Teacher Preparation

Free Webinars on Language Issues

By Mary Ann Zehr — November 17, 2009 1 min read
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The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition is hosting several webinars on issues concerning ELLs, including one this week about how math teachers can best work with such students. The math webinar features the FASTMath program used in Fairfax County public schools in Virginia, and will take place this Friday, Nov. 20, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., Eastern time. (You’ll get a link that appears to be in error and kicks you out of this blog entry, but if you click on “back” you can get to the registration page.) Earlier this week, I blogged about a free webinar on best practices for math teachers to work with ELLs that WestEd plans to host on Dec. 2.

In addition to the webinar offering professional development for math teachers, NCELA has two other webinars planned for this year about how teachers can work with ELLs. Aida Walqui, the director of the teacher professional-development program at WestEd, will be a guest for “Effective Professional Development for All Teachers With ELL Students,” and Deborah J. Short, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Lingusitics, and Linda Griffin, the director of the mathematics education unit for the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, will be guests for a webinar, “Implementing PD for Content Area Teachers.” Dates for those webinars haven’t yet been finalized.

Lastly, the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute is hosting a free webinar this Thursday, Nov. 19, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern time, on how government officials and administrators in the juvenile-justice system can help parents who have limited proficiency in English understand the system. Register here.

I can imagine it would be overwhelming to be a parent who doesn’t speak much English to understand what’s happening if his or her child gets involved in the court system.

It seems to me that it would be a good idea for someone to have a webinar on how schools can work with parents with limited proficiency in English to understand how to navigate school systems as well.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.