Have you ever taught an open-enrollment ESL class? In open-enrollment classes, there is no ‘start’ date. Students join an on ongoing basis. As those of you who have taught in an open-enrollment program know, it can be a big challenge. You never know who you’ll have in class from one day to the next or when you will get your next new student. How do you get new students up to speed and integrate them into a classroom community that has already been formed? The first 2 or 3 weeks in a class are really important in terms or retention, so you want to make sure you create a welcoming atmosphere and prep new students for success.

We recently visited beautiful Madison, Wisconsin to introduce their state Coalition to English Forward, and we asked teachers this very same question. We had a room full of instructors from around the state brainstorming answers to the question. They came up with a bunch of great ideas I wanted to share with the community.

welcome open enrollment tip

Here are some of the suggestions Wisconsin teachers recommended along with my own thoughts:

Use open-ended activities. Open-ended activities allow every student to respond at their own level. If a student is new and adjusting to the classroom, this can take the pressure off. New students also won’t have the background knowledge shared by the rest of the class, and open-ended activities can allow for that.

Pair new students up with a buddy. The buddy is a classmate who can help orient new folks, show them where things are located around the school, and be available to answer any questions.  

Use additional staff or volunteers to work with new students as they arrive. As a teacher, your time and attention are pulled in several different directions. Having to orient a new student and get them up to speed adds to the challenge. If there’s someone on staff who can help take the load off of you, that’s great. Even better, if you have a volunteer in your classroom, they can help the new student settle in as well as review topics covered in previous classes.

When you group students, group them by level. Fitting into a new classroom can be difficult enough. It’s even tougher when a student feels overwhelmed because they don’t understand the language, or they feel like the rest of the class knows a lot more than they do. If you group the class by levels, new students may feel less overwhelmed and more likely to see themselves as being able to succeed in the class.

Use advanced students as teachers. If you don’t have other staff members or volunteers to work with new students, you can call on advanced students to orient them to topics previously covered in class and to serve as an academic support. This can be a confidence boost to the advanced students while helping to build community between students.

Put together a ‘Bag of Tricks’. You often don’t know when new students are going to show up, so you can’t plan for it. When they do arrive, your lesson plan often gets thrown out the window. But you can be prepared for the unplanned. Put together a stack of activities you pull whenever a new student arrives unexpectedly. Ideally the activities won’t put pressure on the new student, but they will help them successfully integrate into your existing community of learners.

Incorporate re-teaching and review throughout your lessons. With open enrollment, your classroom may look very different from month to month. Students’ background knowledge on different topics will likely vary pretty widely as well. Incorporating review not only helps to give everyone in the class shared knowledge on topics, but it’s also an important part of the learning process.

Put together a welcome packet for new students. This might include important phone numbers, where to find things around the school and in the neighborhood, and answers to questions new students commonly ask.

What other suggestions do you have for dealing with the difficulties of open-enrollment?

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