Teachers collaborate with their colleagues and use a variety of data sources for short and long range planning based on the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. These plans reflect an understanding of how students learn. Teachers engage students in the learning process. They understand that instructional plans must be constantly monitored and modified to enhance learning. Teachers make the curriculum responsive to cultural diversity and to individual learning needs.
Teachers should: • Collaborate with colleagues; • Use data for short and long range planning; • Engage students in the learning process; • Monitor and modify plans to enhance student learning; and • Respond to cultural diversity and learning needs of students.
Teachers plan instruction appropriate for their students.
• Collaborate with colleagues - In order to make collaborating with ZMS content-area teachers efficient, I created the English Language Development folder in the Team Drive. The information shared with the LEP team for dissemination throughout the grade levels is housed here as well as other common tools and strategies that content-area teachers can easily access to assist them in instructing and assessing ELs. Though I meet with my colleagues individually and in group settings as needed to strategize ways to improve learning and instruction for particular ELs as well as subgroups (newcomers, beginning, transitionals, long-term ELs, former ELs, etc.), I also use other forms of communication to help build capacity among content-area teachers. Email newsletters are one way that I share staff development information and address concerns more broadly that some teachers share individually with me. The Beginning of the Year presentation is another way that I address the most pressing concerns of my colleagues.
Our PLT -- NorthEast Regional Dynamic Learning Team -- has been collaborating to produce common assessments to inform short-term and long-term planning, improve teacher instruction and assessment, increase student academic English language acquisition, and to decrease the academic gap between ELs and their native-speaking peers. We collaborate in person, virtually, digitally (through email, Twitter, and Google Apps for Education), and small groups as necessary to achieve our goals. We house shared information within a team folder in Google Drive and have expanded our presence to Twitter with the #ESL_DynamicLearning.