Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013 - S12

From left, teachers Allison
Schultz, Barbara Page, and
Meredith Vanden Berg,
collaborated on strategies
for teaching the standards
to ELLs in mainstream
classrooms in their
Beaverton, Ore., school.
Photo by
LEAH NASH
for Education
Week
"
I really see now how much we as content
teachers take for granted."
MEREDITH VANDEN BERG
Beaverton, Ore.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE S10
line explicit supports and "scaffolds"
for ELLS, based on their
proficiency levels.
They are doing that at the
same time the school is shifting
from pulling its ELL students out
of mainstream classes for explicit
language instruction to a "pushin"
model in which the ESL teachers
are always in the classrooms
with content teachers.
"We think this is the only way
that the shift to the common core
is going to work for our Englishlearners,"
said Mr. Artigliere, who
is also an instructional coach at
the Brooklyn school. "The goal
is that you have the ESL professional
right in the room to model
for content teachers how you
scaffold the content for Englishlearners."

In Broward County, Fla.,
where state law requires all academic
content teachers to have
some training in the theories
and practice of teaching secondlanguage
learners, the district's
curriculum and instruction team
has created an open-source trove
of digital professional-development
resources around the common
core, in addition to face-toface
training.
S12 | EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 30, 2013
n
The district has produced a
series of webinars to address
particular instructional shifts in
the new standards. Each of those
also has a companion webinar
specifically targeting teachers
who work with ELLs, said David
Shelley, the district's curriculum
supervisor for literacy. Teachers
in school-based professional
learning communities watch
the webinars together and engage
in discussions about strategies
and supports they can use
for all students.
"All of our teachers, whether
they are mainstream content
teachers or ESL teachers, are getting
this professional development
and are doing it together,"
said Vicky B. Saldala, the director
of the district's English-as-asecond-language
department.
Ms. Saldala's team wrote a
"best practices" document for
English-learners meant for all
teachers in need of understanding
what types of classroom activities
and supports work best
for ELLs at different proficiency
levels and in different subject
areas. It also breaks down which
supports are most effective
across the four language domains
of speaking, listening, reading,
and writing, she said.
Thirteen percent of Broward's
265,000 students are Englishlearners.

Principal's Role
Key to any type of meaningful
collaboration and inclusion of ESL
professionals in the rollout of the
common core, said Ms. Aronson,
are principals and district administrators
willing to give faculty
members the time and space to
work together.
"The principal especially plays
a huge role for encouraging and
facilitating an inclusive school
culture that promotes ESL teachers
and content teachers working
together, but unfortunately, they
are the ones who often erect the
biggest barriers to this," she said.
At Beaverton's Meadow Park
Middle School, Principal Toshiko
Maurizio is backing the
work of the three teachers who
have taken the lead in devising
common-core support strategies
for the school's English-learners.
She has carved out staff-development
time for them to collaborate
and share their work.
Their work is particularly challenging
because ESL teachers like
Ms. Page do not work alongside
content teachers in the classroom.
English-learners are pulled out
for language instruction as part
of their school day, and they are
grouped based on proficiency levels,
not grade level.
To help cross those barriers,
Ms. Page created a Google document
that all teachers in her
school can access to write what
key concepts they want their ELL
students to understand in an upcoming
lesson or unit. She plans
her language instruction around
those core-content requests,
though she says it's an imperfect
process.
"I'm really working on my jug-
gling skills," Ms. Page said. "Folding
in the core content at grade
level into language instruction is
really tough, especially when you
are working with students at different
grade levels. We don't have
it all figured out, but we are trying.
We are committed." n
Coverage of the implementation of
the Common Core State Standards
and the common assessments is
supported in part by a grant from
the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/
foundation. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.
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Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013

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