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
EAL Literacy Resource Centre
This is a collection of customized materials, practical tools, and effective research-based strategies for teaching adult English as a New Lanugage (EAL) learners. The resources are created to strengthen language skills, address literacy barriers, and boost learner confidence. Materials are geared towards helping students develop the essential skills needed for daily life and active participation in their communities. There is a curated list of useful websites and teacher training. Additionally, view internally developed content such as Adults Learn to Print. Developed by The Immigrant Education Society (TIES) in Canada.
Once Upon a Picture: The Thinking Collection
This website provides a collection of images, photo and illustrations, with prompts to inspire learners to write or speak using critical thinking skills about the image.
Assessing Student Writing
Dr. Derek Rodgers details how the number of correct writing sequences (CWS) and incorrect writing sequences (IWS) students generate during a timed writing are sensitive and effective measures of student writing.
Presenter Information
Get information about stipends, reimbursements, the MN Adult Ed policy on use of images in presentations, and other instructions for presenters.
MN Adult Ed YouTube Channel
The MN Adult Education 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.
ATLAS Announcements & Future PD
Check out the latest list of ATLAS professional development announcements and opportunities! This is the document that is shared at all ATLAS events.
Virtual Meeting Resources
Find resources for conducting online meetings/events/presentations! You are welcome to use and adapt these materials to fit your own needs and context.
Upcoming ABE Events
December 5, 2025
1:00 pm–3:00 pm
Online
Teaching and Tutoring with Northstar Digital Literacy
Online
Registration Deadline: FRI. 12/5/25 Venue: Online (see details below) You don’t need to be a computer expert in order to teach computer skills! Come learn how help students build their digital literacy skills using Northstar Digital Literacy. In the webinar, participants will learn: The features of Northstar Digital… Learn More
Online
December 8, 2025
2:30 pm–4:00 pm
Online
Holding Space: Healing-Centered Routines and Practices for Classroom Instruction
Online
Registration Deadline: MON. 12/8/25 For many learners and teachers, stress and trauma can seem like insurmountable barriers to developing academic skills. However, the resilience and empathy that many people in adult education have developed can form a foundation for a learning community grounded in curiosity and compassion. Incorporating… Learn More
Online
December 9, 2025
1:00 pm–3:00 pm
Online
Getting Started with Workplace Literacy
Online
Registration Deadline: TUE. 12/9/25 Getting Started with Workplace Literacy is a two-hour webinar designed to introduce the foundations of Workplace Education, including key terms such as program definitions, milestones, and MSGs. Participants will hear from a panel of local ABE managers and workplace literacy partners who will share… Learn More
Online