It's spring and students may or may not have a little bit of spring fever! Regardless, it's a great time to do outdoor activities and get out of the classroom. And what a great way to bring some language development into a real-world event.

Earth Day is rich with language development activities. Here are just a few ideas to get you started; they can be done along with going outside, or if you can't go outside, they can still be done in the classroom. We will be discussing these language development activities with the Language Experience Approach.

The Language Experience Approach is a great strategy that has been around since the 1960s. According to the Center for Adult English Language Acquisition, it is a whole language approach that promotes reading and writing through the use of personal experiences and oral language. This strategy is great for language learners because it gets students to SWiRL (speak, write, interact, read, and listen). 

Originally posted 4/16/22; updated on 4/1/23.

If you teach multilingual learners, or MLLs/MLs, you may be familiar with Ramadan. This period of reflection and celebration is hard to miss if you serve students who happen to be Muslim in your ESL classes! Ramadan follows the lunar calendar, and it lasts a full month. 

No matter what your thoughts are on religion, there are reasons why we should be aware of Ramadan and be mindful of certain things we can do to make students feel comfortable. Ramadan may affect how students are feeling in class during this month and it may also impact schoolwork.

Throughout the month, those celebrating Ramadan will fast and stay up late praying and reflecting with their family members. Here are some important tips to assist them during the school day.

Provide a place for students to go during lunch.
Muslims fast from dawn to dusk each day during the month of Ramadan. This could mean that they do not eat or drink from 5:30 am until 7:30 pm. It might be hard for students to watch others eat and drink during lunch, depending on the student. Some might be okay with being around others during this time; some might prefer a quiet place to sit and pray.

In my high school, we would usually have at least one student and sometimes a little group come to our ESL class area to pray. It made my heart happy that they felt safe and comfortable to come to us for this! Is there a space in your school where you could provide an area like this?

Provide a place to pray or have quiet. 
This may look like your classroom or an area of your school, or maybe it is that you let students step outside in the hallway to pray. Ramadan is a time for reflection, spiritual discipline, and deep study of the Quran. According to Pew Research Center, Muslims pray five times throughout the day along with a night prayer called Tarawih during Ramadan.

If you are a school administrator, what places in your building might provide some solace for these students? Are there any rooms or areas where other students may not be? Is there an office that could be turned into a temporary prayer space? Think about it and communicate it to your staff so they can let their students know. Make it a safe haven where they can come, no questions asked during this time (just as long as their teachers know). 

Be mindful that students may be tired.
For those of us who do not fast, it may seem hard enough! But what about fasting AND being tired? For me personally, I know it would affect my cognitive functioning if I went to sleep around eleven or midnight and woke up around 5. 

In "Proper sleep essential during Ramadan fasting", authors recommend those who celebrate to try to go to bed early by 11pm and sleep 4 hours following Iftar, wake up at 3.30am ready for Suhoor and Fajr and return to sleep at around 5am for 2 hours. Our students may not be able to go back to bed around 5am because many may ride the bus and have to catch it early, so going to school tired is common. 

Let's show our students celebrating Ramadan some grace and learn from their discipline and reflections during this time. We can also learn a lot about their culture and families! And remember- this is also for some, a favorite and joyous time of year! See more of the joy and celebration in this Facebook video.

How do you support your students during Ramadan? Leave a comment below to give fellow teachers and administrators some ideas!
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Having regular instructional routines are beneficial in many ways for our Newcomer ESL Students. According to Using a Daily Routine for Language Practice, routines help lower the affective filter (feelings of anxiety or self-consciousness) by providing structured, familiar activities in which they can easily participate. 

This includes having routines for teaching foundational English skills. This month in our Secondary ESL Teacher membership program, we had Beth Vaucher of Equipping ELLs with us to talk about foundational skills and routines for our Multilingual Learners, or English Learners. She gave us an explicit routine for teaching these skills and some great tips, as well as an example ESL lesson plan to show exactly how she does it! Her tips can be used if you already have a curriculum or if you are making your own lessons from scratch.

