ELL News Headlines

Throughout the week, Colorín Colorado gathers news headlines related to English language learners from around the country. The ELL Headlines are posted Monday through Friday and are available for free!

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Best of 2023: An Alaska district aligns its school year with traditional subsistence harvests

Seventy miles inland from the Bering Sea, on roadless lands beside the Kuskokwim River, three Yup'ik villages are perfect examples of the educational challenges faced in Alaska. This year, the district was allowed to operate on an academic calendar that's aligned with seasonal subsistence harvests. School leaders spent much of 2022 working to get it approved by the state.

To Effectively Support English Learners, Build Teachers’ Skills, Experts Say

Back in her early days of teaching, Rebecca Bergey thought it was her job as a teacher of English learners to prepare her students with enough language to survive in content area classes. But as Bergey — now a principal researcher at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research — grew in her teaching, she realized that language learning operates at a systems level.

Tailoring Instruction to Support English Language Learners

At P.S. 249 in Brooklyn, New York, over 20 percent of the students are English as a New Language (ENL) learners, many of them newcomers to the U.S. The school’s diverse population includes children who speak Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Ukrainian, and Georgian, and many start kindergarten with little or no English. When principal Elisa Brown first came on board in 2000, the school was using a pull-out model to serve these learners. She quickly noticed that by the time students were picked up from their various classrooms and brought to the specialized language learning teacher, they were getting minimal instruction time—maybe 10 minutes per day. And often, what they were learning was not connected to what was being taught in their regular classroom. 

How to Support Early-Career Teachers: Advice From Native Educators

Two years ago, Stephanie Wright and Tyler Sumpter were part of the next generation of Native teachers. Graduates of the University of Oregon’s Sapsik’ʷałá master’s program, they respectively began their careers as educators at schools in Washington and Oregon.

When your classroom is a garden

Researchers have found kindergarten through third grade classes spend, on average, 89 minutes a day on English language arts, 57 minutes a day on math — and just 18 minutes a day on science. One way advocates are trying to encourage more science time? Adding outdoor classrooms to elementary schools.

Best of 2023: Cardozo English educator named D.C.’s 2024 Teacher of the Year

Beth Barkley thought she was attending a ceremony for International Day of the Girl on Wednesday. The high school English teacher stood in the library at Cardozo Education Campus as the city’s mayor explained the importance of attaining “educational equity across genders.” But, in a ceremony focused mostly on her, Barkley learned that she had been named D.C’s 2024 Teacher of the Year.

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