E.L. Achieve

State standards require students to write essays that skillfully problem solve, weigh evidence, analyze arguments, and discuss complex texts. This can be tricky. The Student Flipbook: Language for Academic Writing and Speaking available in print and eBook formats helps adolescent writers organize information and make intentional language choices to clearly communicate their ideas. They flip through colored pages to select language that helps them express their ideas using...: Cause and effect relationships Compare and contrast Description and elaboration Sequencing Proposition and support See more

Take the pledge! By pronouncing students’ names correctly, you can foster a sense of belonging and build positive relationships in the classroom, which are crucial for healthy social, psychological, and educational outcomes. http://bit.ly/mynamemyidpledge #mynamemyidentity

Wondering how to teach about social justice, identity, and diversity? Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) provides free classroom resources that "help you bring relevance, rigor and social emotional learning into your classroom. Their Social Justice Standards provide a road map for anti-bias education at every grade level.

Experts on two virtual SXSW EDU panels addressed the policies and practices that are needed to support students of color and other marginalized learners as they phase back to in-person learning or remain virtual. The experts discussed ways to support teachers’ and students’ mental health, and the four key elements that make up student engagement.

Partners, have you registered for Symposia? We’re excited to bring you a wide array of strategies for improving English learner instruction, and we’re motivated by the positive feedback we got from last year’s Symposia participants: "This session was invaluable. I really appreciated hearing about what other districts are doing and the multiple opportunities to talk to other leaders. I left with a list of ideas to take our district implementation to the next level. "I found immediate application to my coaching work and the tools were helpful for my reflection. Visit our Events page to register your team! https://www.elachieve.org/upcoming-events.html

At the core of E.L. Achieve’s work is an inherent belief that to change inequitable outcomes for underserved students, we must change instructional practices. In an interview for Collaborative Classroom in February 2020, Zaretta Hammond discusses true equity work: Too often, we reduce equity to 'courageous conversations' about implicit bias. This path into equity has its limits because there’s typically no pivot to instruction ... This is the vital equity work: students must... comprehend what they’re reading, possess advanced decoding skills, have word wealth, and be able to command all of these literacy skills. Our social justice frame should prompt us to ask these questions: How are students code breakers, how are they text users, how are they text critics, and how are they meaning-makers? This call to put equity into action has been the guiding principle for Systematic ELD and Constructing Meaning. Only when we build equitable instructional practices into daily classroom interactions will students begin to realize their full potential.

How do you teach a lesson when some students are at home in front of a computer and others are physically in front of you? The Learning Accelerator interviewed educators around the country about specific strategies that are helping teachers and students succeed in hybrid learning systems. You might recognize these as good teaching strategies you're already using. Let's keep doing what we know works well!

A line of thinking that could answer why we teach anything.

Math Discussion Cards available in eBook and print formats are designed to help adolescent learners talk and think like mathematicians. The cards help students practice together as they make sense of problems, construct workable strategies for solutions, or explain a mathematical rule, diagram, or approach. Through discussions, students learn to persevere in solving problems accurately, finding structure, and expressing mathematical reasoning.

"Children’s book creator LeUyen Pham remembers the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as a time of contrasts and confusion. With her husband and kids at home, the house was suddenly loud all the time, while Los Angeles was abnormally quiet. So Pham did what authors do. She wrote. Within months, she turned her jotted-down ideas into the text and art for "Outside, Inside," a picture book published in January. A formal special education teacher teamed up with Pham to create a read-aloud guide and hands-on activities to accompany the book."