Week 5 – Assignment

Professional Learning Community – Inservice

Part of being an effective teacher and delivering meaningful and relevant instruction to students who are learning English is to share your experiences and successes with fellow teachers as part of a Professional Learning Community (PLC), where teachers work collaboratively towards a common goal of professional development and sharing best practices. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) further explains the importance of PLCs in an article published in Educational Leadership, What is a professional learning community? 

As an expert in lesson planning using knowledge of student learning styles and cultural backgrounds based on language proficiency and academic readiness, your principal has asked that you share your skills during the next inservice workshop.

Choose one of the activities in ESL teacher as cultural broker as a foundation for a one-hour teacher workshop, keeping in mind your audience, their level of expertise, and time of day. The following components are required in your presentation:

1. Describe (in outline form) what will be presented during the hour-long presentation, including a brief summary of the activity and how you will provide at least three “Stop & Share” breaks throughout the lesson, where you provide critical thinking questions for teachers to discuss with a partner(s). See Definition of critical thinking: Reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.

1. Explain how you will use the information from the activity presented to connect cultural backgrounds for future activities.

1. Describe examples of how to use the activity in an ELL classroom and how to differentiate your instruction based on hypothetical varying levels of language proficiency.

1. Explain how families can be participants in the activity in order to gain a deeper understanding of multicultural awareness. 

Be sure that your presentation is engaging and appealing to different learning styles. It is encouraged that you go outside your comfort zone as a practice of empathy for your ELL students who, too, are learning outside their comfort zone. This presentation can be created using the following formats:

The presentation will be five to seven slides in length (or 3-5 minutes infusing an audio/video tool). Be sure to include a title and reference slide using APA format and at least two scholar resources in addition to the text.

Carefully review the Grading Rubric for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.