Here are some of the highlights from our conversation. If you are interested in joining our membership and hearing more, check out more information here! 

Monday
The first day should be focused on building background and connecting to the text.  They can also be provided with the text in their home language if possible or provided with a short summary of the text. One of my favorite warm-ups is to provide sentence strips with the summary and have students put them together. 

If you are looking for texts in Spanish, Beth recommended Unite for Literacy. There are plenty of books in English and Spanish by different categories, and some nonfiction texts are appropriate for secondary students. I also like to use Newsela's Spanish articles.

Tuesday
Provide your text for students with audio or read aloud for students. While students are reading along and listening to the text, they can also use provided scaffolds like images, graphs, or organizers to make meaning of the text.

Wednesday
On the third day, mini-lessons can be started on phonics and phonemic awareness. These can be quick 10 minute lessons with a short video and some practice. I include these in all of my Newcomer Series Lesson Plans inside our membership. You can check out a free sample ESL lesson plan here!

Thursday
On the fourth day, a mini-lesson including high frequency words from the text can be introduced and last no more than 10 minutes. It's important to include these words in writing and speaking with students as well. They can do some quick Turn and Talks with sentence frames and a word bank, and then write. They can also do a Flip (Flipgrid).

Friday
On the last day, mini-lessons with grammar or sentence structure can round out the week. Then, students can interact with writing by including some of those high frequency words previously taught as well as practice with the grammar or sentence structure focus. Even just a one sentence summary would suffice! 

Things to remember: these skills should be taught in conjunction with content from the text, never in isolation. This makes language learning more meaningful. 

Another important thing to remember is that we need to return back to these skills frequently. Just one week will not be as impactful as if we continue to return to them week after week, whether that's in bell work, warm-ups, or exit tickets.

As high school or middle school teachers, we usually don't get the right training for teaching foundational English skills. Sometimes, it's up to us to serve our Newcomers the best we can. If you need help with your Newcomer students, send me a message and I can point you in the right direction! 

If you are an elementary educator, what instructional routines do you use for your Newcomers? Comment below!

Are you a middle school or high school teacher of Multilingual Learners? Do you teach ELD or ESL and serve Newcomers or LTELs (Long Term English Learners)? 

If you do, you might realize that some of your students need more support with foundational skills in English. They may also not come to us with literacy in their home language. For our LTELs, this may be part of the puzzle for why they even became LTELs in the first place. 

No matter what situation you are in, there is one thing that is clear- you want or need more support in your learning for teaching your students these skills. I know that as a high school teacher, I did not get this learning. We are not equipped a lot of times in our teaching credential program or from our district to teach older students foundational skills. 

Here are some resource recommendations for teachers starting off or already in their own professional learning around teaching foundational skills for Multilingual Learners, or English Learners. The book recommendations came from my friend Dayra Gaitan Crespo of EL Literacy when she came to be a guest speaker inside of our secondary ESL teacher membership, My MLL Mentor: High School. She is a great resource as well.

 Books

• Uncovering the Logic of English by Denise Eide
• Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching by J. Richard Gentry and Gene P. Ouellette
• Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers by Louisa Cook Moats
• Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates

  ~Side note for Shifting the Balance- Dayra and I did not discuss this one, but it is one that my district provided us with along with access to the authors' online course. If your district has funds for you to attend this course, it was great! I plan on returning to the materials they provided over and over again, as well as the book.

Podcasts

• Sold a Story

          ~I devoured this podcast! As someone who had no clue about the details
           of the reading wars, this podcast was intriguing to say the least. 

• Melissa and Lori Love Literacy
• The Six Shifts

           ~This is a podcast by the authors of Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring
​             the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom.

