#cdltlanguagelearners

WHY COME?

Do you have students at different levels of language acquisition in the same class? This two-day workshop will provide practical strategies for differentiating grade level lessons and engaging all learners in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

WHO IS IT FOR?

• Grade K-5 EAL teachers.
• Grade K-5 general educators who serve EAL students.
• Teams of general education and EAL teachers, who co-teach, co-plan, or work together in any way.

WORKSHOP OUTLINE

In this interactive workshop, participants will experience differentiation strategies in demonstration lessons from an asset-based approach. After each learning experience, participants will reflect on ways to apply the strategies to various grade levels, language acquisition levels, and content areas or units of inquiry. Participants will analyze academic language demands of texts and units of inquiry and create supports and scaffolds to ensure that all students can access grade-level content and develop their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Participants should bring plans for an upcoming lesson in order to participate in a protocol for adding the language lens to the lesson.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Throughout the workshop, participants will:

• Identify students’ strengths and create a student “Can Do Portrait”.
• Experience and analyze differentiation strategies in model lessons.
• Understand the features of academic language.
• Analyze academic language demands of texts and projects.
• Enhance language development within inquiry-based and project-based units.
• Plan for differentiation of language in classroom content, process, product, and environment.
• Develop scaffolds and supports in each language domain (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) for students at different levels of language acquisition.
• Transfer strategies and supports to lessons using the Language Lens Planning Protocol.

SPEAKER

Beth Skelton provides professional development, coaching, and consulting for schools around the world focused on creating equitable education for multilingual learners. She believes that all students are academic language learners and that all teachers are language teachers.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Multicultural Teacher Education and has worked with early childhood, elementary, middle, high school and adult language learners in rural, urban, suburban, and international school settings for over 30 years. She is a WIDA certified trainer and has extensive experience and training in Kagan cooperative learning, Harvard Project Zero and Visible Thinking Routines, SIOP, International Baccalaureate English B course, Marzano’s Strategies that Work for English Learners, Total Physical Response Storytelling (TPRS) for English Learners, and student-centred instructional coaching. She has published materials for teaching adult English Learners with the TPRS method entitled Putting it Together, which have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, and sign language.