Resources

View the slides from Collective Joy: Leveraging Students’ Collectivist Mindset as a Classroom Asset, presented by Erin Cary and Cydnee Sanders at the 2025 Minnesota English Learner Education (MELEd) Conference. This session invites educators to shift from deficit-based thinking to an asset-based approach that recognizes the collectivist strengths many multilingual adult learners bring to the classroom. The resource includes practical strategies—such as simple, community-building routines—and reflective prompts to help educators create classroom environments where connection, identity, and joy are central to adult ESL and ABE instruction.

This resource repository contains videos, articles, and handouts on the topic of culturally responsive teaching. The executive director of CCRTL, Dr. Sharroky Hollie, is a nationally recognized leader in the field of culturally responsive education.

In this video, education experts Jackie Jordan Irvine, Geneva Gay and Kris Gutierrez explain how to make culturally relevant pedagogy a reality in your classroom.

In this article by Emily Jane Style, "a veteran teacher expresses the importance of drawing on the life-texts of students and recognizing the ways that personal experience influences a student’s perception of the world."

According to their website, “We aim to connect, through stories, the local human experience to global meta-level issues, such as climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, poverty, endangered cultures, migration, and sustainability. Through featuring individuals and communities impacted by these issues, our stories and lessons provide opportunities to examine universal themes that emphasize our common humanity... Our lessons facilitate the development of students' critical thinking, inquiry, empathy, and listening skills."

Sheri Lear, and adult ESL teacher from Minneapolis, MN, outlines her approach to teaching functional grammar in this lesson plan. The plan provides teachers with an explanation of functional grammar as well as a concrete example of how it integrates grammar instruction into the overall context of the lesson.

This blog post from Ellevation provides an overview of a webinar where participants learned how to transform the commonly used SMART goal-setting framework and make it directly applicable for EL educators. The full recording of the webinar is available using Adobe Connect.

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.

TEFL Online Tutorial: Teaching Grammar in Context - an example provided by an experienced TEFL teacher of how to teach grammar using context.

This PowerPoint outlines goal-setting projects and their results in beginning level adult ESL classrooms. Images of handouts and descriptions of activities are provided.

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.

The San Diego Continuing Education Program has created PDFs of a three-part goal-setting lesson for adult ESL students. The lessons and materials are appropriate for high-beginning to advanced level learners.

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.

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.

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.

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.