Start the year off strong. Establishing a strong coteaching relationship and structures that serve multilingual learners is much easier than trying to figure it out mid year-when frustrations and feelings are high.

Join me August 23rd for this online workshop. 

We will explore some bigger ideas that shift from vague "support" to strategic collaborative content and language integrated learning. We will also explore some of the nuts and bolts.

Join me August 23rd for this online workshop. Head on over to the EventBrite website for tickets.

Join me for an interactive online event where we will explore ideas of co-assessment of our multilingual learners' language journeys.

• How might co-teachers bring their different lens to holistically assess a multilingual child?
• How might we help nurture metalinguistic awareness with self-assessment and goal setting strategies?

Head on over to EventBrite to grab your tickets today.

I seriously love co-teaching. I love the collaboration. I love the design questions. I love the joy. It truly is an adventure!

This workshop will equip participants to answer the following questions:

• What are the roles and responsibilities of EAL specialists and content/grade level teachers?
• How does our co-teaching process reflects the values of dynamic multilingualism?
• What might a research-based, co-taught, lesson plan look like and how does this drive-coteachers' co-planning?
  
  Topics Explored:
• dynamic multilingualism
• roles and responsibilities
• strategic co-planning that facilitates language acquisition

Head on over to EventBrite to grab your tickets today!

I know an a lot of MLL Specialists that are reluctant to attend or contribute to curriculum focused team meetings. I even know a few that throw their hands up with exasperation saying "they are a waste of my time."  Yet, a strong curriculum is so crucial to strong instruction.  A strong curriculum helps our multilingual students 

immensely. while making co-planning meetings more efficient. Curriculum is one of the key components of the multilingual ecosystem that we discuss in my professional learning workshops. Schools with a strong commitment to equity and their multilingual learners ensure collaboration time is embedded in their timetables for teaching teams and MLL specialists.

​Why is it then, that so many MLL Specialists experience reluctance, exasperation, or even trepidation when it comes to sitting down with colleagues for the unit design process? That's a question I often explore in coaching, since the answer(s) can be complex and contextualized. For now in this blog post I will share what I believe our role is at the table and possible ways to engage with questions.

Participating in curricular meetings is important for MLL specialists to seek to understand the grade level content. They do not need to be content area experts of course, nor should they be expected to. Curricular meetings are a good time to ask questions to seek to understand in order to 

aid the design process with a clear eye on the horizon. Its a great time to ask questions like:

• What's the heart of the unit? What's the big picture?
• What do we want all students to be able to know, understand, and do?
• How will students be asked to engage in discourse of the content matter? Will there be writing? Speaking? Presentations? Collaboration? No? Hmmm, where might we integrate a few?
• What structures of discourse are we thinking about? 
• Where are there opportunities to open up this content to offer more choice?
• How will we nurture our multilingual students' sense of agency?

We immerse our learners in language rich classrooms, but remember part of the MLL Specialists job is to facilitate language learning. I find this is something, when done right, that all students benefit from.

• What's the discourse we are seeking that is required of the discipline and subject matter? How are we going to design backwards from that goal?
• What's a "good answer" sound like?  What biases are showing up in our thinking? 
  
• What language functions might be the biggest bang for our buck to prioritize? What grammatical elements do our students need for those functions? 
• What subject area vocabulary is important to make meaning of the content and later share our understandings? What general vocabulary words are important  yet might need some contextualizing?
• How might these experiences and expectations look like and sound like across proficiencies?

As MLL Specialists we have a deep commitment to linguistic equity. We have a deep understanding of bilingualism and the role culture and identity play in our students lives. We can offer contributions to the unit to ensure that our students are seen and see others like them while nurturing their multilingual identity.

• What do our students already know about these concepts? Where can we build connections and partnerships with home? What do these ideas look like in their other languages?
• What thinkers/authors/ideas are we upholding in this unit? Who are we currently excluding? How might we offer a variety of perspectives, narratives, and ideas here?
• Where might we intentionally fold in translanguaging experiences to affirm our students bilingual identities and help deepen conceptual understanding by building connections across languages?

Creating access is an important role that many MLL specialists play at the curricular table. Just be careful! This isn't the only role.  Questions we can ask of ourselves and design for include:

• What building background experiences should we plan for?
• What scaffolds will help make meaning? What scaffolds will help share meaning?
• How might we design so students have choice? What might we make different? Experiences? Task? Materials? Groupings? Why?
• How will our students monitor and reflect upon their progress?

Can I tell you something, that I am not particularly proud of?

I used to really not love math. I was no good at it. No really.

​Now as an adult, I know I am  not supposed to say that, because it reinforces misconceptions and mindsets, that reinforces certain teaching methods, that reinforces mindsets and so on and so on. But as a child who went to school in the 90s, I can honestly trace my first panic attacks to a subtraction lesson, a fraction test, and later a timed multiplication test.  (Also, I know I am dating myself here: is going to school in the 90s make me old or young? I'm not sure.)

When I first started my career as an elementary school teacher, I mostly just turned a page of a workbook to keep up with my school's pacing calendar. I knew I was supposed to have students use manipulatives a lot, but I didn't really know how to do so in an impactful way. 

When I became a middle school humanities teacher, I was off the hook for a while.  Until one year, through some unknown celestial event of higher enrollment and decreased staffing I had to teach a section of Grade 6 mathematics.  I knew a little more by then about teaching and project based learning, but I still was very dependent on the adopted textbook. Oddly enough, after the first quarter benchmark testing (yes, it was one of those situations) my sixth grade math students had demonstrated the highest growth of any of their peers in our very large urban district. District officials came in to observe and ask me questions. Meanwhile, I was terrified that they would find out that I didn't actually know what I was doing or even deeply understand math the way I was supposed to. In retrospect, I do believe that my students' growth was due to my robust conferring practices, differentiated strategy group lessons, and mindset work that I had transferred from my Humanities workshop and elementary days. However, as sixth grade math went on- my own conceptual understandings certainly hit a wall. Knowing how to solve an algorithm only gets you so far. I was relieved when the year was over. 

When I moved overseas, post graduate degree, I started specializing as an English as an Additional Language teacher.  At my school, an immersion school for multilingual students with an American high school curriculum, co-teaching was the expectation. This school had deeply invested in content and language integrated learning. Students were learning the English language alongside grade level expectations across the subjects. The stakes felt high. Many of our students were emergent bilinguals in 9th grade, with a curriculum gearing them for AP classes. I was the EAL specialist for the English, Social Studies, and Art Departments. Again, I was off the hook for a while, besides an occasional collaboration with a math teacher. At this point I had a fairly large toolbox for teaching vocabulary, but the upper level concepts of math that my co-teachers tried to explain to me gave me the sweats. As a co-planner my go to line was "I'm excited you love your content. I want to understand the gist, but what does a successful answer sound like? That will help me target the language our students need."

At my next school. I was the EAL teacher in Grades 1-5, with 9 different co-teachers. Here I was, back in elementary school. It is through some of those co-teaching partnerships that I began to fall in love with math.  For that I am grateful!

I'll share more in my upcoming Part 2. Lots of strategies forthcoming!