ELL Learning Consortium 2012

Hey all,

I hope to see many of you next week for the ELL Learning Consortium 2012 Kick-Off. We will spend the afternoon brainstorming session topics for the coming year (and anything else you need!).

Also (in order to better accommodate everyone’s schedules), we will be offering both a morning and an afternoon session, each of which will have the same focus every month.  The morning session will be from 9AM to 12PM-ish and the afternoon session will be from 1PM to 4PM-ish.

The ELL Consortium Kick-Off is Friday, September 28 from 1PM-3PM!

The remaining dates are:

October 26

November 30

December 19

January 25

February 27

March 28

April 24

May 16

Hope to see you soon,

Amy & Darryl

Friday May 11, 2011 ELL Consortium Topic: ACCESS Score Interpretation

Lisa McCarty and Darryl Douglas will be sharing information learned from a WIDA training in Jefferson City during the April meeting of the MELL Instructional Specialists from across the state.

Also come prepared to share ideas on Curriculum. What are you doing? Is it a set curriculum or program?  How might what you're doing be shared/molded for another school? Hopefully these questions can spur some great conversation.

If you haven't met him yet or didn't know there was the new Instructional Specialist working with Amy, it will be a good time to meet Darryl.

See you on Friday!!

October Meeting
Friday, October 28, 2011

ELL Essentials

During our October meeting, Amy shared a presentation entitled ELL 101: What You Need Your Colleagues to Know. She walked participants through each section of the presentation which are outlined below.

• Laws & Court Rulings
• Demographics
• Culture
• Language Acquisition
• Sheltered Instruction Models
• ESL Program Models
• Parent Engagement
• Instructional Strategies
• Assessment
• Planning

Each of the sections include activities designed to engage participants with the content or encourage reflective conversations.

September Meeting -- Dissecting the Data

The session began with a re-cap of our August session and a review of the Mission & Vision statement we created at that first meeting.

With that statement in mind we played "Collective Commitments in 15 Minutes or Less." Here is how the process went. Everybody thought of one personal commitment and wrote it on a note card. Lisa McCarty got everyone started with this example: "Problem aware, but solution focused." Then pairs shared their commitments and if they were similar, they combined them into one; if they were different they kept them distinct. Then,the pairs "squared" with another pair and synthesized their commitments if possible. We ended up with the following commitments:

• Share expertise. 
• Be open to change. 
• Stay on topic.
• Learn new ideas to share with colleagues
• Commit to professional grwoth and learning by sharing ideas freely and working toward specific goals with student success in mind.
• Proactive, professional collaboration focused on ELLs' educational needs.

We also discussed the proposed topics for the rest of the year, with some consideration of expectations for each of the sessions. As a result of this conversation, I have switched the topics for the two dates in bold below (moved Tier 1 Instruction from February to November!):

October 28-ELL Essentials
November 11-Impacting Tier 1 Instruction
December 9-MELL Conference Debrief (and ACCESS refresher?)
February 24-Connecting to Curriculum
March 9-MAP Matters
April 13-Systemic Views
May 11-Planning for Next Year

See you all in October!

August Wrap Up

After introductions, we considered the four components of a learning consortium (in fact, the components of a professional learning community): mission, vision, goals and values. There were four posters hanging in different areas of the room, each with one of these words on them. Participants were asked to gather next to the poster with the word they thought was most critical to a learning consortium. The majority gathered around goals and mission!

Each group was then asked to write a statement explaining why they chose the word they did.

Here is a summary of what was said:

• Mission – It’s the Big Picture!
• Vision – It’s the Picture of What We Want to Accomplish!
• Goals – Need to Know What to Accomplish Before Trying to Accomplish It!
• Values – Without Commitment Nothing Happens!

We spent some time focusing on what our mission. Based on comments from the group, the following mission statement was compiled:

“Create a culture of collaboration dedicated to personal and professional growth that leads to student success in school and beyond!”

Kick-Off Meeting

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend our ELL Learning Consortium kick-off meeting!

Here is the (tentative) list of topics for our monthly meetings for the rest of the year! We will continue to discuss and revise this list as we go, but I wanted to get the list of ideas out there for comment:

September 28-Dissecting the Data -- (Date changed from 9/30 to 9/28!)
October 28-ELL Essentials
November 11-Connecting to Curriculum
December 9-MELL Conference Debrief (and ACCESS refresher?)
February 10-Impacting Tier 1 Instruction
March 9-MAP Matters
April 13-Systemic Views
May 11-Planning for Next Year

Welcome!

The ELL Learning Consortium harnesses the collective expertise of ESL professionals in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area to research and identify best-practices, examine trends in ELL data both locally and globally, and advocate for ELLs and programs that serve them.