In the 21st century, all learners must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively within a community of learners. This is easier for some than others, but remains a goal for all learners. The distribution of mentoring through peers can greatly increase the opportunities for one-on-one support. When carefully structured, such peer cooperation can significantly increase the available support for sustained engagement. Flexible rather than fixed grouping allows better differentiation and multiple roles, as well as providing opportunities to learn how to work most effectively with others. Options should be provided in how learners build and utilize these important skills.

• Create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities
• Create school-wide programs of positive behavior support with differentiated objectives and supports
• Provide prompts that guide learners in when and how to ask peers and/or teachers for help
• Encourage and support opportunities for peer interactions and supports (e.g., peer-tutors)
• Construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities
• Create expectations for group work (e.g., rubrics, norms, etc.)

Classrooms support students development of language/academic language through quality interactions

• Provide opportunities for student-to-student interaction as part of daily learning
• Support sustained dialogue between peers which builds on the participants’ ideas. Participants use academic language, ask questions and reason together to promote understanding of concepts
• Use collaborative transfer tasks or activities which require students to solve complex problems and apply what they have learned to novel situations.

The semantic elements through which information is presented—the words, symbols, numbers, and icons—are differentially accessible to learners with varying backgrounds, languages, and lexical knowledge. To ensure accessibility for all, key vocabulary, labels, icons, and symbols should be linked to, or associated with, alternate representations of their meaning (e.g., an embedded glossary or definition, a graphic equivalent, a chart or map). Idioms, archaic expressions, culturally exclusive phrases, and slang, should be translated.

• Pre-teach vocabulary and symbols, especially in ways that promote connection to the learners’ experience and prior knowledge
• Provide graphic symbols with alternative text descriptions
• Highlight how complex terms, expressions, or equations are composed of simpler words or symbols
• Embed support for vocabulary and symbols within the text (e.g., hyperlinks or footnotes to definitions, explanations, illustrations, previous coverage, translations)
• Embed support for unfamiliar references within the text (e.g., domain specific notation, lesser known properties and theorems, idioms, academic language, figurative language, mathematical language, jargon, archaic language, colloquialism, and dialect)

Single elements of meaning (like words or numbers) can be combined to make new meanings. Those new meanings, however, depend upon understanding the rules or structures (like syntax in a sentence or the properties of equations) of how those elements are combined. When the syntax of a sentence or the structure of a graphical representation is not obvious or familiar to learners, comprehension suffers. To ensure that all learners have equal access to information, provide alternative representations that clarify, or make more explicit, the syntactic or structural relationships between elements of meaning.

• Clarify unfamiliar syntax (in language or in math formulas) or underlying structure (in diagrams, graphs, illustrations, extended expositions or narratives) through alternatives that:
• Highlight structural relations or make them more explicit
• Make connections to previously learned structures
• Make relationships between elements explicit (e.g., highlighting the transition words in an essay, links between ideas in a concept map, etc.)

The ability to fluently decode words, numbers or symbols that have been presented in an encoded format (e.g., visual symbols for text, haptic symbols for Braille, algebraic expressions for relationships) takes practice for any learner, but some learners will reach automaticity more quickly than others. Learners need consistent and meaningful exposure to symbols so that they can comprehend and use them effectively. Lack of fluency or automaticity greatly increases the cognitive load of decoding, thereby reducing the capacity for information processing and comprehension. To ensure that all learners have equal access to knowledge, at least when the ability to decode is not the focus of instruction, it is important to provide options that reduce the barriers that decoding raises for learners who are unfamiliar or dysfluent with the symbols.

• Allow the use of Text-to-Speech
• Use automatic voicing with digital mathematical notation (Math ML)
• Use digital text with an accompanying human voice recording (e.g., Daisy Talking Books)
• Allow for flexibility and easy access to multiple representations of notation where appropriate (e.g., formulas, word problems, graphs)
• Offer clarification of notation through lists of key terms

• High Yield Pedagogical Practices (HYPPs) are high-level pedagogical practices that integrate deep content learning with language and literacy development. They address the four language domains: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Collaborative Summarizing - Students collaborate to read and discuss complex text by finding the main ideas and details to summarize the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster academic conversations about text-dependent questions and serves as a scaffold from academic conversations to writing. Click to read more.

Expert Group Jigsaw - Students become experts on a topic through focused reading and collaborative discussions with peers. Students read and take notes on text, meet with peers in expert groups, teach important findings about the text in jigsaw groups. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster student engagement and individual accountability for learning, scaffolds student understanding, maximizes peer interaction, establishes cooperation and respect through teamwork. Click to read more.

Collaborative Text Reconstruction - Students recreate/reconstruct a text that they have listened to several times, taken notes on and discussed with partners without ever looking at the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ understanding of the topic, deepen content knowledge, draw attention to the meanings and language features in the text, and apprentice students into writing the text type. Click to read more.

Sentence Unpacking - Students deconstruct text to find the meanings of long, complex sentences. Teachers guide students through sentences to find the meaning of sentence “chunks”. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students to understand the complex sentences and text they encounter by raising the awareness of language and connecting the language awareness to meeting. Click to read more.

Cohesion Analysis - Supports student’s reading comprehension and scaffolds writing abilities by focusing on cohesion created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level structure/organization. Helps students understand the predictability of text types using analysis of text types. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ reading comprehension and scaffolds their writing ability by focusing on how cohesion is created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level organization and structure. More information coming soon.

Joint Construction of Texts - Teachers act as a facilitation scribe, prompting students to offer ideas for what to write in a collective piece. Teachers model how writers think about writing and encouraging students to create more academic and genre-appropriate text. The purpose of this HYPP is to scaffold students’ abilities to write a particular genre. Supports students to compose independent texts through a teacher-facilitated process that allows rehearsal of writing. Click to read more.

Collaborative Problem Solving - Students engage in answering a prompt by first finding the story and understanding what is being asked. They solve independently, and with a partner and a group of four. Students agree on an answer and create a collaborative poster using visuals, words, and numbers (If applicable) representing all members’ thinking and work. The purpose of this HYPP is through discussion and problem-based tasks, students learn to think for themselves, provide feedback to their peers, and are encouraged to take risks and make “mistakes.” Click to read more.

Stronger and Clearer - Students think and individually write how they would solve a problem. Students then share their thinking with another partner and have the opportunity to clarify and ask questions. Have students switch several more times before returning to their seat to individually write their response. The purpose of this HYPP is to provide a structured and interactive opportunity for students to revise and refine both their ideas and their verbal and written output. Click to read more.

Text Analysis - Teachers explicitly teach students the purpose, text structure & organization, and linguistic features through the use of the Genre Cheat Sheets. The purpose of this HYPP is fundamentally written genres are distinguished by their social purposes — that is, what the text is intended to accomplish within a particular context and content area and the desired effect on the people who will be reading it. These social purposes shape the genre, guide how it is structured and organized, and determine which language resources are most powerful to use in the text. More information coming soon.