Some professional reading: A case study of language development portfolios

The conversations I'm having with teachers about next year often turn to the unique challenges we'll encounter in opening a new school, forming new collaborative teams, and establishing new routines. The prospect of starting the year with small(ish) class sizes is one potentially exciting challenge we discuss. We've wondered aloud how we'll establish collaborative classroom cultures if, hypothetically, a class is particularly small and shy, or just low energy. At the same time we wonder about the kinds of problems we encounter, we talk about how small classes afford us the chance to teach in ways that are more responsive, and individualized than we can when our classes are at capacity. 

I like to imagine we'll know each individual student a little better, and the supports we plan for students who seem to need extra help, or who need a challenging extension will be tailored to the specific learners as a result of small student numbers. It is fun to think about how that kind of design and support work could lead to school wide professional learning for teachers when we share our work, and compare strategies, notes and wonderings. 

With this idealized view of next year's collaborative teacher learning in mind, I read a recent focus bulletin from WIDA: Supporting Multilingual Learners Language Growth Through Language Development Portfolios. As I read, I appreciated the focus on one team of teachers trying something new, in this case a some portfolio tools to monitor language acquisition. My first response was that this use of portfolios with special populations like multilingual learners might be the kind of strategy small class sizes give us the chance to try. Of course it is impossible to know what the needs of our special populations will be before we know our students, so I don't want to get too fired up about portfolios just yet. 

Instead, I can just be excited about encountering an article that helps me imagine collaborative possibilities. I uploaded the article into my Google Drive so that I could make notes in the margins. The sharing settings will allow anyone else who wants to read the post to share questions, ideas or comments in the margins as well. If you're interested in reading the bulletin, click on this version:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EYKygjy78EmLwtKAG1q2q5E9JGMqEmNu/view?usp=sharing

If you want to annotate this article with me, just highlight text that interests you, then post a thought. You can also respond to something I've written by clicking on my comment and replying. 


Note: The version we use for annotation won't allow you to click on the links embedded in the bulletin. If you want to read the other resources referenced in the bulletin, you can access those through the link in the third paragraph above. 

What do you think? 

What are some of the things you've been imagining for next year?

What interests you about this WIDA Bulletin post? 

Is there an article you'd like to read and annotate with our team? 



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