10 Index
Foreword
I spend a lot of time in schools with large numbers of English learners. The range and depth of learning in these settings can be enormous. And yet, as most teachers know all too well, the challenges can also be enormous. Teaching English learners who have widely varying collages of interests, backgrounds, and language proficiencies is the most challenging thing a person can do. We need resources that clearly and quickly help us to meet these diverse instructional needs every day in every classroom. EL Excellence Every Day: The Flip-to Guide to Differentiate Academic Literacy is such a resource.
This guide offers a suite of practices and strategies that help teachers to maximize the learning of language and content by English learners and the rest of the class. Powerful instruction, however, cannot thrive without a solid foundation of mindsets and principles, which are clearly described and connected throughout this guide. Mindsets include viewing students’ differences as assets rather than liabilities, expecting excellence from every student, and continually reflecting on how students are learning as a result of instruction. Principles include engaging students to intrinsically motivate authentic learning, supporting the development of students’ academic conversation skills, and strategically differentiating the scaffolding of language and content learning. While these ideas could fit into several books, EL Excellence Every Day adeptly weaves them together in this highly practical guide for real and busy teachers.
Many new content and language standards have entered the scene, all of which place extra high language and content demands on English learners. The increased emphasis on using more complex texts, for example, means that we must sharpen and strengthen our teaching practices for helping students understand and use the language in challenging texts for constructing meaning. Language develops when students engage in learning activities that encourage the transforming ideas and applying them in new ways, engage students in meaningful dialogue with one another, and ask them to be critical consumers of information. This guide provides clear ways for designing and supporting such activities, and it describes how to formatively assess student work in order to know where students are and where they need to go with respect to language and content.
When we attempt to address the complex challenges of teaching diverse English learners across a wide range of grade levels, content areas, and students, there are no simple solutions. But over time we can and must build up unique solutions for each of our settings, based on research, reflection, trial and error, and expert resources. Fortunately, EL Excellence Every Day is an expert resource that helps us to clarify the challenges and sculpt the solutions that are needed across a variety of classrooms.
—Jeff Zwiers
Acknowledgments
“Where do you get such great ideas?” a teaching colleague once asked me. “In meetings like these,” I said. “From teachers like you.” Thousands of classroom teachers, administrators, students, parents, educational researchers, and authors make up the ecosystem that shapes my thinking and book. I am grateful to all of you for your influence and voices in this important conversation.
I especially want to thank systems leaders and teachers across the United States and Canada whom I am honored to serve in my consulting work, and my former colleagues and students in Houston, Redwood City, South San Francisco, and Roseland school districts. Our collective work has fueled both my sense of the urgency to write this guide and my clarity about how to shape the contents to realize our shared vision for EL students.
A humble thank you to the many authors and researchers I cite within this work. Keep researching and writing, as I love learning from you. Jeff Zwiers, thank you for influencing my work on conversations, and for your beautiful foreword. Thank you, Zaretta Hammond, for your insightful feedback and collaboration.
Bill Singer, Erin Earnshaw, and Kim Edwards, thank for opening your classroom doors to ongoing co-teaching and photo shoots. Thank you to Erin and her student Ariel Woodson for the exemplar in this text. To my friend Penny Hastings, thank you for helping create beautiful anchor charts.
To all reviewers named on the next pages, thank you for your valuable insights throughout the writing process. Thank you, also, to Venus Cenizal, Kim Nguyen, Ann DuBois, Dr. Marlene Bautista, and Cristina Huizar for your contributions to our focus group at the C.A.B.E. conference.
Thank you Goretti Barragan Hamlin and Angelica Salas, for your feedback on my Spanish dedication. Like many ELs, I especially appreciate peer feedback and encouragement before I take the risk to publish in a second language.
To my editor, Dan Alpert, I appreciate your editorial expertise and your heartfelt presence that always inspires me to be my best self. Thank you to my dream team at Corwin and SAGE: Maura Sullivan, Lucas Schleicher, Scott Van Atta, Mia Rodgriguez, Melinda Mason, and Amy Schroller, for collaborating to bring all the elements of design and content into synthesis. Betsy Lane, thank you for being my go-to copy editor and editing my book proposal, the catalyst for this work!
I appreciate Lisa Tamayo, Deborah Sandweiss, Caroline Hinkle, Taya Hall, Clare Venet, and my community of friends and family for fueling me and helping me find balance. Bill Singer, I am grateful for our shared adventures growing together as multilingual learners, teachers, and parents of our beautiful boys. Alec and Mateo, les amo muchisimo. Thank you for reminding me every day that each student in our schools is precious and unique.
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
Corwin gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the following reviewers:
Marlene Batista, EdD
Director of English Learners
Oxnard School District
Oxnard, CA
Michele R. Dean, EdD
University Field Placement Coordinator and Lecturer
California Lutheran University
Thousand Oaks, CA
Elaine Ealy, EdD
Middle School Teacher and Adjunct Professor
Crestwood Middle School—Palm Beach County School District
Royal Palm Beach, FL
Erin Earnshaw
8th Grade ELA/History Teacher
Mark West Charter Middle School
Santa Rosa, CA
Terri Fradette
Assistant Superintendent Learning Services
Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools
Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Carmen Gordillo, EdD
Literacy Specialist and Rutgers Part-Time Lecturer
Liberty Middle School
West Orange, NJ
Zaretta Hammond
Owner/Senior Consultant
Transformative Learning Solutions
Pinole, CA
Kathy Harris
Instructional Coach
Piner-Olivet Union School District
Santa Rosa, CA
Yolandia