MISSION: ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is a membership organization that develops programs, products, and services essential to the way educators learn, teach, and lead.
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| Volume 5 | Issue 5 | December 10, 2009 |
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ASCD Conference Scholars
Get ready to follow, learn from, and share with ASCD Conference Scholars. This select group of education leaders from around the globe plans to push the envelope on collaboration and social networking about school leadership in theory and in their own practices—before, during, and after the ASCD Annual Conference in San Antonio, Tex., in March 2010.
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Purposeful Planning for the Multilingual Classroom
Authors Pérsida and William Himmele discuss their 2009 ASCD Summer Conference presentation on planning instruction for multilingual classrooms.
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Avoiding Misplaced Empathy, Achieving Total Participation
Though it's harder for ELLs to actively listen in their non-native language, they still need just as many opportunities to fully participate in classroom discussions.
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Blog Watch: Teacher Reboot Camp
Shelly Terrell has taught ELLs in the United States and Germany and has a knack for integrating technology into her lessons. Watch her blog for a weekly roundup of tools and Web sites tuned to teachers of ELLs.
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Health and Learning
Research shows that healthy children learn more, so how can schools forge a healthy environment? This issue will examine programs ranging from creating school-based community health clinics to keeping physical education part of the school day; from implementing discipline policies that make hallways and classrooms free of physical or emotional violence to teaching students about nutrition and fitness; from helping students maintain a healthy body image to helping them avoid self-destructive behaviors.
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Helping ELLs Acquire Academic Content
Academic language, as described by ASCD authors Pérsida and William Himmele, is “the language of books.” Acquiring academic language means learning content-specific as well as non-content-specific vocabulary and navigating the grammatical patterns of informational texts.
 Classroom teachers bear the most responsibility for conveying academic content, so they need ways to actively engage English language learners (ELLs) in lessons that help them simultaneously develop language and comprehend content.
In this issue of ASCD Express, you'll learn how to embed academic language in any conversation, how language objectives strengthen lesson objectives, how to help ELLs understand figurative language, and how to use graphic organizers to scaffold content-specific vocabulary.
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Increasing Exposure to Academic Language by Speaking It
For teachers to increase students' exposure to academic language, it's important that they approach almost any verbal interaction as an opportunity for developing academic language. They can support ELLs by using academic language in meaningful contexts and following difficult words with synonymous terms.
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You Don't Have to Be a Specialist: Supporting ELLs in Content-Area Reading
Attending to language objectives with strategies before, during, and after reading will set up ELLs for success and also complements lesson objectives for all students.
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Helping ELLs Become Smart Cookies: Unpacking Idioms
Idioms, which are so common in the English language, can be a roadblock for ELLs. But having students identify and generate hypotheses about figurative language can aid comprehension, and idiom journals and walls can spark students' investigative curiosity and chart their progress.
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Are You Fluent in Best Practices for ELLs?
Content-Area Conversations |
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Educating Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students Professional Inquiry Kit |
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Content Writing Strategies to Support ELLs
 Teachers can help all students, and especially ELLs, understand and retain content-area vocabulary and concepts by using student-created glossaries and inviting student-directed learning.
Watch the video
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New Leaders for New Schools: Hiring an Aligned Instructional Staff
Teachers spend the most time with students and have the biggest effect on student learning. So for principals, establishing selection criteria, recruiting, and hiring the right teachers can feel like a herculean responsibility. This fifth column in our series about principal leadership in urban schools describes how New Leaders follow through.
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My Back Pages: Teaching the Language of Thinking
Because teaching and learning are transmitted mainly through language, Art Costa and Robert Marzano—in a 1987 Educational Leadership article—encourage teachers to demonstrate and develop the language of thinking in classroom discussions and procedures.
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Give ELLs Time to Play with Vocabulary
 By using multiple mediums and dedicating time to unpack academic vocabulary words with examples from other cultures and disciplines, teachers can deepen students' connection to and comprehension of new content.
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“The solitude of being an immigrant, the solitude of having to learn a language in a culture from scratch, the need for some sort of explanation, the need for answers, the need for something that would somehow shelter me led me to books.”
–Author Junot Diaz on “Becoming American” (NPR interview, November 24, 2008)
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