An advocacy perspective requires educators to believe that with adequate support, multilingual learners (MLs) can achieve at the same level as their non-ML peers. Advocates also believe that educators have a shared sense of responsibility for the academic achievement of MLs. For educators to approach MLs’ instruction from an advocacy perspective, they must understand the needs and key areas for ML advocacy, as well as understand the tools and strategies that can support advocacy efforts.  Read more

In this module, educators will explore opportunities to increase family and community involvement with multilingual learners(ML) by understanding the five steps of advocacy leading to the implementation of a multilingual learner family workshop. Read more

This course will focus on your need as an educator to teach academic language as well as content. Teachers must ensure that multilingual learners have access to grade-level and challenging content within a standards-based framework. They must also implement strategies that help multilingual learners access the content.  Read more

In this course, you will explore second language acquisition (SLA) and learn to understand the stages of acquiring a second language. You will also explore how SLA impacts educational experiences for multilingual learners’ cognitive processes, academic achievements, and socio-emotional growth.    Furthermore, this course introduces a variety of instructional strategies you can use in your classroom to support and engage your multilingual learners. Read more

This course is designed to introduce educators to the unique learning needs and challenges of today’s Multilingual learners (MLs). More than 55% of teachers in the United States have at least one ML in the classroom, making it critical for all educators to become familiar with the important roles that parent and community involvement, legal protections and policies, advocacy, and community organizing play in supporting these students in learning core academic content.  Read more

Multilingual learners (MLs) have unique needs when it comes to demonstrating their understanding and knowledge in an academic setting.  Creating assessments that provide MLs with opportunities to successfully demonstrate their learning is one of the key skills that teachers of MLs need to master. Assessments are one of the most important tools educators use to gather data that will drive best practices in their classroom instruction. To accurately assess MLs, teachers must identify the most appropriate tools to evaluate the reliability of assessments and create appropriate accommodations for their students.  This course will support teachers through the intentional design, creation, and evaluation of assessment tools for classroom use so that results best reflect multilingual students’ content knowledge, as well as their language ability. Read more