What is your name story?

My Name, My Identity

Take the challenge: Tweet your name story @sdwduallanguage #mynamemyidentity

DL Updates September 13, 2019

WELCOME BACK EVERYONE!!

I hope that you are braving the heat and enjoying connecting with your students!  This update will be a quick one.  Don't forget to check out this weeks BLOG (Is "Good Teaching" Enough?).

WEEK IN SCHOOLS-AVID Excel 8th grade-Horning Middle School

With great expectation comes great support-then they achieve! AVID Excel explicitly attends to the language demands our students need to master as they succeed into high school and beyond.  This is just one way it is done.  Look at the volume and complexity of this writing by an English learning student-do you expect the same?  do you get it?  More to come on this Excel Routine!

News for you!

NEW TEACHER Changes in MENTORING:  This year, our grant allows for us to bring you skilled mentoring as always, however, your mentor will likely be your building literacy coach, rather than another building colleague. 

• Minerva is DL Spec Ed Mentor K-8
• Jamie, Lisa, Marlene, Carina are “DL Mentors K-8”
• Barbara Sanchez FORT Mentor

NEW TEACHER PD AND SUPPORT: New to teaching?  In your first three years?  if you answered YES! you will be invited to participate in these trainings to support your learning.  Your secretary and principal will help to support you in getting a substitute!

• Classroom Management Training October 15
• Data Based Instructional Planning Nov 13
• Progress Monitoring February 7
• Foundations of Reading, Wednesdays in Spring TBA

NEW and RETURNING TEACHERS:  All new Bilingual Teachers are required to attend Teaching for Biliteracy-Metalinguistic Awareness.  Returning teachers, your expertise is welcomed.  If you want to brush up or just share in our community of learning, contact Sara Orcholski to sign up.  (new teachers-I signed you up already)

• TDP-Required Teaching for Biliteracy Metalinguistic Awareness

Language Routines

The Importance of Routines

As classrooms around the district start the first week of school, dual language classrooms are focused on  developing classroom routines and procedures that students will use and follow to facilitate their learning this year in halls, bathrooms, lunch rooms etc.

We’ve thought of everything, but have we?

The strength of a Dual Language Program rests in our collective ability to ensure Bilingualism and Biliteracy, and if we do this we get Academically and Multiculturally proficient students.  Have we thought about teaching our students procedures to maintain their linguistic higiene?  Our students code switch because they can, but what would happen if we taught our learners a procedure to grow their language.  It’s very simple!

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Procedure: ¿Cómo se dice?

Instead of only using the code-switching to navigate new language, it is appropriate for us to teach our students to use ¿Cómo se dice?.  

 ¿Cómo se dice? solicits linguistic support from the listeners when the speaker is searching for what or how to say it-reinforcing listening engagement, cognition and problem solving, and increasing the status of the partner’s linguistic abilities.  It indicates linguistic meta-cognition-key to growing language and ensuring the outcomes we want. If we explicitly teach and model ¿Cómo se dice? With our students, and set the expectation that they use this procedure-we will ensure bilingualism that is transferable anywhere in the world!