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Beth is passionate about language learning and especially about enhancing the achievement of English Language Learners.
Sometimes when I walk into a classroom, students have such a sense of focus and purpose, that they don’t even look up or notice me. I recently had the opportunity to observe a second grade science class that epitomized that kind of classroom. Located in a small, rural school district in a Title One school with over 80% English Language Learners, this room buzzed with excitement and interest. Students were working at round tables asking each other questions, sharing information, or writing and reading independently. At first, I didn’t even notice the teacher in the room. When I found her, she was kneeling next to a student discussing his research and asking probing questions about his next steps.
This brief video clip addresses the ‘writing to read’ strategy. Participants use a labeled picture with sentence frames to orally generate sentences before doing a quick write about the content picture. Then, they compare their academic text to the scientific text noticing the differences between their writing and the academic writing....
In this video, Beth focuses on the WIDA “Can Do” Philosophy and how creating student portraits can positively impact how teachers meet the needs of diverse learners.
When I returned to the U.S. in 2013 after teaching ESL for three years at the Bavarian International School in Germany, I began to hear the term close reading in every school I consulted with. I noticed many new books with close reading in the title; I heard teachers tell students, “Let’s do a close reading of this text”; and I saw sessions about close reading at every conference I attended. I felt completely out of the loop and wondered what I’d missed while I was out of the country. So I began to read about close reading, talk to my colleagues about the process, analyze the Common Core State Standards, and attend workshops on the topic.
Beth organizes this webinar around WIDA’s features of academic language: word/phrase level, sentence level, and discourse level. Watch the webinar to find out what academic language is and how to teach it.
Learning vocabulary is critical for ELLs. In this brief clip, Beth demonstrates at least 15 different strategies with 3 different words.
In this clip from a critical thinking workshop with English Language Development teachers, Beth facilitates the Visible Thinking Routine “Silent Conversations” from Harvard Project Zero.
“Mom, I got a 96 on the math test. What does that mean?” I had to laugh at my daughter’s innocent reaction to traditional grades and percentages after 11 years of schooling with alternative forms of feedback. Entering a traditional U.S. public school in Grade 10 gave her a bit of culture shock. Traditional quizzes, end of unit tests, homework for points, and percentage based grading policies were completely foreign to her.