Valentina Gonzalez is a former teacher who has served 20 plus years in her own classroom, a district facilitator for English Learners, a professional development leader, and an educational consultant. Her work has been focused on literacy, culture, and language. She still delivers professional development for EL education and is an accomplished author. She explains…
The WIDA Consortium is dedicated to research, design, and implementation of high quality culturally and linguistically appropriate systems to support multilingual learners in Kindergarten through twelfth grade. For accountability purposes, WIDA member states must administer the ACCESS test for ELLS test to ensure students are making progress in their language acquisition and meeting the language…
In today’s episode, we continue our coaching session from last week and discuss reading, writing, and phonics with ELs. For teaching literature, like Romeo and Juliet, it can be helpful to let students read in their native language first to let them access the content. You can also pre-teach vocabulary, or summarize chunks of the…
Do you struggle to teach your ELs to do research? In today’s episode, I share a coaching session I had with a ESL Teaching Roadmap member. She teaches 9th grade ELA and ELD in a district that is just getting their ESL program off the ground. She explains that there is no curriculum for her…
In today’s episode, I speak with my friend, Amber Harper about teacher burnout. Amber is a full time kindergarten teacher and teacher burnout coach. After struggling with burnout for most of her teaching career, in 2016 she created Burned In Teacher. Now she uses her podcast, book, and online course and community to coach teachers…
In today’s episode, I discuss academic connections in response to a question from one of my listeners about teaching English Content. Why is traditional English Language Arts content inferencing, finding metaphors and similes, and identifying literary elements, so difficult for English Learners? It is a higher order thinking skill that requires a deep understanding of…