Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) Institutes: Literacy, Math

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Approximately 4.5 million English learners are enrolled in the nation's public schools. Over 40% of public school teachers have English learners in their classrooms, but only 12.5% have had eight or more hours of professional development focused on teaching these students. With few exceptions, teacher preparation and professional development programs have not kept pace with the growing linguistic challenge. And yet, it is teachers who play the most crucial role in the success or failure of their students.

This five-day institute, organized by WestEd's Aida Walqui, presents a research-based model of professional development, Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL). By combining intensive seminar, lecture, and small-group work at WestEd, participants will learn theory-based strategies for effectively teaching academic language to English learners, particularly in literacy and math content classrooms.

Who Should Attend

• Secondary teachers who work with English learners
• Teacher educators and professional developers who work with preservice and inservice secondary teachers

What You Learn
Participants will learn QTEL's research-based key principles of promoting academic language development in secondary English learners, and they will develop expertise in applying those principles using a wide range of pedagogical strategies in rich instructional sequences. Specifically, participants will:

• understand the attitudes, knowledge, and dispositions that enable teachers to work effectively with adolescent English learners;
• increase understanding of scaffolding disciplinary discourse in specific subject matter areas through exploring and analyzing classroom examples;
• increase understanding and skills in how to use several types of scaffolding, including modeling, bridging, schema building, contextualization, text representation, and metacognitive development; and
• gain the understanding and skills to develop students' metacognitive awareness of language and generative learning strategies.

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