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Interview with the Author: John Carr “It’s a challenge teaching to two different sets of language arts standards simultaneously. But thousands of California teachers have to do it every day. So professional development showing how the California Standards for English Language Development (ELD) fit with the English Language Arts (ELA) standards has been in demand. “When I first began providing these workshops, I always did a match of a reading comprehension standard from the ELD document with a comparable standard from the ELA document. The idea was to give an example of what teachers could do themselves with each of the standards at their grade levels. But what I heard, at workshop after workshop, was, ‘Can’t you do this, for all of the standards?’ And to be frank, it’s not so easy to do. “My WestEd colleague Nanette Kolsch and I created a template and started integrating all of the ELD and ELA standards. Along the way we got good feedback from our advisory panel — people in districts, county offices, and universities with reputations as ELD experts in the state — and the result has been the ‘map.’ “It's important for teachers to see how the ELD and ELA standards are connected. After all, the ELD standards are intended to serve as the ‘onramp’ to the ELA standards. Elementary school teachers say the highest level ELD standards tend to be more rigorous than the ELA standards. They see that by addressing the ELD standards, all the kids in their classes can benefit. At the high school level, on the other hand, teachers say there is still a ‘big step’ students must take from the highest ELD standards to be proficient on the ELA standards. Those are some pretty big ‘ah-haa’ for teachers, with important consequences for how they plan their instruction and assessment. “I’m really pleased with how useful the map seems to be, and my only concern is that it not simply get plunked on teachers’ desks. Even a short workshop that just takes teachers through the document and gets them started reviewing it at their grade level will make all the difference in their comfort actually putting it to use.”