• ​The Science of Reading by Amplify Education
• Boosting Achievement: The ESL Podcast by Carol Salva, Episode Literacy for Older Newcomers, What is Practical and Effective

These are just a few resources out there that are either free or the price of a book (minus the Six Shifts course). I hope these resources are helpful for your reading foundations journey for your ELLs and MLLs. 

If you would like to continue this conversation with us, check out our high school ESL teacher membership to listen in and for more resources and support. 

Using images, videos, charts, and graphs are mainstays in our scaffolding toolkits for our Multilingual Learners, aka English Learners. Making content comprehensible through visuals are especially helpful for our Newcomer students. 

Why? It lowers the language load and allows our ESL students to focus on the content. After the language load is lowered, we can then add in English language scaffolds for them to practice along with our content. Learning language with content integrated makes language learning more meaningful! 

Another fun way to lower the language load is by using silent videos. And these may be actual silent movies from the 20s or they may just be YouTube videos on mute! During the first couple years of teaching ESL, my super knowledgeable and helpful colleague had a lesson using Charlie Chaplin's silent movie, Gold Rush. This was a great lesson to use when we had all of our students combined in one room while others did state testing. Students of all proficiency levels could do it. 

So how can you do this in your classroom? Here are the steps to start tomorrow!

Choose a video or movie clip.
Any clip will work! It's best when you can choose a clip that is related to something you are already discussing with students to make it more meaningful. For example, maybe you are reading The Seventh Man by Haruki Murakami. In this story, there is a part where two boys are standing by a wave. I won't spoil it for you, but the wave is an important part of this story.

​You could choose a video like this of a wave and put it on silent. You can post some guiding questions for students, or you could play it and see what they write down. The purpose is for them to activate prior knowledge of waves and to then generate language around that. 

When we did the Charlie Chaplin movie, we actually ended up showing most of the movie. We prompted students to identify elements of the story. What was the climax? What was the resolution? Who are the characters and what is the setting? They could tell all of this information just by watching the silent movie and with some sentence frames and word banks! So fun!

Decide what language you want students to generate.
This is our ultimate goal, and students need guidance for what you want them to use. Think of generating language in the three language levels to guide your planning. What do you want students to use at the word, sentence, and discourse levels? If it is a wave clip, you might want to see this language:

• Word: wave, water, crash, blue, big, sand
• Sentence: Past tense (crashed, was)
• Discourse: Compound sentences using the target words and sentence structure/grammar. Discourse can happen in the writing or speaking domains, or both!

Another example from my All About Money Newcomer Lesson is to generate language around money. Students are asked to watch this video called "How much money is in your bank account?" and answer what the video is about. They can watch the video on silent as the interviewer asks his classmates questions. I would focus on the following language for them to generate:

• Word: money, account, interview, talking, cents, dollars
• Sentence: Present tense
• Discourse: Simple sentences (noun + verb)

Since it is just a quick warm-up, I would provide some sentence stems like: I see... They are...No need for a fancy graphic organizer, unless you want to.
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For more, check out the full lesson for secondary Newcomer students!

Decide how you will have students generate the language.
Once students have an idea of what you want them to use, they can then string together their own sentences. How will they do this? Will you have some sentence stems or frames for them to use? Will you provide a graphic organizer for them to use while they watch the video clip? For the wave video clip, a cause and effect organizer would work! (The big blue wave got bigger, so it crashed on the sand.)

To add on to the how, have students pair and share their writing so they are now speaking. Just in this quick activity, you have then hit all of the language domains!

​Differentiate instruction.
Even if you have Newcomers, they may all be at different levels. Differentiating instruction can be easy for writing and speaking. For more advanced students, ask them to write more details and complex sentences. They should also be able to generate more vocabulary if they are more advanced and may not need as much translation support. For those who are at more starting or emerging levels, allowing the use of their first language and allowing drawing and art to express their ideas are key.

How else do you use video clips in your lessons? Leave a comment for us below!

