NC Standards Academy & MLs Summer Conference (East)

Are you looking for new ways to effectively support the growth of your multilingual learners in your classroom, school, or district? Join our team of two ESL teachers from a high-ML population school in Wake County to learn more. Our ESL team has spent the last three years cultivating a culture of advocacy, collaboration, and professional learning within our school. The process of making the necessary changes that foster advocacy, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing has led our school’s multilingual learners to make exceptional growth that has been recognized at the district level. We will be unpacking our structure for professional learning around high-yield instructional strategies for MLs, our model for collaboration with classroom teachers, and our journey in co-teaching. Our session will focus on our steps that led to these results so that session participants can walk away with action steps for your class, school, or district.

During this session, attendees will apply research-based practices within the science classroom to engage multilingual learners. Participants will develop a lesson using these strategies to engage all students in the science classroom. The intended audience includes K-12 science teachers, administrators, and instructional coaches.

In this presentation, I will share the transformative journey of my past three years teaching multilingual learners (MLs) in the United States, after having taught for thirteen years abroad. Despite my extensive teaching experience, I faced numerous challenges upon entering U.S. classrooms, including mixed proficiency levels, a lack of established ESL guidance, numerous policies and procedures to assimilate, behavioral issues, and very low literacy skills among others.

Through perseverance and adaptability, I have identified key strategies to support MLs in various aspects of their educational journey. I discovered the importance of individualized support, fostering a trusting relationship, and addressing each student's unique needs.

This presentation will outline my progression from the initial challenges I faced at the beginning of my career, to a place where I can confidently support MLs through diverse school and afterschool activities, and I will strongly emphasize on how focusing on empathy has had a positive impact on my students.

Along this journey, I have learned valuable lessons that will be shared with other educators, highlighting practical strategies, insights, and reflections that can empower teachers to elevate outcomes for MLs.

In this session, participants will focus on how offering honors Level I heritage language courses could impact Multilingual Learners (MLs), as well as their local course sequence(s) that continue into inherently honors courses, like Level II heritage and Levels III - VIII modern languages. They will also delve into the Honors Level Coursework guidance and tools available to all content areas with examples for more and less common World Languages that show greater depth and complexity to differentiate honors and standard courses.

This interactive session equips educators with tools to integrate global competencies into everyday instruction.
- Align practices with the NC Standard Course of Study, Professional Teaching Standards, and Portrait of a Graduate by embedding global issues into curricula.
- Access ready-to-use resources to design lessons that empower students to address real-world issues.