Where
San Joaquin County Office of EducationWentworth Education Center
2707 Transworld Drive
Stockton, CA 95206
Driving Directions
Contact
Kirk BrownSan Joaquin County Office of Education: Office of STEM
209-468-4880
akennedy@sjcoe.net
Supporting Teachers & Students K-8: Discourse Tools to Engage in Equitable Sense-Making in Science
Guest Facilitator: Emily Miller, NGSS Writing Team Member
Emily Miller is a 2nd and 3rd grade ESL and bilingual resource teacher at Hawthorne Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. She has taught for the Madison Metropolitan School District for thirteen years. She serves on the school leadership team, and the SIP (School Improvement Plan) committee which successfully elevated the school from “failing” to a Wisconsin School of Promise. Emily is on the district's science leadership team and has facilitated staff development with Inquiry for the 21st Century, a partnership between area school districts and the University of Wisconsin.
Emily is also on the CRP (Culturally Relevant Pedagogy) leadership team at her school. The team wrote and received a SOR (School of Recognition) grant to combine best practices in ESL with CRP to improve student achievement at Hawthorne. In addition, Emily has worked with WIDA (World-class Instructional Design and Assessment) to expand and amplify can-do descriptors for English language proficiency benchmarks. Currently, Emily is collaborating on a project with the University of Wisconsin to design placed-based culturally-relevant outcomes with a focus on sustainability and forest biodiversity for schools on the Menominee Reservation.
Emily has a MS in Bilingual Studies from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; a BS from the same department with a Spanish minor; as well as ESL and Bilingual teaching licenses.
About This Workshop:
Emily Miller will explore how teachers and elementary and middle school students engaged in the science practices can use discourse tools to promote more equitable knowledge-building in classrooms with ELs. More than language supports are needed for equitable sensemaking discourse for knowledge-production with ELs. In this workshop, the group works together to answer the following question, “How can discourse tools be used for not only supporting language and discourse, but also for removing persistent exclusions of EL’s ideas in knowledge-building?”
Emily will share new research that focus on language supports for ELs. She presents discourse tools that alleviate exclusions based on the knowledge-building system (language, meaning, and historical and socio-cultural factors) in classrooms with the push in and inclusion model. Educators using these tools, notice changes in group dynamics, rich talk, and more diverse idea exchanges in their classrooms.
The work is based on research from an NSF Eager Grant and the following chapter: MacDonald, R., Miller, E., & Lord, S. (in press). Doing and talking science: Engaging ELs in the discourse of the science and engineering practices.
More Information: