Colorín Colorado Blog: Helping ELLs Succeed
Welcome to our Colorín Colorado blog! This blog is focused on helping English language learners (ELLs) succeed in the classroom, with a special focus on strategies and tools that that support the use of college- and career-ready standards (such as the Common Core) with ELLs.
The blog includes updates from the ELL field about topics such as language proficiency standards and assessments, as well as practical tips for developing academic language, helping ELLs tackle grade-level content, and collaborating with colleagues.
For related content, see our Common Core and ELLs resource section. You can also browse blog posts by topic.
How can teachers equitably grade ELLs? Learn more about challenges, related research and resources, and recommendations developed by the Diane Staehr Fenner, Jill Kester, and Sydney Snyder.
Our new blog post from Diane Staehr Fenner focuses on themes she's been noticing while she has been busy out in the field: supporting students with trauma; young dual language learners; and dual language programming. For each theme, Diane shares what she's noticing by way of the sense of urgency or demographics, suggests some ideas on what you can do to address these issues, and provides a few resources for each topic in case you’re interested in learning more.
Join us for our first Colorín Colorado Facebook Live event on Wednesday, May 24th at 12:00 p.m. ET! We’ll be chatting with our blogger, Dr. Diane Staehr Fenner, on how to best advocate for ELLs. Feel free to send us questions ahead of time at info@colorincolorado.org. This event will be archived.
To help you reflect on the 2016-2017 year, Lydia Breiseth, Manager of Colorín Colorado, has put together some reflection questions with the input of a group of veteran educators and teacher leaders, as well as a list of questions and writing prompts for students.
This article highlights the diverse leadership experiences of ELL educators and shares ideas for identifying and honing your own leadership capacity.
In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Listenwise's founder, former public radio journalist Monica Brady-Myerov, shares what she has learned about teaching and assessing listening for students, particularly ELLs.
In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Lynn Shafer Willner and Mira Monroe describe three steps to a "can do" approach when it comes to designing and differentiating instruction for ELLs who are struggling — in other words, building upon student strengths and abilities rather than focusing on weaknesses.
We have collected some helpful lesson plans as well as discussion guides for talking about the results of the 2016 election. We also offer suggestions for creating welcoming schools for all students.
In this blog post, I’ll share an exciting, recently published new book to help ELLs access the CCSS. I’ll first provide you some background on the book, will then point out some of the book’s contents, and will close with unique features of the book that struck me when reading it.
This blog post highlights three resources developed by Achieve the Core that you can use to provide support to your ELLs
