Welcome Spring! The second year of the SEE-TEL grant has been a busy one for both the SEE-TEL team and the SEE-TEL teachers and coaches. SEE-TEL teachers are nearly midway through the TESOL certification courses and close to finishing the third course, Cross-Cultural Communication in the Classroom. An emphasis area within this course is family engagement, where SEE-TEL teachers and coaches have been working tirelessly to provide an interactive and linguistically and culturally responsive event. The SEE-TEL team has enjoyed visiting all four partner districts to see in action their family engagement planning with parents. Bayless and Columbia School Districts have both designed events involving engaging activities utilizing the community public library, Carthage is hosting a multicultural Mother’s Day event and book fair, and Kansas City has two upcoming events which involve a multicultural art fair and the other capitalizing on building parent leadership.
This year, the SEE-TEL coaches and teachers have been implementing the Guided Online Coaching model in a technology-mediated space. The SEE-TEL Communal Meeting Space on Canvas provides opportunities for self-reflection and feedback using a three cycle, facilitative and dialogic approach. Not only does the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) prioritize family engagement, ESSA (U.S. DOE, 2015) also stresses the importance of professional teacher learning activities that:
1) are designed to give teachers of English learners, and other teachers and instructional staff, the knowledge and skills to provide instruction and appropriate language and academic support services to those children, including the appropriate use of curricula and assessments; and 2) provide follow-up training to teachers who have participated in activities described in this paragraph that are designed to ensure that the knowledge and skills learned by the teachers are implemented in the classroom (Section 8101, p. 397).
An important part of professional learning is the 2019 Summer Institute designed for teachers, coaches and school leaders. This year’s event is being hosted by Columbia Public Schools July 23-July 25. (Thank you CPS!) Returning to join us this year are DESE’s Ryan Rumpf, and MU’s Emily Crawford and Dawn Heston! We are also excited to announce our two keynote speakers from CUNY, Dina López and Tatyana Kleyn.
We look forward to continue visiting the Family Engagement events occurring this month and seeing everyone at the 2019 SEE-TEL Summer Institute!