I recently had a chat with one of our members from My MLL Mentor. In passing, she mentioned that her Newcomer class was very chatty, and they also had a habit of being on their phones.

It reminded me of my Newcomer classes. The feeling of a little family. The feeling of comfort and companionship that comes along with a safe space. And also, the talkative nature that comes with that comfort. And the cell phones- the common problems we face coming back from the pandemic and with high school students in general!

We talked about needing a reset with her class. That's one of the great things about teaching- we can really reset at any point in the school year, but the New Year is a great time for this. It got me thinking of my own classroom management strategies that I have tried and stuck with, depending on how each unique class responded to them. 

Here are some great classroom management strategies to try with Newcomers. They work because they involve one of the best scaffolds for this group- visuals!

Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light
For this classroom management strategy, all you need is red, yellow, and green construction paper. You can also get fancy and use some stick-on lights like these and place them somewhere students can see. If you are using paper, cut out your lights and place them on your board. Find a magnet that you can place next to the "light" you want to indicate students are on. If they are doing independent work, place the magnet next to the red light that shows they shouldn't talk and should be on-task.

Before implementing any classroom management strategy, make sure the expectations during each color are explicitly taught. For Newcomers, this may need to be translated into their own language and acted out for them. Adding in visuals such as icons to help with comprehension is helpful too!

Here are some example expectations:

Red Light: No talking, in your seat, on-task
Yellow Light: Low noise level, in your seat, can work with a partner
Green Light: Inside voice noise level, partner/small-group/whole-group work, may be able to get up from your seat

Spell It Out
For this strategy, all you need is a whiteboard or a chalkboard and a marker or chalk. Have students think of their own word that they would like to spell out. It could be "English" or "Arabic", or it could be "Bad Bunny"- whatever they want, as long as it is appropriate of course. Once you have picked out your one word as a class, write that word on the board where all students can see. 

When students are on-task and have appropriate noise level, they get to keep their letters. If students become off-task, are too talkative, or out of their seats, a letter gets taken away. The goal is to have the full word at the end of the week, and they get a reward. We all know that students are food-oriented, but I am a fan of giving students other options.

Here are some other rewards besides food that I have used in the past. These would normally happen on a Friday, or you could make this an end of the month reward too:

• Class outside if the weather permits
• Time to do an activity outside such as soccer
• Use of earbuds or headphones during classwork
• Free time to read (yes, they can read on their phones if it is not social media:)
• End of the month movie time/mini party (may need to get this approved from your administrator)

​Opportunities to Respond (OTR)
Ensuring that all students have an opportunity to respond means high engagement for students- including Newcomers! When engagement is high, there are less off-task behaviors.

In Confianza's blog post Giving Our Newcomer Students Opportunities to Respond, author Marjorie Kerstein indicates three steps for OTRs:

1. Prompt
2. Response
3. Feedback

​For the response step, you can choose how students will respond and differentiate appropriately according to their language level. How a Newcomer responds might look different than how a bridging student will and that is okay! However, a lot of the responses are ones that can easily include our Newcomers. Responses include white boards, thumbs up or down, choral responses, gestures, or an exit ticket.

How might we differentiate for our Newcomers? An example with white boards might be that some of your students can write a response while your Newcomers can draw one to show their understanding or use their first language.

Hopefully some of these strategies can assist with some of the common behaviors that may happen in our Newcomer classes or our content-area classrooms. If you have any other visual strategies that you have tried and liked, leave a comment below for other teachers to check out!

Celebrating holidays in the classroom can be tricky. What we celebrate may not be what all of our students celebrate, and we want to keep our classroom inclusive. Inclusivity means we are creating a sense of safety and belonging for all of our students, no matter where they come from, how long they've been here, or their cultural and educational backgrounds.

In the ESL classroom, we are already sensitive to creating this space for our students. We also want to make the space special for them- especially if you serve Newcomers. This is their space where they most likely feel the most comfortable. So of course, when the holidays come, we want to share some of the magic with them! 

