What are the unique educational needs of English Language Learners, and how can you best meet them? Throughout this course, you'll work with proven strategies to make your curriculum more accessible to students at different levels of English proficiency. With the help of fellow educators, a coach, and an instructor, you will learn new approaches that will enable you to: implement adaptive technologies to improve student performance, support higher-level, collaborative inquiry in your classroom; design alternative ways for English Language Learners to convey their content-area understanding; and identify opportunities for more ongoing assessment.

The course will show how you how to identify your students’ language learning needs and target their strengths. You will also learn the research behind differentiated instruction and how it is relevant to English Language Learners.

The core questions we will investigate during this course are:

• How do I best assess the language and learning needs of my students who are learning English?
• What is differentiated instruction and how can it help me to better serve English Language Learners (ELL) in my classroom?
• What are effective differentiated instructional strategies for teaching ELL students?
• How do I plan differentiated lessons/units, based on English as a Second Language (ESL) and state standards, and implement them in my classroom?

To answer these, we will:

• Show you how you how to identify your students' language learning needs and target their strengths
• Outline the research behind differentiated instruction and explain its relevance to English Language Learners
• Give you practical strategies on how to incorporate ongoing assessment, tiered activities for all levels of learners, and adaptive technologies to improve student performance
• Redesign a "Work-in-Progress" unit or other project you teach to better serve English Language Learners