The eWorkshops listed here are suitable for teachers to participate in across grade levels and content areas. These eWorkshops focus on equitable approaches and teaching language skills in varying classroom contexts by featuring methods for scaffolding writing, oral language, and effectively teaching concepts to your multilingual students.

These are the available eWorkshops:

Scroll down to see more details about each eWorkshop

*If you are located outside of Nebraska, this eWorkshop is available through the WIDA Consortium.  Nebraska residents may contact ICMEE to enroll in this course.

Getting Kids to Talk About Writing (Grades 3-6)

Essential Question:  How do you support your linguistically diverse students in listening, speaking, reading, and writing?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How do I get my bilingual students to talk about what they already know about the writing process?
  • Unit 2:  How I use my bilingual students’ oral language skills to help plan their writing?
  • Unit 3: How can I use conferencing as a tool to support my students’ writing?
  • Unit 4:  How can I make connections for my bilingual students and their writing through the use of read aloud texts?
  • Unit 5: How can I ensure that my bilingual students have productive conversations about their writings?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Grouping Strategies for Multilingual Classrooms (Grades K-12)*

Essential Question: How can I maximize opportunities for all learners in a multilingual setting?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1:  What are the dynamics of grouping and regrouping in a multilingual classroom?
  • Unit 2: What is the unique nature of teaching and learning in groups where some students are fluent in the language of instruction and others are not?
  • Unit 3: What is the nature of grouping where all students are second language learners of the language of instruction
  • Unit 4:  How can I support students learning in their home language and connect it to their learning in English?
  • Unit 5: How can I build on the opportunities of a multilingual classroom in my planning?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Home Languages in the Classroom (Grades 2-8)*

Essential Question: How can I set up routines and learning activities that promote the use of home languages in my classroom?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: What are some warm-up activities to bring home languages into my classroom?
  • Unit 2: How can I leverage the use of home languages when studying vocabulary?
  • Unit 3: How can I structure learning activities that require two or more languages, even if I am not in a bilingual school?
  • Unit 4: How can I help learners reflect upon their own bilingualism?
  • Unit 5: How can I encourage conversations about the language use of our students, families and communities?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Introduction to the Standards of Effective Pedagogy (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: What is an effective pedagogy for supporting strong learning for bilingual students in my classroom?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How can I construct a positive culture within my classroom community?
  • Unit 2: How do I facilitate learning to support language development?
  • Unit 3: What is a transformed classroom? How would it benefit my students?
  • Unit 4: How do I get started transforming my classroom?
  • Unit 5: What are the six standards of effective pedagogy?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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The Standards of Effective Pedagogy: Standards 1 and 2 (Grades K-12)

Essential Question:  How can Joint Productive Activity & Language and Literacy Development support stronger content and language learning for bilingual students in a diverse, inclusive classroom?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: What is Joint Productive Activity?
  • Unit 2: How do I implement Joint Productive Activity?
  • Unit 3: What is pedagogy for Language and Literacy Development?
  • Unit 4: How do I implement Language and Literacy Development?
  • Unit 5: What does instruction look like when students engage literacy and language development to accomplish a joint productive activity?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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The Standards of Effective Pedagogy: Standards 3 and 4 (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: How does the connecting of teaching and curriculum to the experiences and skills of my bilingual students’ homes and communities promote complex thinking?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How can Funds of Knowledge inform my curriculum
  • Unit 2: What can contextualization look like in my instruction?
  • Unit 3: What is complex thinking and how does it help bilingual students to meet high academic standards
  • Unit 4: How can I enact complex thinking in my teaching practice?
  • Unit 5: What does a classroom look like when Joint Productive Activity, Language and Literacy, Contextualization, and Complex Thinking are put into place at high level?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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The Standards of Effective Pedagogy: Standards 5 and 6 (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: How do the CREDE standards for Instructional Conversations and Critical Stance improve instruction for multilingual learners?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How does leading instructional conversations that include significant time for student talk benefit students, especially multilingual students?
  • Unit 2: How do multilingual students benefit from Instructional Conversations?
  • Unit 3: What does Critical Stance look like in the elementary or secondary classroom?
  • Unit 4:  How do multilingual students benefit from taking a critical stance in content areas?
  • Unit 5: How do all six CREDE standards fit together?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Language and Concept Development (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: How can I provide bilingual learners the greatest opportunities to acquire both the knowledge and the language needed to be successful in my classroom?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How do I distinguish the key concepts of instruction from the language used to communicate about them?
  • Unit 2: How do I identify and make understandable the essential concepts of the curriculum?
  • Unit 3: How can I uncover the language demands of my instruction?
  • Unit 4: How can I support students in taking on the language demands of content instruction?
  • Unit 5: How can teachers engage families in order to help students (and themselves) access and deepen what students know about the topics of instruction?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Learning Through Two Languages (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: How can we build on students’ linguistic and cultural assets to foster additive bilingualism?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How does speaking a language other than English benefit students in U.S. schools?
  • Unit 2: How do bilingual learners access information and express what they know when they are learning through two languages?
  • Unit 3: How is teaching on the “Second Language Pathway” different from teaching on the first?
  • Unit 4: How do bilingual learners transfer the knowledge they have gained through one language to express themselves in another language?
  • Unit 5: How can I help bilingual students increase their communicative competence in a second language?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Race and Education (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: What is the role of race in the classroom? What do I REALLY know about race and how can it help me become a better teacher?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: When did you first learn about race?
  • Unit 2: Where do racial disparities come from?
  • Unit 3: What is racism?
  • Unit 4: What terminologies and concepts help us understand race and racism?
  • Unit 5: How does race and racism work in my classroom?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Reading Supports for Multilingual Learners (Grades 2-8)*

