What stands out about Larry Ferlazzo's new book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies that Work, from others that describe strategies to engage high school ELLs are his suggestions for how to encourage such students to be leaders.
I expect that special contribution comes out of Ferlazzo's 20 years of experience as a community organizer. Now with six years under his belt as a social studies and English teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., where many of his students are ELLs, Ferlazzo has lots of ideas to share about how to build leadership among students. (See a slide show with highlights of the book
here.)
He writes, for example, that teachers should make explicit the qualities of a good learner or leader. Good learners, he says, have intrinsic motivation, self-confidence, and a willingness to take risks and learn from mistakes. He suggests that teachers have students choose one quality of a learner to work on in the next quarter of the school year, and hold a one-on-one conversation with each student about an action plan.
He suggests teaching a unit on leadership that also incorporates literacy activities. Students may draw from articles or folktales ideas about what makes a good leader. He describes a lesson in which students complete the phrase "I feel powerful when..."
Many of you are familiar with Ferlazzo's prolific tweeting and blogging on how to
incorporate technology into lessons for ELLs and
how to engage parents in school. This book gives a much deeper view of Ferlazzo's philosophy of how to connect with students and engage them.
The New Teacher Project complains that Delaware's tough new evaluation law does not "guarantee" that "demonstrably ineffective" teachers are fired in two years, even though a valid metric of student performance may never be possible. The TNTP consistently plays it cute when discussing its "effectiveness standard based 
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Reformers assume that teachers should be held more accountable for increasing student performance, and that hypothesis may or may not be thrown on the junkpile of history. But wouldn't students be better served if administrators concentrated on administration? Shouldn't principals just focus on discipline and refereeing the the diverse personalities in the complex social organizations known as schools? Wouldn't it make more sense to evaluate people on what they actually do and for addressing the circumstances under their control?
President Obama. (Pete Souza/ The White House)
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