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The QTEL Professional Development Modules consist of multimedia tools and processes for teacher professional development, from pre-service education through teacher leadership. These modules are both robust and flexible enough to be implemented in many combinations and settings. All contain examples of practice, components that develop cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and reflection and elaboration activities. The modules also include road maps that propose sequences of engagement for diverse users — teacher educators, teacher professional developers, and other teacher leaders — that can address the needs and circumstances of individual users and sites.
Key components of QTEL's tools and processes include:
Reflection - Activities to deepen teachers' understandings of effective classroom practice by inviting them to learn from past situations (recollective reflection), plan how to address a specific situation (anticipatory reflection), and to "think on their feet" as they engage in action (interactive reflection).
Exemplars - Videos, vignettes, or cases that illustrate instances of accomplished teaching, controversial moments in teaching, "Ah ha!" moments, or situations that present roadblocks to teacher or student understanding.
Elaborations - Tasks that invite participants to explore professional literature to draw conclusions for their own practice, to solve problems, develop materials, and to propose alternatives to specific learning and teaching situations.
Road Maps - Sequences from the modules that guide teacher educators and professional developers in using selected activities and tasks based on the specific needs of a group of teachers.
Teachers who effectively appropriate these tools and processes learn to set high expectations for academic performance by English learners, scaffold instruction to support rigorous academic and disciplinary content and discourse learning, and apply QTEL principles to lessons in content areas.
A description of each module follows.
The Sociocultural Context of Educating Adolescent English Language Learners
This module explores the larger context of the education of English language learners. It focuses on the interplay among language, culture, economics, and social class, and the dynamics that ensue as different groups, in asymmetrical relationships, enact schooling. This module raises teachers' awareness of these issues and to help them reflect on attitudes, dispositions, and behaviors that may, if unexplored, be detrimental to their students' education.
Scaffolding Instruction for Adolescent English Language Learners
This module introduces pedagogical principles that underlie the development of academic instruction for English language learners. Building on sociocultural notions of teaching and learning, this module uses the concept of scaffolding to discuss ways in which teachers, peers, and artifacts support students' ability to develop conceptual, academic, and linguistic competence.
Teaching English as a Second Language to Adolescent English Language Learners
This module focuses on the theoretical, methodological, and practical approaches for teaching English as a second language to beginning-level secondary English language learners in a variety of instructional settings.
Teaching Social Studies to Adolescent English Language Learners
Teachers strive to make the content of social studies courses meaningful to students; students wonder why they have to study the past and what history has to do with the present. At the same time, professionals in the field debate the nature of history, the content of history courses, and the purpose of history in our schools. This module demonstrates ways to make connections between individuals and groups, and personal and public histories. Emphasis is on developing academic language in social studies for intermediate-level English language learners.
Teaching Reading to Adolescent English Language Learners
This module examines the challenges secondary English language learners encounter as they read in various subject areas, demonstrating how teachers can help students develop expertise in reading. As part of their professional development, teachers are asked to reflect on the ways that linguistics, background knowledge, conceptual complexity, new vocabulary, and ambiguous purposes for reading can singly, or in combination, make reading subject area texts difficult. Teachers learn about tools and processes to support students and to help them develop cognitive and metacognitive strategies to comprehend and critically analyze academic texts.
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