Over the past few months, the IRC has asked members of our community to nominate Illinois teachers working with multicultural, multilingual students who are going above and beyond, and now, we’re celebrating them and highlighting their work. Keep an eye out for these features in the coming months – and if you’d like to nominate someone, email leanet@cntrmail.org. Next up is Nicole Lynch, an EL Resource Teacher in Diamond Lake School District 76. 

Says Julie Pecoraro, who nominated her: “Nicole goes above and beyond with her students. She cares about each and every one of them. She strives to help them in all aspects of their day. She is passionate about teaching and making sure her ESL students have equitable opportunities to be successful in their academic journey. She is always willing to work with every student in need, no matter what. She is a role model for her students, whether she is explaining things in their L1 or working on having them practice their L2 with creative projects and her innovative style! All of our teachers look up to her and the way she treats her students with respect and how collaborative she is with her peers! She truly is.gem and such an asset to our school! She deserves to know what an amazing job she is doing and how appreciated she is!”

For Nicole Lynch, student success starts in the mind.

As an EL Resource Teacher in the Diamond Lake school district, Lynch works to ensure the needs of her students are met and provide as many opportunities for growth and learning as possible, and that starts with cultivating a growth mindset, goal-setting and building upon even the smallest successes. “Students can be reticent to use the language or might be intimidated or unfamiliar with the educational milieu,” she says. “We work to foster that sense of community and mutual appreciation where kids are able to grow and thrive.”

In practice, instilling that growth mindset looks like daily check-ins and goal-setting and evaluation every trimester. Students have a portfolio of their work so they can see how they improve. And Lynch tries to model her own growth and progress in areas she struggles with so students know they’re not alone, even asking them for help with things like technology in the classroom. “Letting students know that we ourselves are learners goes a long way,” she says. “I let my students know that some things are hard for me and modeling a positive mindset and ask for help when things get challenging.”

Lynch utilizes a lot of choice in her classroom and has an additive perspective in terms of bilingualism – for example, when working with her students on guided reading texts, she tries to find a companion text that has more diverse characters or settings, as well as choice of format and what language they are using, along with the choice to work in pairs or groups. She also tries to connect lessons to topics her students care about – for example, students read The Boy Who Saves Camels, about a boy in the United Arab Emirates working to promote recycling, and students wrote emails about a cause that’s important to them, learning skills they can apply to their passions and goals in the real world. “Authenticity is really important,” Lynch says.

Community is important in Lynch’s classroom, too. Days start with a warm-up with students where they discuss a topic of interest to them to work on language skills and get to know one another better. Group work, peer-to-peer conferencing and showcasing work in a positive, supportive way are part of her practice as well. “I try to foster the idea that we don’t work in isolation, that we’re a community and we’re there for each other, to support the emotional needs and academic needs,” she says. “That’s something I pride myself on, that the kids feel safe and comfortable knowing that their peers will support them and their teacher respects them.”

That sense of fostering community extends out to her collaboration with colleagues – working with 6th-8th graders, she works closely with the special education teacher, for example. She sees a sense of humility as being key to this collaboration — she says she has a lot to learn from her colleagues and peers, and that fostering a relationship built on mutual respect and openness helps open the door for her to advocate for her students.

“I think seeing students as people and humans and recognizing the complexity of human nature and our lives is so important,” she says. “There’s more than what’s beneath the surface. I think it pays dividends in their learning in terms of establishing their trust. When students know their teachers care for them, they’re more apt to open up for whatever need that might be. In the end, learning is all about making connections, particularly human connections.”