ear progressed, I created content-related questions.
When developing the questions for student responses, I embedded scaffolds that would help students who needed them. For instance, for each question that was stated orally in the video, I also provided written directions, as well as sentence stems and word banks to help students develop their response. These important tools are essential for English language learners and other students because they offer differentiation that can help them craft oral responses.
Throughout the course of the school year, I saw improvement from all of my students in the area of language development. The biggest success I saw was in my students’ comfort in communicating with their peers and with me as their teacher. Many of my students felt more comfortable using academic language that they encountered in class texts, tests, lessons, etc., to effectively ask and answer questions in person during class after practicing their language skills on Flip.
Scaffolding Needs Will Decrease Over Time
I had students who went from using only gestures to communicate to progressing to answer questions with words or simple phrases. Many of my ELL students who had higher speaking abilities started to use more complex sentences. For example, when asked a question, the students would restate part of the question and then give their reasoning using words such as “because.” As time passed, I also noticed that I was able to cut back on the sentence starters as a scaffold on Flip for many of my students because they had become comfortable with using their own language to answer questions.
I encourage all teachers who have the opportunity to teach native English speakers as well as English language learners to incorporate programs such as Flip into their daily or weekly instruction to give all students an accessible way to practice their language skills in order to improve their communication in and outside of the classroom.