as Estudiante A was pushed on to the next lesson.

What I see Estudiante A doing in class now is a lot of reading with stories that have an abundance of words with the particular sound being looked at that week.  While I could be missing some work done specifically with the sound earlier in the week, I still feel that this isn’t enough work for Estudiante A to truly understand a specific sound or phenomenon in reading and spelling.  Something that I have started doing, and plan on continuing throughout the school year as I work with Estudiante A is to go back to concepts he struggles with, and drill him in different ways.  A lot of times he just needs some extra review in order to remember a specific rule such as the long sound a vowel can make when there’s an “e” at the end of the word.  Some specific strategies I used with Estudiante A when trying to sound out a difficult word were splitting the word up into smaller, more manageable sections and then piecing them together and using familiar words to figure out longer, more challenging words.  Attached to this case study is a lesson plan that I feel would work better in adapting to Estudiante A’s learning style.

Assessment of Impact

Having worked with Estudiante A for a comfortable amount of time, I have learned what strategies do and do not work when teaching him a new concept or reviewing something old.  Estudiante A functions best in an environment where his areas of concern can be identified and confronted early on instead of test time later in the week.  Mrs. Jensen and I began to notice that after I had been working with Estudiante A for these past few months, his reading tests and fluency test scores have gone up.  Before, I would have to read test questions out loud to him and allow him to choose the best answer, but now he has started taking tests on his own.  Where earlier he would mispronounce three or four of the 15 words on a list, he is now missing only one or two words per test.

Conclusions

After being given the opportunity to work with Estudiante A in his ESL class 5 hours a week, I have taken a lot from the experience.  One thing I will keep in mind when working with future students is to aim for a more personal relationship because this lays a foundation that I can work with when trying to remain relevant to the students’ lives.  When you take the time to know a student as an individual, you become privileged with the information about him/her and how he/she works best in the academic setting.  Expanding on the idea of knowing students individually, I feel that it is also important to work with students individually from time to time in order to better identify their areas of need and the strengths they may bring to the classroom.  This idea seems unrealistic, especially in classes with many students, but it could be as simple as walking around during individual work time and briefly quizzing students about something that was gone over earlier in the class.

Working with Estudiante A has been a delight.  I have gained a lot of insight into the world of working with both elementary and ESL students.  I don’t usually consider the academic requirements for elementary students, as I am focusing on middle/secondary education, but with an ESL minor, this experience has definitely been beneficial for me and my future as an educator.  I feel lucky for having been able to work with Mrs. Jensen because she is very straight-forward and open in regards to how she feels about her students, classes, and the directions in which they are going.  I have definitely gained a lot from this experience, and I plan on continuing to return to Jonathan Jennings Elementary School IPS 109 every Thursday and Friday for the remainder of the semester; hopefully my schedule may even allow me to continue with this experience in the spring semester.