Teachers align their instruction with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. Teachers know the content appropriate to their teaching specialty. Teachers recognize the interconnectedness of content areas/disciplines.
Since 2017, I have been on the Middle School ESL curriculum writing team. We align our UbD framework to the ELA curriculum Expeditionary Learning (EL) that Wake County adopted. We have completed 6th grade ESL II and and currently are completing 6th grade ESL I curriculum. Included here is a sample lesson from the C-Mapp 2.0 curriculum, written by me, to demonstrate the alignment with ELA standards and interconnectedness to middle school interdisciplinary subject matter. The 6th grade curriculum is a model for middle school ESL teachers to use as a guide for aligning with EL. Moving forward, the 7th and 8th grade instruction will focus on Math and Science integration.
This year, I have focused on building my capacity with the content that students need to know entering into high school in order to strengthen content and thematic knowledge and improve my skills as an academic English language development specialist while remaining up-to-date on ESL best practices. I also used this background knowledge base to inform interdisciplinary language support to teachers. Here are texts I read this year specific to building my own capacity around middle school content and themes:
Teachers make instruction relevant to students. Incorporate life skills which include leadership, ethics, accountability, adaptability, personal productivity, personal responsibility, people skills, self-direction, and social responsibility
In order to establish a respectful environment for all students, I promote collaboration through discourse moves that encourage collegial conversations, discussions which also empower ELs to be active and engaged participants in their content area classes. I also do this to encourage students to practice the art with their peers in hopes that their social conversations will become academically focused and they begin to see their peers as not just social acquaintances but as a collegiate network within which they help each other to excel.