Moving Beyond for Multilingual Learners: The Blog

 Have you just attended a great conference, and you're sad it's over? Want to maximize the aftermath? Keep that learning alive!  1. Find out the conference hashtag and search it on your favorite platforms. Find folks who posted using the hashtag and give them all a follow! This is a great way to build your network. 2. Identify one take-away that you want to use ASAP. Put it into practice. Just ONE thing! It's easy to get overwhelmed with a long list of tools or strategies or resources to check out. 3. Use your calendar! Plug in various dates/times and link a resource that you just learned about. This way, 3 months from now, you'll be bumped right back to the tool or resource and you'll have built-in time to explore it and try it out.  4. Get on your Team or Staff meeting agenda and share 1 or 2 tools or takeaways that you learned. This will keep the conversation going in your space, and it will also help you to serve as an instructional leader in your setting! Keep ...

How can we sneak in more "quick" writing throughout our students' day? All students need opportunities to read, write, listen, and speak about their content learning ALL DAY LONG!  Let's quickly chat. Remember that group writing is WRITING. Co-constructed writing is WRITING. Independent writing is WRITING.  Partner writing is WRITING. Broaden your scope of writing! Here are a few quick ways to sneak in more writing across your content areas!  1. Have small groups or partners co-construct 1-3 sentences about their learning for the day. You may even give them a few "Goal Words" to incorporate into their pieces. Students could also co-construct a Tweet or Instagram post to share their learning with a global audience! If you have a classroom Twitter/Instagram account, students may decide if it gets shared or if it stays within the learning space. Check out Matt Miller's website Ditch That Textbook for *FREE* downloadable templates that you can use RIGHT NOW...

Winters are hard for me, living in the midwest and saying goodbye to the sun around 4:30 each day. I know - it could be worse- but the seasons definitely do impact me! Typically this time of year, I also find myself stuck in a rut, and I fill the need to mix it up - even if it's just something small.  We've often heard that "Teamwork makes the dream work" but I also believe that DREAM WORK MAKES THE TEAM WORK. Let's continue dreaming aloud with our colleagues!! I don't love ice breakers. I don't. However - when purposeful and intentional, I can see the value. After listening to Marco Antonio Torres' keynote at the Multilingual IL 2022 Conference, I wanted to capture 8 questions that you could ask colleagues to generate creativity and innovation in your spaces!    1. If you were given 1,000 for an after-school program, what kind of program would you design? 2. What is one problem our school has and what are some possible solutions? 3. What's the mos...

  As we start to wrap up the year 2022, I keep seeing graphics that my friends and colleagues post about their Spotify playlists. It shows different things like their favorite artists that they've listened to the most throughout the year, the total number of minutes spent listening to music, top genres, and top songs. I thought this would be a fun way for us to reflect with our students about all the incredible learning they've done so far this year.I hit the interwebs to find a few template generators, and here are a few great spaces I found! Gridfiti templates  (they have LOTS of different templates, including a few that are centered on the books you've read throughout the year- this could be cool). Kapwing templates  (very user-friendly!) Check out this Kapwing one (as a festival headliner graphic) Your district can even use the above graphic and capture your district's languages, like the example below! How might you utilize these templates with students? GOALS: Th...

 As we start to wrap up the year 2022, I keep seeing graphics that my friends and colleagues post about their Spotify playlists. It shows different things like their favorite artists that they've listened to the most throughout the year, the total number of minutes spent listening to music, top genres, and top songs. I thought this would be a fun way for us to reflect as educators, so I decided to drum up a few possible ways of capturing all that we do as educators serving multilingual learners. I hit the interwebs to find a few template generators, and here are a few great spaces I found! Gridfiti templates (they have LOTS of different templates, including a few that are centered on the books you've read throughout the year- this could be cool). Kapwing templates  (very user-friendly!)  Check out a few that I've come up with for teachers! Some funny, some serious. What would you design to capture your work??   (((( STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT POST: SPOTIFY WRAPPED...