Students in Valerie Valdivia’s kindergarten class line up Friday morning at McKinley Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan. The class has 16 students, 14 of whom are English-language learners; of those, eight didn’t speak any English when school started.

At the start of the school year, the sound coming out of Valerie Valdivia’s class was rare for a room full of 5-year-olds.

“It was just dead silence. You wouldn’t think that there was a child in here,” Valdivia said. “Absolutely not a word spoken, and they all just kind of stare at me in fright.”

On Friday, the room sounded like what you would expect from a group of 5-year-olds, as the group launched into a song about the days of the week — first naming them in English and then in Spanish.

“They are really warming up to me and warming up to each other,” Valdivia said.

Her class at McKinley Elementary School, a small neighborhood school in Kansas City, Kan., is made up of 16 students, 14 of whom are English-language learners; of those, eight didn’t speak any English when school started.

“I came in and I said hello, and they looked at me,” Valdivia said.

So, for the past 44 days, Valdivia has sung, danced, gestured and partnered her way through the kindergarten class in hopes of teaching her students both English and the basics of an American education.

Methods evolving

Within the next 50 years, every single teacher in the country will have a student in the classroom whose native tongue is not English, said Cristina Fanning, the associate director for Kansas State’s Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy.

To prepare for that change, Fanning said teachers have to adapt to a style that means more group work, hands-on learning and visual aids.

These changes — making the classroom less of a listening environment and more of an active one — are good for any student raised in the world of video games, the Internet and text messaging, Fanning said.

“You can’t expect to hold the attention span of any child very long,” she said. “What worked 20 or 30 years ago in a classroom doesn’t work today.”

Engaged is the word used by Tod Pennell, who directs the English as a second language program at McKinley. Twenty years ago, students who were learning English sat in the back of the classroom and colored. Then there were the “fixers” who pulled students out of classrooms to teach them English.

“That is not how it works,” Pennell said. “We want to get into the classroom and parallel teach. Support the teacher rather than pull them out.”

Training for the future

That integration is obvious in Valdivia’s classroom, where students sit on a rug that identifies colors, animals and numbers in English and Spanish.

The classroom’s calendar is in both languages, as are Valdivia’s nameplates above the door. Next to every vocabulary word that hangs on the wall is a picture.

When Valdivia teaches the alphabet, she brings in muffins as an example of what begins with the letter M. Instead of calling on a student to name the day of the week, the whole class turns to a partner and says it. And, when they do a good job, Valdivia tells them to kiss their brains.

Valdivia is a general education teacher who has gone through training for ESL endorsement. Across the state, more districts are asking teachers to receive that training.

Those classroom changes are registering at Kansas University, where the school is reviewing how to restructure its teacher education programs.

Among the changes could be requiring soon-to-be teachers to take more coursework for teaching English-language learners and to take classes in a foreign language.

Because Hispanics are the fastest-growing subgroup in America and the largest population that speaks a different language, it’s a change that makes sense for Sally Roberts, the associate dean of KU’s teacher education and undergraduate programs.

“It is probably the largest thing we are being told now, that we need to do a better job as we train our teachers,” Roberts said.

In the end, Valdivia believes the teaching strategies used for those learning to speak English are good for all students.

“A lot more teachers are trying to bring it into the classroom,” she said. “And all you are going to do is enhance their learning and make it more concrete.”