Unlocking English Learners' Potential: Strategies for Making Content Accessible, July/2017

A once-in-a-generation text for assisting a new generation of students
Content teachers and ESOL teachers, take special note: if you’re looking for a single resource to help your English learners meet the same challenging content standards as their English-proficient peers, your search is complete. Just dip into this toolbox of strategies, examples, templates, and activities from EL authorities Diane Staehr Fenner and Sydney Snyder. The best part? Unlocking English Learners’ Potential supports teachers across all levels of experience.

The question is not if English learners can succeed in today’s more rigorous classrooms, but how. Unlocking English Learners’ Potential is all about the how:

1. How to scaffold ELs’ instruction across content and grade levels
2. How to promote ELs’ oral language development and academic language
3. How to help ELs analyze text through close reading and text-dependent questions
4. How to build ELs’ background knowledge
5. How to design and use formative assessment with ELs

Along the way, you’ll build the collaboration, advocacy, and leadership skills that we all need if we’re to fully support our English learners. After all, any one of us with at least one student acquiring English is now a teacher of ELs.

About the Authors:

Diane Staehr Fenner is the president of SupportEd, LLC (formerly DSF Consulting), a woman owned small business that provides educators in English learners’ education the skills and resources they need to champion ELs’ success within and beyond their classrooms. At SupportEd, Diane serves as project lead for all the team’s work providing professional development, programmatic support, and research to school districts, states, organizations, and the U.S. Department of Education. Diane is an author of four books, a blogger for the Colorín Colorado website, and a frequent keynote presenter on EL education at conferences across North America. Diane was a research associate at George Washington University’s Center for Excellence and Equity in Education, spent a decade as an ESOL teacher, dual language assessment teacher, and ESOL assessment specialist in Fairfax County Public Schools, VA, and taught English in Veracruz, Mexico and Berlin, Germany. Diane earned her Ph.D. in Multilingual/Multicultural Education with an emphasis in Literacy at George Mason University. She earned her MAT in TESOL at the School for International Training and her Masters in German at Penn State University. She lives in Fairfax, VA with her husband, three elementary age kids who are in a Spanish immersion program in their public school, a dog, a few fish, and an elderly hamster. Diane speaks fluent Spanish and German, grew up on a dairy farm in New York State’s Finger Lakes region.

Sydney Snyder, Ph.D. is a Principal Associate at SupportEd. In this role, Sydney has had significant experience in developing and conducting interactive professional development for teachers of ELs. She also has expertise in program management, curriculum development, research, and technical writing. Sydney has contributed to a series of blog posts on the Colorín Colorado website on strategies to support ELs. Sydney has extensive instructional experience, having taught ESOL/English as a Foreign Language for over 15 years. She started her teaching career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guinea, West Africa. This experience taught her the extent to which effective strategies can support students’ language acquisition, even when resources are limited. She taught most recently in Falls Church, VA where she was the K-12 ESOL Curriculum and Instruction Resource Teacher for the district. Sydney also served as an English Teaching Fellow at Gadja Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Sydney earned her Ph.D. in Multilingual/Multicultural Education at George Mason University and her M.A.T in TESOL at the School for International Training.