2018 CISC Leadership Symposium

The workshop is intended for administrators who are interested in learning more about how NGSS and making can be used to promote language development and better serve English Learners. Education is shifting to emphasize engineering and STEAM, and English Learners can and should benefit from this. Making has the power to authentically engage ELs while building language proficiency and can be a critical tool for equitable access to information and skills. In this session, participants will develop a deeper understanding of how NGSS-aligned maker lessons can be used in conjunction with Integrated ELD strategies to engage and support English Learners.

This workshop will begin with participants taking part in an NGSS lesson with hands-on and maker components. The example lesson will focus on waves, which is one of the NGSS disciplinary core ideas (PS4) that contains a significant vocabulary component. Participants will experience the concepts through hands-on activities, engage in building vocabulary as a group, and demonstrate new knowledge and language through a maker challenge and subsequent presentation. Once they have experienced the lesson, participants will engage in an informational discussion about NGSS and the ELA/ELD framework as well as intersections between these and the best instructional practices for English Learners. They will also have a chance to reflect on the three major components of the sample lesson (experience, language, and knowledge demonstration) and how these components and the general structure could fit into a teacher’s lesson design to provide more equity and access. Finally, they will reflect on the support teachers need in order to transition to this type of lesson design.

This session fits within the equity strand of the CISC Symposium. Recent research has shown that weaving together hands-on science and language development has the potential to accelerate English Learners’ content understanding and language learning. This session provides an example of and strategies for how to do this effectively in the classroom so that English learners can simultaneously acquire English fluency and master performance standards in science. It also provides administrators with a chance to reflect on and discuss how they can support this type of instruction and learning within their contexts, thus addressing more broadly access and equity within educational systems.