Professional development @ La Paz

Before the 2024-2025 kicks off at La Paz Community School, middle and highschool teachers participated in a highly engaging workshop experience with Dr. Ferraro. 

In this full day workshop, educators wrestled with the following questions: 

1. how do our students acquire multiple languages, what does that process look like and what do we, as their teachers, need to provide to make this magic happen?
2. along what continuum do students acquire multiple languages? what implications do these stages have for my instruction?
3. what does it feel like to participate, as a student, in a successfully designed and delivered sheltered lesson, where I am learning language and discipline-specific content simultaneously and where I can understand and produce new language in academic contexts?
4. deconstruct the above lesson to enumerate a list of strategies that made content and language learning possible, challenging and engaging!

The educators then formed groups for each one of these six strategies they identified through the experiential lesson - contextualizing whole lessons, developing academic language, modifying texts, creating graphic organizers, eliciting extended, oral language, and modeling language for students to produce academic writing - and shared their expertise with their colleagues.

Over the next few months, one casa meeting will be dedicated to the application of each strategy to the teacher's lessons.