Chapter 7: TEACH LANGUAGE BEYOND A TASK Use this flip-to chapter to find mini-lessons to deepen students’ understanding of how English works.
Flip-to Tip: Anytime you are planning for a specific literacy goal (e.g., asking questions, identifying main ideas, or justifying claims with text evidence), flip to the table of contents after the green “IV. Apply” tab. Choose your priority and flip to it to find a wealth of ready-to-use tools that make teaching for EL excellence a breeze.
Section IV: Apply Strategies to Differentiate Academic Literacy
Use this flip-to section to apply the essentials for EL excellence to differentiate close reading, conversations, and writing with text evidence.
Chapter 8: Make EL Excellence Routine Learn a four-step close reading routine to use with any classroom text.
Chapter 9: Anticipate Use Chapters 9–11 to differentiate each step of the routine based on your literacy goals and your students.
Chapter 10: Read to Understand
Chapter 11: Read to Analyze and Infer
Making EL Excellence Routine
In my work leading professional learning, I see what you see every day: the challenge of applying theory to daily teaching. It’s easy to learn new strategies. It’s hard to make them central to how we teach every day.
There is also a challenge of initiative overload: too many different demands on teachers coming from too many different directions. It’s human nature to get excited about a new silver-bullet solution (e.g., strategy, curriculum, training, or initiative) and much more challenging to synthesize what we know to strategically address the needs of students in our unique teaching contexts.
I address both of these challenges in this flip-to guide by applying my favorite high-level thinking skill: synthesis.
A Synthesis of Best Practice
I designed this guide to synthesize research-based practice into user-friendly resources that help you easily enhance what you already teach via a dynamic integration of the following:
High expectations and critical thinking
Effective pedagogy for all students
Effective pedagogy for ELs and SELs
Designated and integrated language development
Culturally proficient practice
Effective use of formative data
Differentiation to personalize teaching
Reflective teaching
A Synthesis of Priorities
In addition to synthesizing best instructional practices, I’ve intentionally narrowed the focus of instruction in this guide to go deep with two high-priority goals for students:
1 Collaborate in Conversations
2 Make and Justify Claims With Text Evidence
Collaborative conversations are a top-priority strategy to ensure excellence for ELs and build student competencies in collaboration and communication essential for achievement in and beyond school. This guide both teaches collaborative conversation strategies (Section II) and gives you conversation tasks and scaffolds for every literacy goal (Section IV).
Making and justifying claims with text evidence is a high-priority skill for career and college readiness for all students and is embedded with many linguistic challenges for ELs.
Academic argument is at the intersection of the English language arts, math, and science standards (Cheuk, 2013). This makes it an especially high-impact area of emphasis to deepen student and teacher learning across all content areas.
Section IV helps you build student capacity for academic argument through core routines and a flip-to guide to the many subskills of this higher-level literacy goal. Flip to Chapter 11 for an example of how to find specific goals and strategies to help you empower ELs and all learners to make claims (p. 236) and how to help students justify claims with evidence (p. 246). By design, these aren’t just strategies in isolation, but a synthesis of strategies organized to help you apply best practices to help your unique students thrive with high-priority academic literacy goals.
Ways to Use This Flip-To Guide
You don’t have to read this book from cover to cover. I recommend reading Chapters 1 and 2 and then flipping to other chapters as you need them. Here are five great entry points for using this book:
1 ESSENTIAL MINDSETS. Do you want to create a classroom and school culture that values diversity and makes high expectations a reality for every EL and every student? Read Chapter 2.
2 ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES. Do you want to learn ways to structure active engagement and academic conversations in your classroom? Read Section II or flip to any strategy in the purple pages to enhance active participation and student conversations in you next lesson.
3 STRATEGIC SUPPORTS. Do you want strategies, lessons, and scaffolds to help students learn core concepts, language, and literacy? Read Section III or flip to any strategy in the orange pages when you need new tools to help your students thrive.
4 LITERACY GOALS. Are you looking for ways to help ELs (and all students) excel with a specific literacy goal like justifying claims with text evidence? Flip to the chapter in Section IV that aligns with your goal for a wealth of resources organized to make planning and differentiating a breeze.
5 STUDENT NEEDS. Listening to student conversations, watching students annotate texts, or reading students’ writing, you notice specific areas where they need additional support. To address specific literacy needs, flip to the appropriate chapter in Section IV to find support for both the literacy goals and aligned language goals.
Collaborative Ways to Use This Guide With a Team
Any teacher can use this book alone, and the impact amplifies when you use it with a colleague, a team, or a whole school community. Reflect on the entry points listed above and determine your goals together. The following approaches are four great ways to use this book in collaboration with colleagues:
1 LEARN MINDSETS OR STRATEGIES TOGETHER: The first four chapters are great for building background together in essential mindsets and strategies. Choose a relevant section or chapter and use the following sequence:Read.Discuss. What’s most effective? What do you already do? What do you want to try?Collaborate to plan ways to apply at least one specific strategy to your teaching in the coming week.As students engage, watch to gather additional formative data.Meet to compare notes on impact and adapt your approaches together.
2 PLAN LESSONS TOGETHER: When planning literacy lessons, choose the chapter in Section IV that best fits your goals and choose strategies within that chapter to integrate into