There are different approaches to sharing the magic of the holidays. Some teachers may feel that they do not want to bring in the holidays so that no one is left out. They may focus on more winter-themed activities, lessons, or decorations. Some absolutely love Christmas and want to share their love by bringing it in the classroom (if you are a Christmas lover and enjoy walking into HomeGoods or Macy's this time of year, this is you, am I right?). And some teachers may celebrate Hanukkah and may feel a little left out and unsure about sharing their Hanukkah spirit for personal or societal reasons.  

My philosophy is: bring out all of the magic! Just let it all out for our students to enjoy and learn about each other. Does this mean we have to include all holidays under the sun? Not if you don't want to! Although I think it is fun to bring in different cultures and celebrations from around the world. Here are some of my suggestions for keeping our classrooms inclusive during the holiday season and beyond.
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Survey Your Students
At the beginning of the school year, it's a good idea to survey your students and see what holidays they observe so teachers can plan for them throughout the year. Here are some possible winter holidays students may celebrate in November, December, and January:

• Hanukkah
• Christmas
• Kwanzaa
• Three Kings Day
• Ramadan (can occur during Spring or Winter)
• New Year's Eve and New Year's Day
• Chinese New Year
• Japanese New Year
• St. Lucia Day

You can do this survey on a Google Form or by handing out a holiday questionnaire template like this one!

Decorate Accordingly
After you survey your students, you can either let them decorate or you can bring in some of your own if you have any! I'm a big fan of crafting and including students in your classroom atmosphere, so go ahead and get crafting away and don't forget to turn it into a language development activity by getting students SWiRLing about their crafts (speaking, writing, interacting, reading, and listening)!

Example craft + SWiRL: Kindness Countdown Chains to their holiday they celebrate
1. Make the chain (or start of the chain)- listening domain (directions from teacher)
2. Students write about the chain and/or their holiday (with appropriate scaffolds)- writing domain
3. Interview a partner (with appropriate scaffolds)- listening, speaking, and interacting
4. After interviewing, have students switch writing to read- reading domain
5. Students compare and contrast their chains and holidays with a graphic organizer together- interacting, writing, speaking, listening!

There you go! You could change up the order if you'd like, stretch it out for a couple of days or a week, or just do it for a quick one day lesson! You can vary this lesson for any craft idea you have.

Include Holidays in Your Lessons
After you get to know their holidays a little bit (you don't have to become an expert, but you just might over the years!), think about how you can strategically integrate these into your lessons.
Some ways could be:

• Warm-ups/bell work/bellringers 
• Texts you read if you do not have a curriculum or have freedom to supplement to your curriculum
• Community building activities like community circles
• Everyday, informal classroom chats!

Continue Celebrations All Year
Don't just celebrate holidays during the winter season! Keep them going and keep them included in your classroom. For example, just because Hispanic Heritage Month is September 15-October 15th, that doesn't mean we stop discussing student's heritage in our classroom; it is an intentional time to celebrate it, but not the only time. Get some new ideas for Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month All Year Long on the blog!

Here are some other holidays that students may celebrate in your classroom throughout the year:

• Day of the Dead
• Diwali
• Holi
• Eid al-Fitr
• Rosh Hashanah 
• Yom Kippur

Do you have any fun ways to include your students' holidays in your classroom and lessons? Share them in a comment below!

I had the pleasure of doing a Q and A with Ieva Grauslys, aka Simply Ieva, on her podcast. This was my second time on The ESL Teaching Podcast- catch the first episode with me on text engineering here! Or you can read about text engineering on my blog.

We decided to do the episode on questions that educators asked in Ieva's Facebook group and my Facebook group as well. We gathered a nice mix of questions and chatted about some possible answers. Maybe you are wondering about some of these too!

