WIDA Global Community of Practice Capstone Celebration

The WIDA Global Community of Practice has been an online, year-long professional learning experience supporting school-based teams engaging in a collaborative research and design process to improve schoolwide systems for multilingual learners. In our inaugural year, 86 participants representing 28 schools participated. Currently, teams are engaged in an 8-week, facilitated design sprint to prototype, test, implement and refine a solution to a problem of practice at their school.

The final stage of the WIDA Global Community of Practice will be the Capstone Celebration on May 12, a virtual mini-conference featuring presentations that highlight the journey of school-based teams over the past year. The event will consist of a morning (8-11am, U.S. Central Time) and evening session (7-10pm, U.S. Central Time). Attendance is an exclusive benefit for all WIDA International School Consortium member schools.

The presentations will highlight innovative design cycles in which teams identified a problem of practice at their school and then designed and gathered feedback on a prototype to address the problem. Each 30-minute block will consist of a 20-minute team presentation, followed by time for questions.

Prior to the Capstone Celebration, registered attendees will receive a schedule with details about each team presentation. For now, here’s a glimpse of some of the upcoming presentations:

Collaboration: It's What We Do, The International School of Latvia

In this presentation, we will describe our journey through the WIDA Global Community of Practice process using our school’s 3Cs framework: Community, Core, and Commitment. After an in-depth look at our school community, we identified a problem of practice that aimed at the core of who we are and what we do. We decided to focus on the Collaboration Activity System and to develop an introduction to our collaborative practices that we will use to on-board new staff. The presentation will showcase our collaborative practices throughout the teaching and learning cycle, including co-planning templates, real world examples of co-teaching in action, and reflective artifacts.

Improving Continuity of Support for Multilingual Learners Through Professional Development Planning, The American School of Kinshasa

With the high faculty turnover in many international schools, maintaining an inclusive and supportive educational program for multilingual learners can be a challenge. Creating buy-in and building effective collaborative partnerships for co-teaching takes time, but how could a strategic approach accelerate this process? In this session, we will focus on leveraging different types of professional development opportunities to target key dispositions, common expectations, and skills throughout the course of a school year.

Collaboration: The Key to More Effectively Serving our Learners, The American School of Guatemala

This project focuses on the elaboration of a long- and short-term plan with specific goals and steps that allow setting the stage for and taking advantage of the collaboration of classroom teachers (across program languages), learning specialists, bilingual auxiliary teachers, dual language liaisons and instructional coaches. The overall goal is to better support our learners – all of whom are multilingual – through a more clearly articulated definition of collaboration, ways in which to work successfully as collaborators, and the use of dynamic teaching and learning strategies that capitalize on the strengths of our multilingual environment and students.

Register for the Capstone Celebration!