Principles of Quality Teaching for English Learners

Sustain Academic Rigor in Teaching English Language Learners

• Promote deep disciplinary knowledge.
  • Develop central ideas in the discipline, initially leaving behind interesting but secondary details.
  • Establish interconnections among central ideas of the discipline.
  • Deepen understanding of themes over time.
• Engage students in higher order thinking.
  • Have students combine facts and ideas to synthesize, evaluate, and generalize.
  • Have students build arguments, solve problems, and construct new meanings and understandings.
  • Have students support thinking with evidence.
• Engage students in generative concepts and skills.
  • Have students anchor new knowledge to central concepts to build understanding.
  • Have students apply familiar central ideas or strategies to their emerging understanding of new concepts.
  • Invite students to build increasingly complex explanations of disciplinary concepts and processes.

Hold High Expectations in Teaching English Language Learners

• Engage students in tasks that provide high challenge and high support.
  • Provide students with activities that are robust but flexible enough that they provide multiple entry points: all students, regardless of where they start, will benefit from participation.
  • Scaffold students' ability to participate in the activities.
  • Ensure that students are asked to engage in increasingly more complex tasks.
  • Treat students proleptically (as if they already possess the abilities you are seeking to develop).
• Engage students (and teachers) in the development of their own expertise.
  • Conduct metacognitive activities so that students gain knowledge of how to learn, how to monitor their progress, and how to self-correct.
  • Provide practice in the use of academic tools and activities so that students appropriate them over time.
  • Encourage students to support each other in their development.
  • Encourage students to support each other in building academic stamina.
• Make criteria for quality work clear for all.
  • Use rubrics to spell out expected quality of work.
  • Encourage students to take risks and to work hard to master challenging academic work.

Engage in Quality Interactions with English Language Learners

• Engage students in sustained interactions with teacher and peers.
  • Invite students to go beyond single utterance answers to elaborate, illustrate, and connect to their interlocutors' ideas.
• Focus interactions on construction of knowledge.
  • State explicitly that constructing new understandings is hard work, that it requires listening intently to interlocutors, making sense of what they are saying, and deciding how to respond to their ideas either by agreeing and providing further evidence (if possible) or by disagreeing and stating why this is the case.
  • Ask students to focus on the coherence of what they are saying (Are they staying with the main ideas? Are they making sense?) and to deepen their understanding by connecting it to related ideas.

Sustain a Language Focus in Teaching English Language Learners

• Promote language learning in meaningful contexts.
  • Provide explicit examples of how to mark agreement, disagreement, and other moves of ideas within a text.
• Promote disciplinary language use.
  • Focus on the social purpose of genre, audience, structure, and specific language of disciplinary texts; have students practice deconstructing and creating similar texts.
• Address specific language issues judiciously.
  • Focus corrective feedback on fluency, complexity, or accuracy but not at the same time.
• Amplify rather than simplify communications.

Develop a Quality Curriculum for Teaching English Language Learners

• Structure opportunities to scaffold learning, incorporating goals above.
  • Set long-term goals and benchmarks.
  • Use a problem-based approach with increasingly interrelated lessons.
  • Use a spiraling progression.
  • Make connections between subject matter and students' reality.
  • Build on students' lives and experiences.