Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL): Summer Institutes

Who Should Attend

• Secondary teachers who work with English learners
• Secondary teachers whose content expertise is science, math, English as a second language/language arts/social studies
• Teacher educators and professional developers who work with preservice and inservice secondary teachers

Goals of the Institutes

The institutes increase the capacity of teachers, teacher educators, and professional developers to teach rigorous academic language and disciplinary content to English learners at the secondary level. The institutes provide educators with a firm foundation of theoretical understanding and corresponding strategies for effectively teaching academic language to English language learners.

Format of the Institutes

The summer institutes are five-day programs that combine intensive seminar, lecture, and small-group work.

What You Learn

Participants learn key principles of promoting academic language development in secondary English learners, and they develop expertise in applying those principles — using a wide range of pedagogical strategies in rich instructional sequences. More specifically, participants

• Understand the knowledge, dispositions, and attitudes that enable teachers to work effectively with adolescent language learners
• Increase understanding of scaffolding disciplinary discourse in specific subject matter areas through the exploration and analysis of classroom exemplars
• Increase understanding and skills in how to use six types of scaffolding: modeling, bridging, schema building, contextualization, text representation, and metacognitive development
• Gain the understanding and skills of developing students' metacognitive awareness of language and generative learning strategies

Who Facilitates Your Learning

Aida Walqui, Director of the Teacher Professional Development Program at WestEd, and the research and development staff of the Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) project lead the summer institutes and provide hands-on support for institute participants.

What Resources Support Your Learning

Walqui and QTEL staff have developed, field-tested, and implemented in preservice and secondary classrooms across the country the theoretically grounded tools and processes that structure the institutes.

These tools and processes build the capacity of teachers to deepen the linguistic, conceptual, and academic development of adolescent English learners. Walqui's Access and Engagement and the new QTEL publication, Scaffolding Academic Uses of English: Accelerating the Achievement of Secondary English Learners (see page 33) also inform the institute.

What the Research Says

Research indicates that teachers struggle in implementing meaningful instruction that advances secondary English learners' content area literacy in English (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002; Velasco & Fix, 2000). In fact, 57% of students who are English learners are from families that have been in the United States. for two or more generations (Fix & Batalova, 2005). These students have been educated exclusively in this country. The need to develop teacher expertise to turn this situation around is urgent. It calls for professional development opportunities that allow teachers to reframe and enrich their pedagogical content knowledge so as to more successfully address the needs of their students.

What Participants Report

“This professional development program was superior to other professional development opportunities in which I have participated. The information, research-based strategies, literature-based activities, modeling, and scaffolding were all very relevant to my work as a teacher and professional developer.”

Cost

$1,600 per person, or $1,300 per person for teams of three or more. Space is limited.

Contact

Please see the QTEL website for institute dates and more information.

Contact Information

Steven Weiss
415.615.3170
sweiss2@wested.org