ELL News Headlines

Larry Ferlazzo's new question-of-the-week is: “What are the best ways to build relationships with students?" Larry has collected responses from dozens of contributors. Education consultant Tara Brown writes, “For some kids, the classroom may be the only 'family' they ever really experience. It certainly will be the best chunk of many students' entire days. Investing in time to build positive relationships through team-building exercises to quickly learn names and facts about each other, partner work, sharing student profiles, embracing different nationalities, and more, will all shape the tone and feel of daily peer and teacher interactions. Many teachers still feel as though 'they don't time to build relationships with kids'. Research is very clear that we don't have time not to build relationships because you can't get to Bloom without going through Maslow."

Thousands of Central American migrants are walking, taking buses and wading through rivers in a cross-continent effort to reach the United States. As of Monday, the United Nations said the caravan has grown to about 7,200 migrants. The trek has entered the political debate ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. Here is what we know and what's next.

Four Rivers Community School has been identified as having a high-achieving dual language immersion program, and will be further studied for the next few years to determine the whys and hows of that success. The Center for Applied Linguistics is performing the study project, titled "Features of Dual Language Immersion in High Achieving Programs." The nonprofit organization is based in Washington D.C., and it focuses on the fields of bilingual and dual language education, and English as a second language, among a host of other fields.

Kara Bobroff is the founding principal of Native American Community Academy, a pioneering school in Albuquerque that grew from an entire community speaking up about what kind of school it wanted. Now in its 13th year, NACA is expanding within New Mexico and nationally as the "NACA Inspired" Schools Network. Ashoka’s Simon Stumpf caught up with Bobroff to learn more about what makes this model unique and effective for Indigenous students and what it can teach us all.  

She doesn't recall all the details of the story or even the name of the first play she saw, performed entirely in Spanish in the basement of a Bronx church, but Annette Ramos vividly recounts this very intimate introduction to the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre. She was 7 or 8 years old. "I remember the essence of feeling like I had found my home, I found the art which spoke to my heart and my spirit ... and felt that I could do that too, and that theater was a feasible place for a Latina, brown-skinned girl to be in."

Jennifer Serravallo is a literacy consultant, speaker, and the author of several popular titles. In this blog post about the International Literacy Association's document "Children's Rights to Read," she writes, "Children walk into our classrooms with all of themselves. They are the sum total of their experiences and their expectations. We cannot ask them to leave any part of themselves at the door when the bell rings, rather, we must embrace their entirety. So, how can we do this as reading teachers?"

Fresno State has received a $3.75 million Title V grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help and encourage more Hispanic and Latino students to become teachers in the San Joaquin Valley, according to a university press release.

Despite the widespread damage to schools in the Florida Panhandle from Hurricane Michael, district officials remained "laser-focused on reopening their schools as quickly as safely possible," the state's education commissioner said Monday. 

At Hoover High School on the northwest side of Des Moines, the student body is made up of kids who speak 40 languages. The school has identified more than 350 students out of a student body of nearly 1,100 as English Language Learners.

Throughout his childhood, Jarrett Krosoczka kept painful information about his mother’s heroine addiction and frequent incarcerations hidden. After he became a successful graphic novelist for kids, he considered writing about his own life, but worried his story was too dark. It wasn't until he began meeting young fans with similar life stories that he changed his mind. Krosoczka's new book Hey, Kiddo, tells the story of his mother's addiction and incarceration from the point of view of his 17-year-old self.