Resources
Results
Best Practices for Serving LGBTQ Students
This is a guide for educators on how to work towards creating a more LGBTQ-inclusive school environment. This guide includes four key areas: policy checkup, classroom culture, instruction, and family and community engagement.
A Strategy of Giving Corrective Feedback to ELLs
This article explains how using sentence frames and explicit feedback can provide the right balance of structure and scaffolding for English language learners.
Understanding Trauma: Learning Brain vs. Survival Brain
This short video reframes trauma in the classroom in terms of "learning brain" versus "survival brain" as a way to make it easier for teachers think and talk about trauma with students.
Trauma and Learning: Impacts and Strategies for Adult Classroom Success
Exposure to potentially traumatic events, which can have a significant impact on brain mechanisms for language learning, is high in adult ELL classrooms. This article outlines strategies that target attention and memory networks which may make it easier for adults to learn.
Teaching the Skill of Self-Correction
This article offers several suggestions on how teachers can help students to take ownership of their reading, monitor themselves while they are reading, self-correct when they need to.
Differentiated Comprehension Checks
This article explains how using differentiated comprehension checks is a way to reach all students in your classroom. It helps students understand grammatical features by asking a quick series of tiered questions during a story or conversation. This is a meaning-based technique that promotes comprehension.
Visible Thinking
Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. This website provides a convenient way to learn about Visible Thinking as well as thorough descriptions of the ideals, routines and activities that were developed from research in K-12 schools.
Talking Politics: Valuing Different Perspectives
This video from Edutopia demonstrates how high school students learn how to share and listen to opposing beliefs with empathy in the classroom.
Teaching Grammar to Adult English Language Learners: Focus on Form
This brief from the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) provides a research-based rational as to why there is a need to teach grammar within a meaningful context. Teachers who struggle with questions of how much, when, and how to teach grammar will find this brief both informative and thought-provoking.
Supporting ELLs in PBL Projects
This article from Edutopia outlines how Project-Based Learning (PBL) is valuable for English Language Learners (ELLs) when it teaches academic vocabulary, encourages collaboration, scaffolds structure and function, allows assessment and differentiation, and leverages their native language.
Looking at the Bigger Picture: 7 Tips for Using Project Based Learning in the ESL Classroom
This article gives an overview of project-based learning, including why it is good for ESL students and what the teacher's role is. It also provides seven tips for successful project-based learning implementation in the ESL classroom.
Incorporating Goal-Setting in Adult ESL Classrooms
This PowerPoint outlines goal-setting projects and their results in beginning level adult ESL classrooms. Images of handouts and descriptions of activities are provided.
Learner Goal-Setting
This article addresses the question, "What can instructors do to help students set goals, monitor progress, and reach goals?" with research-backed strategies and suggestions for practitioners.
Error Correction
This article provides strategies for how and when to correct learners' mistakes and suggestions for how to make error correction a part of your classroom routine.
ESL Teaching Methods: Teaching Grammar Creatively
This article from the Reach to Teach blog offers best practices for teaching grammar in an effective and engaging manner for learners of all ages.
Best Practices for Teaching the Whole Adult ESL Learner
This chapter by David Schwarzer describes some research-based best practices for teaching adult ESL students centered around the idea of whole-language principles.
Cultural Identity and Teaching
This article discusses the role that culture plays in shaping the values and practices of teachers, both consciously and subconsciously. It offers recommendations for how teachers can build awareness of their own cultural values and beliefs, and suggests ways that teachers can build and present culture in their classrooms.
3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive
This article by Zaretta Hammond discusses three easy strategies that teachers can use to leverage the brain’s memory systems and information processing structures and make their lessons more culturally responsive to the diverse learners in their classrooms.
A Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching
This article addresses the roles of motivation and culture; analyzes some of the social and institutional resistance to teaching based on principles of intrinsic motivation; and outlines the norms, procedures, and structures for effective culturally responsive teaching.
New Resources
Tapping into Diverse Perspectives and Teaching Materials
This video discusses what “diverse perspectives and teaching materials” mean, and why this is important to learner success in the classroom. Using diverse materials makes class more relevant to learners’ lives and helps them bridge information they already know to new information. Utilizing diverse perspectives in class content is also key to building up critical thinking skills. We take a look at numerous resources that can help each of us diversify the visuals, videos, audio, and written materials we use.
Being a Warm Demander
This video takes a look at a spectrum of different kinds of teachers and asks you to reflect on where you would place yourself. We argue, based on Zaretta Hammond’s work, that the “warm demander” is the sweet spot of the spectrum which focuses on building trust with learners while also holding them to high standards to meet their learning goals. We then discuss tools to practice building relationships with learners, creating a learning partnership pact, and giving quality feedback so learners can meet their goals.
Discovering Learners’ Funds of Knowledge
In this video, we define and discuss the terms “funds of knowledge” and “an asset-based perspective.” A key element of equity in the classroom is acknowledging learners have a wealth of knowledge based on their own experiences, and we should provide opportunities for learners to be the experts in the room. Once we learn what students’ assets are, we can weave this information into class content, which helps learners be more successful. We take a look at an example lesson.
Presenter Information
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MN ABE YouTube Channel
The MN ABE YouTube Channel is a free online PD resource that you can use to explore teaching techniques and classroom ideas in action! Find out more in this MN ABE Connect newsletter article.
Upcoming ABE Events
August 6, 2024
10:00 am–12:00 pm
Online
Racial Equity 101 Presented by Jimmie Heags
Online
Registration Deadline: TUE. 8/6/24 Join presenter Jimmie Heags, Jr., MA, LSC, LPCC, LADC, ACS, for this session that exposes how race is defined and how racism impacts individuals and institutions. The session will provide learners with a framework for understanding and disrupting the attitudes and structures that perpetuate… Learn More
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August 6, 2024
6:30 pm–8:30 pm
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Volunteer Core Training Module 1: Overview of Minnesota Adult Education and Program Accountability
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Registration Deadline: TUE. 8/6/24 Participants learn about Adult Basic Education programming in Minnesota, demographics of learners, instructional content standards as well as initial and on-going assessment. This session wraps up with learner motivations, barriers and persistence. Learn More
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August 13, 2024
6:30 pm–8:30 pm
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Volunteer Core Training Module 2: Understanding Adult Learners
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Registration Deadline: TUE. 8/13/24 Participants develop their personal cultural awareness and learn how expectations around school culture shape how people teach and learn. Guiding principles for effectively delivering instruction to adults are also covered. Finally, participants increase their sensitivity to the challenges of learning English and developing literacy… Learn More
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