Enriching Practice in Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classrooms

This powerful book shows how all teachers can build on the linguistic and cultural resources that students bring with them to school.

All teachers teach English language learners (ELLs). However, many practicing mainstream teachers have not been adequately prepared to engage the ELLs in their classes with core content-area instruction. In this book, Ponte and Higgins show teachers, teacher educators, and staff developers how to address this challenge.

Enriching Practice in Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classrooms illustrates how teachers learn to make changes to the linguistic and pedagogical landscapes in their classes throughout the course of a one-year highly embedded professional development (PD) project in Hawai’i. The approach to PD is participatory; collaborative; linguistically and culturally responsive; and transformative for teachers, mentors, and teacher educators.

Key Features

• Strategies that mainstream teachers can use to increase ELL student engagement with core content-area concepts and skills
• Examples of ways to use different home languages as learning resources
• A lesson planning framework that brings a language and culture lens to sheltered instruction
• A linguistically and culturally responsive teacher observation protocol
• Structures to drive systematic and sustainable PD in any context