Optimizing Learning for All Students
To serve all students well, Learning Support, EAL and classroom teachers need to collaborate to plan, teach, assess and reflect together. School leaders and educators need to communicate in clear and consistent ways with each other - and with students and parents. Simple enough? In fact, we all know that this aspirational state is hard to achieve and sustain.
Partners in Learning
The partners in this learning event, WIDA and NFI, focus on, respectively, designing learning ecosystems, designing language learning and designing learning support. We collaborate to provide schools with ways to synthesize these key learning elements in systemic and supportive ways. In this conversation, we will collectively inquire into the role of identity and school culture in helping or hindering organizational collaboration. We’ll also work together to notice, name and nurture collaborative practices that work, and to tackle those that don’t. We’ll all leave with a deeper understanding of this central professional challenge of collaborating for student success, and better equipped with the competencies to work together more effectively.
Why a collaborative conversation?
This event will include dialogue, collaborative inquiry and intentional disruption to help school-based teams explore the intersection of class teacher, EAL and Learning Support. We each bring unique knowledge and experience that will serve to enhance learning. As professionals with specialized areas of expertise, we can inadvertently slip into perceiving children through the lens of our individual professional perspectives if we are not careful. We may construct these perceptions based less on students’ actual learning profiles than on our own frame of reference and the structural constraints of our schools. NFI and WIDA support networks of schools committed to the asset-based inclusion of all learners within intentional learning ecosystems. Building on our collaboration in writing The Wrong Question, this event aspires to help educators learn from each other, and perhaps more importantly, from our students.
Presented By
- Ochan Kusuma-Powell, NFI Director
- Jon Nordmeyer, WIDA International Program Director
- Kristen Pelletier, Redefining Access & NFI Design Team