The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol: A tool for teacher -researcher collaboration and professional development - Short and Echevarria

Short and Echevarria's article discusses the study of teachers of LEP students learning the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model. In their project they created learning communities for the teachers so they are able to openly discuss their learning strategies and plans.
There are several distinctive features of this approach outlined in the article. The first one is the learning communities that are created. The teachers either went to reunion meetings or had an ongoing list serve that they all participated in. In these commuities they were able to openly discuss their approaches and find out what people thought of their plans and ways for improvement. I think the researchers found that this was a successful and useful tools for the teachers that they very much enjoyed. The next feature that I found interesting was the amount of preperation and self-evaluation the teachers did. They were being observed using the SIOP checklist, so they began to plan their lessons using this checklist. It took a lot of time and was extensive, but many of the teachers found it improved their lessons. They really strived for student centerd approaches I thought. They carefully observed student work and videos of students in the class and if they were not seeming to understand the teachers immideately changed. One last interesting feature is how the teachers combined langauge practice into content areas. To me this was especially interesting becuase this is something I have been taught to do in all of my classes. However, the teachers in the article seemed to have trouble getting used to it. Once they did, most teachers saw the point and really liked it, a few did not.
Some of the challenges was that it takes teachers a longer time to adjust and change than the researchers initially thought. Also, some teachers are language trained while some are content trained. Many of them were put into this position because of teacher shortages and were not adequatically prepaired. Some were starting from scratch. It was difficult for them, but this was very useful as well. I think the secondary teachers found it very hard to have time to incorporate all of these strategies and have time for the amount of planning it requires. Some are specifically trained in some areas rather than across all content areas that LEP student need to be taught. I'm sure that time constraints is the number one difficulty with this strategy.
I really enjoyed reading this article. It was very well written and easy to follow. However, I most enjoyed it because I found it very useful for my own professional growth. I learned many things from reading this and would like to try to use the SIOP model in my own classroom. I would also try to use some of the strategies outlined such as the learning communities/open communitation among teachers and the self-evaluation.