Moving Beyond for Multilingual Learners: The Blog

Our education systems have really grown in our capacities to prioritize the social-emotional health and mental well-being of our students. In many schools, there are dedicated blocks of time throughout a week where components of SEL are being implemented. Many schools have invested in stronger and richer professional learning opportunities to help educators as they support the SEL needs of their students. All of this is great and I hope that we continue to make this a priority. However, I want us to pause for a second. I’m a person who is a reflective languager- meaning I often pause to reflect on the language choices that I make. I also reflect on the language choices of those around me. I’ve written about this in multiple spaces about how the language choices we use often demonstrates our beliefs, and sometimes those things that are said about students we serve can demonstrate bias and lead to problematic practices that can go unchecked.  In the last few years, in educational spa...

Just wanted to give a quick update since I don't think I've ever posted this info here (oops! lol):  Here's all the links to the social digital spaces I am online: LinkedIn BlueSky (I'm utilizing this and will eventually phase out my Twitter ) TikTok Instagram Additionally, you can reach me about workshops, conferences, and other in-person or virtual professional learning opportunities by emailing me directly through my work at the nonprofit Illinois Resource Center at cspina@cntrmail.org. You can view all of the IRC's free workshops and webinars by clicking here . My other email address is carlymspina@gmail.com.  My first book, Moving Beyond for Multilingual Learners, was a 2023 Excellence in Equity Award Winner. You can purchase it here !  Special thanks to everyone for visiting my blog here - I'm excited to offer tools, resources, and ideas to educators and leaders in our field! Consider me a teammate and please reach out anytime! I'm always happy to ch...

 Did you know there's a very effective way to design stems and frames for students, and a not-so-effective way also? I will be honest and share that during seasons of survival during the school year (I'm talking to you, winter months), these often get less of my attention. However, if I systemetize this with my teams, it becomes a much more sustainable scaffold !  Here's a quick tool to bring to your next team meeting where you identify your unit's vocabulary, set a timer for 5 months, and knock these all out so they're ready to go for all students! I don't make separate stems and frames for every proficiency level - instead I design one that's newcomer-facing (sometimes these are just full sentences!), one that's middle-level proficiency, and one that's fully linguistically stretched!  Don't think this works? I had eight and nine year olds in third grade using stretched stems. Instead of saying, "I was surprised when..." they started t...

 Yikes - it's been a while since I've posted here y'all- but I've been sharing these when I go into schools & districts or when I'm speaking at conferences, and educators have shared that they've been helpful! Woohoo! So it's time to get these on the blog.  First - let's chat about the purpose of these tools. Depends on what you're doing with them, but a few quick ideas:  *Reinforce vocabulary with visual cues *Provide stems/starters for students to support EXPRESSION of certain skills, academic language, or provide social cueing (through speaking, writing, or representing). Please note there's a highly effective way to design stems - check out this Tri Level Stem Tool here !  *Provide a mini-version of your anchor charts as a more accessible tool for students Because I like to be playful, I set these up with different names based on coffee. I don't even "speak" coffee, but I think I got the sizing right.  VENTI:   Venti - the ...

Can you believe it's May? Let's continue with list-prompting-fun with a fresh new list! Don't forget to provide time for your students (or yourself) to get out your thoughts, and THEN go ahead and decorate, annotate, and beautify your list. Post educator lists on social media using the hashtag #EduListers to get more inspiration from other creative listers like yourself.  May Slide Deck to Project for Your Students  (see two sample slides below) Colors we see more in spring: When I’m overwhelmed, I can:  Things I’m thankful for today Favorite cold treats to eat: Favorite warm foods to eat: Things I can do away from my device/screen: Song lyrics that I love right now: Ways I feel appreciated: Ways I can show others how I appreciate them: To help myself get organized, I usually… Popular flavors of ice cream: Things I need to do this week: Sounds that relax me: Characters in books or shows that I’ve loved: Things that stress out adults: Things that stress out students: Thing...

 We've all utilized Word Banks to support students, but sometimes those can be linguistically limiting. I love when scaffolds can also serve as STRETCHERS. We typically say that we scaffold up for students at lower proficiency levels, but it's important to note that students of ALL proficiency levels (yes, including monolingual students) are also in need of linguistic stretching !  One easy way to provide both a scaffold AND a stretcher for students is by expanding on the idea of a word bank, and moving towards a Word-Phrase-Sentence-Question (WPSQ) Bank. Here's a simple template to demonstrate how quick this can be:  How might you use this template? Here are 5 different ways! 1. Whole Class: Warm Up - Prior to watching a video or doing a mini lesson, or as a review of previous days' learning, ask students to take a moment to think about what they'd fill into this template on their own. Then ask them to partner up and share information to build on to their banks....