Education

Tips for Integrating Immigrant Students Into School

By Mary Ann Zehr — September 18, 2009 1 min read
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Organize a team of teachers to support the same group of students and schedule time for this group to meet and plan together during the school day. That’s one of 12 tips that Claire Sylvan, the executive director of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, offers to educators on how to integrate students from immigrant families into a school.

Also noteworthy is her tip that students should be organized into heterogeneous groups. It’s a trademark practice of the international high schools that Sylvan supports to assign English-language learners with different English proficiency and academic knowledge to the same classrooms. It’s not a common practice nationwide.

“Listening to a teacher lecture is very hard,” Sylvan writes, “while working with peers to accomplish an activity allows students to learn language from each other as they work through their academic assignments.”

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.