Classroom Decor
Ieva and I both have a secondary grade level background, so anything that is too little kid-ish is usually a no thanks from us. Ieva recommended Carson Dellosa Publishing and just from doing a quick browse, there are definitely classroom decor options that are more neutral and simple. 

My pick is using Amplifier by browsing some of their free posters by the many artists they showcase. A bonus is that you can filter their artwork by language! Right now, they have 23 languages to choose from. There are subjects that are not educational, and some may be inappropriate for kids; I wouldn't condone students to browse alone in my classroom. However, there are many free downloads that promote inclusiveness and equity, which we all strive for our multilingual learners! See some examples below.

Scheduling for Newcomers
For us secondary educators, scheduling for Newcomers is totally different. In our episode, we discussed scheduling at the elementary level. If you are serving Newcomer ESL students, it is perfectly fine to pull-out these students to really dig into language and foundational skills and give them the scaffolding and support they need.

When does this happen? If you have a high number of Newcomers, this could be challenging and pushing in might be more feasible. If you can pull-out, you do so by grade-level cohorts. In our district, we discuss only pulling out students in grades 2-5 since kindergarten and first graders are most likely getting the foundational skills they need in the mainstream classroom. When you are pulling out, make sure your Newcomers don't miss out on things that are happening in core instruction because they deserve access to the same content as their peers!

Listening Resources
Some of the listening resources we discussed were Voice of America for English learners, Listenwise, Online voice recorder, Flip, and Padlet. Flip (formerly FlipGrid) and Padlet allows students to engage in prompts and posts by teachers and add in their voice recordings so that others can listen and then respond. Listenwise has high-interest topics in podcast form as well as an ESL /ELD section. And Voice of America focuses on current events and news. If you want to get fancy and you have the time, you can easily make your own voice recordings to texts or assignments with Online Voice Recorder.

ESL Books and Websites for All Proficiency Levels
Some of our very favorite websites and books are ones you just might already be using! They are:

• Newsela
• Saddleback Educational Publishing (high interest, low level books- take a peek at their awesome covers!)
• News in levels
• Readworks

Whether you are an Instructional Coach or an ESL Teacher, coaching conversations are part of the job in order to support our Newcomer students. If you are an ESL or ELD Teacher, you may not have realized that this was going to be a part of your job! This comes with part of the territory as you realize that advocating for your students could become a full-time gig rather than actual teaching.

Inside of our ESL Teacher Membership, we chatted with Sarah Ottow of Confianza about what it means to take on this coaching role and some basic coaching conversation tips for when you have those impromptu conversations at your school. We even got to do a little role-playing! If you are a member, don't forget to check this out! Here is a piece of our chat below.

Focus on the Evidence in the Moment
It's easy to think of our Newcomers and imagine the ways your student is not getting the support they need. We might tell ourselves, "Oh, it's US History and I already know this teacher. I know my student isn't getting the scaffolds they need." However, I have been surprised many times and have learned new things as well from our awesome content teachers! 

Whatever the content teacher is telling you in that moment, that is what should be the focus of the conversation. You may have a million other questions and comments and that's okay- keep them on the backburner and focus your attention so your teacher feels supported and therefore, can support your students with you. You are a team and the goal is to discuss ways to assist your students to thrive and access grade-level content.

Since you are the language expert, as you are listening, think of the what the teacher is saying with your language lens on so you can be prepared to provide inquiry-based questions for the teacher that might lead to more language support for the student.

For example, if a teacher is talking about supporting the student in math and is saying that they are having difficulties understanding simple directions, your questioning might be first in your mind:

• What visuals are being provided that may lower the language barrier?
• What is some of the academic language in the directions and how can it be supported with cognates, explicit instruction, or translations?
• What scaffolds have you tried and what do you think is working?