Essential Question: How can I support bilingual students who are struggling with reading in English?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: What is different about teaching reading in English to bilingual students
  • Unit 2: How can I use co-constructed texts to help my bilingual learners read texts with confidence?
  • Unit 3: How can Shared Reading help bilingual learners read and comprehend texts in English?
  • Unit 4: How do patterned texts help bilingual learners read and produce sophisticated, fluent text?
  • Unit 5: How can I help my bilingual learners develop a deep curiosity for the way language works?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Second Language Acquisition (Grades K-12)

Essential Question: How can my knowledge about second language acquisition improve my instruction with bilingual students?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: What are the similarities and differences between learning a first language and second language? Why does this matter in your classroom?
  • Unit 2: What are the similarities and differences between social and academic language? How does your school attend to the social and academic repertoires of your students?
  • Unit 3: How am I providing cognitively challenging tasks for learners at all language levels? What types of scaffolds am I providing for my bilingual learners?
  • Unit 4: How can I incorporate native languages in instruction to support bilingualism and academic achievement?
  • Unit 5: How can the knowledge of language proficiency levels help me differentiate instruction for my bilingual students?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Spanish Language and Literacy Development (Grades PreK-5)

Essential Question: In early childhood, how do Spanish speaking children acquire language and literacy?  How does that differ from English?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1:  What’s involved in oral language development?
  • Unit 2: How do adults ensure that young children comprehend language?
  • Unit 3: How does storytelling discourse differ among languages? How does this discourse influence language to literacy?
  • Unit 4: What is different about teaching reading in Spanish? Why is Spanish reading taught differently from English reading?
  • Unit 5: How is grammar different between the two languages? And why does this matter for my students?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Uncovering and Leveraging Students' Home Literacies in the Classroom

Essential Question: How do I reposition multilingual/multicultural students’ strengths in the classroom as assets? How can I build on the strengths and assets that multilingual / multicultural students bring to my classroom?
 
Guiding Questions:  

  • Unit 1: What are ‘Funds of Knowledge’ and how can I build on them in my classroom?
  • Unit 2: How do I identify literacy practices that students are already familiar with when they come to school?  How can I use this knowledge to support my classroom instruction?
  • Unit 3: How do I create connections between the students’ knowledge and the school’s curriculum? How do I apply any student literacies I have identified to classroom activities?
  • Unit 4: How can I bring family and community members and resources into the classroom?
  • Unit 5: How can I give voice to linguistically and culturally diverse students in the classroom?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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What is Language? (Grades K-12)

Essential Question:  How does my understanding of what language is and how it functions guide me to be a more effective teacher for all students but especially for bilingual students who are in the developmental stages of learning English?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: What are ways to think about language when it is not or is in addition to English
  • Unit 2: What are the possibilities for the forms, sounds, and functions of language? How do they work?
  • Unit 3: How does language function for learning in the classroom?
  • Unit 4: What is the role of English in schools and classrooms when it is not the only or not the first language of many of the students?
  • Unit 5: What ways of using languages can lead to success in my content area classroom?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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Writing (Grades 3-6)

Essential Question: What does writing look like in a linguistically and culturally responsive classroom?

Guiding Questions:

  • Unit 1: How can I use resources to learn more about my bilingual learners?
  • Unit 2: What is considered good writing in the intermediate grades?
  • Unit 3: What does a demonstration look like for all of my writers?
  • Unit 4: How do I support my bilingual learners after the writing demonstration?
  • Unit 5: How can the oral language approach support your bilingual learners?
  • Unit 6: Answer the Essential Question
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“Sometimes I am guilty of not doing as much in the realm of family engagement as I should. The family interviews reminded me to keep the student and family's input on the top of the list of things to do at the beginning of the school year.”                          (eWorkshop Completer)