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Here’s Advice I Gave To My Student Teacher Grandson This Week About Student Engagement OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay
My grandson entered a teacher credentialling program just as I retired from the classroom, and he’s doing great! Any school will be lucky to hire him next year. He’s doing his student teaching and, this week, he asked me for some advice about student engagement. I assured him that this was an ongoing challenge for veteran teachers, too. One of the points he raised was that when he asked his students to turn-and-talk, very few said anything. Here are some of the ideas I offered him about that issue, and engagement in general.
I’m adding this info to The Best Posts & Articles On Student Engagement.      This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues
Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in seeing all my “Best” lists related to education policy here):
More students are going to college. Affordability and workforce training are factors is from NPR.
Looking out for ICE, California parents, teachers help students get to school is from EdSource. I’m adding it to The Best Resources To Support Schools, Teachers, Students & Families In The Face Of Trump’s Deportation Threats. I’m adding this to the same “Best” list:
I’m adding this post to The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven”:
 Russian Strikes Force Kyiv Schools to Close Amid Rolling Blackouts is from The NY Times.
At nine, I disappeared into home schooling. No one came looking is from The Guardian.
 
Federal immigration enforcement near schools disrupts attendance, traumatizes students and damages their academic performance is from The Conversation. 
 A Look Back: Does Advanced Tech Mean That Secondary ELL Classes Should Be Radically Restructured?For the next month or so, I’ll be republishing my best posts from the last half of 2025.
 geralt / Pixabay
I had a bit of a revelation last week while working with a group of the more English proficient students in my ELL Newcomer class. They were writing a story, which is how I always end the school year. I pushed hard asking students to just use Google Translate for “words, not sentences,” but, as usual, it was a losing battle (though I do think more students implemented a new guideline I suggested – “Think about the sentence in English before you use Google Translate to check it”). I also did ask them to specifically use Google Translate in another way – after they felt they were finished writing their story, I asked them to paste it in Google Translate and read the Spanish version to see if it made sense. Google Translate’s capability with Spanish has supposedly surpassed a 95% accuracy rate recently, so I thought that might be useful (and students agreed). In reading students’ stories, it was clear they used Google Translate almost as much as my past students have used it – in other words, a lot. But it was also clear that Google’s recent advances showed that several of my students were very talented writers in their primary language. I don’t think that was as apparent to me in the past with earlier versions of Google Translate. So, that experience and subsequent conversations with more advanced ELLs in my other classes got me wondering about how we structure ELL classes in the age of easily accessible technology. In other words, though it seems to me helping students get basic grasps of English reading and writing in Newcomer and, perhaps, Intermediate classes makes sense, would it be better to place a much greater emphasis on speaking and listening in more advanced high school ELL courses (at least, where most ELL students are Spanish-speaking and, and in the future, maybe others when Google Translate’s performance in their languages improves)? Based on my conversations with students in those classes, that would clearly be their preference. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be in many situations where they wouldn’t be able to use Google Translate for writing and Google Lens for reading – if they needed it. But speaking and listening are the two areas where tech is going to take a long time to get to a truly practical Star Trek-type Universal Translator usable by everyone (despite recent impressive simultaneous translation advances). I’m not suggesting throwing out reading and writing in those classes. But I do think in many existing high school classes that speaking and listening are very much secondary to them. Should those priorities be reversed? I think a weaker case can be made for that kind of reversal in earlier grades. But, at least in our school, most of our ELL classes are comprised of students who have recently arrived in the U.S., and they just don’t have a whole lot of time left to spend in public schools. Of course, another kind of technology – Artificial Intelligence – might be the big counter argument to this kind of change. If more and more college instructors move to requiring in-class writing to combat AI use, and restrict Google Translate as part of those rules, then we would be shortchanging our students by making reading and writing a lesser priority. Sigh. There are always trade-offs and never any easy answers in education…. What do you think? I’ve had to restrict comments on this blog because of AI bots, but I’d love to hear from people via email, or on Facebook, BlueSky or Twitter.
 “LangTwo” Seems Like A Decent AI-Powered Language Tool & It’s Free (For Now, At Least)
LangTwo is an AI chatbot that teaches multiple language and, for now, at least, it’s free. What’s especially nice about it is that it will automatically provide feedback to you in your home language. I’m adding it to: The Most Useful Free Or VERY Low Cost AI Tools For Supporting English Language Learners The Best Multilingual & Bilingual Sites For Learning English & Other Languages  “Our World In Data” Makes Charts, Graphs And … Data Easier To Find
You might or might not be familiar with Our World In Data, which is a treasure chest of infographics sharing data about world. In the past, it hasn’t been that easy to find specific charts and reports on the site. However, they’ve recently announced a new search engine that is very accessible and effective, as you can see from the above screenshot showing just a tiny bit of what you can find when searching “education.”
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