Practice Active Listening
Being an active listener means focusing on what the teacher has to say and doing so by making eye contact, nodding, asking questions, and making the teacher feel validated and supported. This also means minimal interruptions unless asking for clarification. When the teacher feels like you are seeing from their point of view and you are keeping an open mind, they are more likely to collaborate with you in the future. It also means that they will tell your colleagues about the positive experience and others may be more open to collaboration too! When teachers are collaborating together for student success, our students win!

Use Language of Collaboration
Some simple language stems to use while having impromptu or planned coaching conversations include some of the following stems and statements from our coaching chat:

Inquire: Have you thought about trying...?
Clarify: Tell me more.
​Validate: I hear you.

What other phrases can you use to support inquiry, clarification, and validation?  

These conversations don't have to be well-planned to be impactful. Our coaching scenario was based around a 5-minute class change chat on the way to the restroom. That's the beauty of coaching! Even if we do plan, we never know how coaching conversations will go. What we do know is that we keep our students at the heart.

Setting goals can be a powerful practice for our multilingual learners and English learners. Not only is a great way to monitor ESL student progress, but it is a great way to get students invested in their goals.

When we involve students, it gives them more of an incentive to reach those goals. When we just give them goals directly, they may not feel that they are learning for themselves, but just for their teachers. There is no sense of ownership and accountability. 

Think of it from a child and parent point of view. If I tell my 5 year old (which I do happen to have one;) that I want to set a goal for us to each a vegetable for each meal, she will feel like it is a directive and won't be as likely to eat those vegetables. But if I tell her that if she reaches these goals with me, she will also have more energy to play and it will help her body stay healthy so she can go to gymnastics practice, she has more of an incentive for her goals.

​Setting language goals can seem daunting, especially if your students are in the entering or emerging range. I made a Language Goals resource and included some scaffolds for each language domain in the entering and emerging proficiency levels. These language goals are based off of WIDA Can-Dos for grades 9-12 high school.

Here are some ways to involve students in the language goal setting process for maximum success!
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Make student goals relevant
For our multilingual learners, we have to make it relevant for them! Sure, we want to learn English so that we can get good grades and communicate in society, but try telling that to a middle or high school student who doesn't necessarily care to get good grades. They may care about other things that is more on a career path, not academic path.

When you are meeting with your students to set goals, think of things they are particularly interested in. One year, I told one of my students, hey- stick with me and be engaged in class and I bet you that you can be chatting up that cute girl you like in the class next door in no time! True story. Hey- I notice that you have been looking at the flyer for robotics class. We can totally talk to your counselor about that class, but lets make it part of our language goals to develop our speaking practice and academic discourse so you can participate in a range of different conversations in robotics! 

Create a culture of learning
Creating a culture of learning really begins on day one; it's best to start at the beginning of the year. If you didn't get a chance to- maybe you started later in the school year or you were focusing on your classroom management first, it's better late than never!

Ways to create this culture are by setting expectations high (yes, even if you have entering and emerging students- just keep them attainable!) and by giving students voice in the classroom. It might mean that everyday in class, students are giving some form of feedback to each other and having collaboration between each other. This can even happen in their first language by embracing a translanguaging stance.

Use visuals
Make it visual! By making language goals visual, students have their goals always at the forefront. This could be that pages are printed out from their goal sheets and put in the front of their binders, or if you have them doing them digitally, you might have them in an area online that they frequently see.

Another way to keep language goals visual is by posting class goals anonymously in the classroom and updating them as they reach these goals. If you are a WIDA state, you may have an interim assessment that you give students throughout the year to monitor progress, and you can update them after they are scored and see who moved up to reach their goals! Teachers could make this a classroom competition between classes at the junior high and high school level. Nothing like a little friendly competition!

Getting students involved in setting language goals takes time and routine. Don't get discouraged if students aren't into it at first. As you get to know them better, make it more relevant, and get that competition going, they will see their progress and will continue setting goals with you!
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Get the Language Goals resource here if you don't have a system in place already! If you do, comment below to tell us more about it!

Check out more on language goals in this post here to continue learning!