Stanford University Offers Free Videos on How to Teach English-Language Learners

Stanford University is now offering a series of videos on how to teach language-minority students.

In a video that I recently reviewed from the Stanford offerings "Ms. Griego" models for "Ms. Sullivan" how to give English-language learners "think time" during a lesson and how to guide students to chat with a "shoulder partner," whoever is sitting next to him or her. Ms. Griego is a coach for teachers of ELLs, and Ms. Sullivan is a teacher being coached. The video doesn't name the schools where the teachers work.

The video captures excerpts of Ms. Griego's model lesson delivered to ELLs in 3rd grade, and conversations between the two teachers. It's available online from Stanford's School of Education. The coach explains, for example, why she thinks it works best to assign ELLs to work in groups of four, with students of different levels of proficiency in the same group.

The video is one of a series on teaching ELLs that have been created by Stanford Professors Kenji Hakuta and Guadalupe Valdes. The one I watched was called "Modeling and Coaching SDAIE." The acronym refers to Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English, a set of strategies used in California to teach intermediate ELLs content and language at the same time.

The video lessons seem to be well-thought-out and and correspond with three Stanford courses concerning the education of ELLs.

I learned about them through Mary Ann Zehr's article "Learning the Language" in Education Week. Ms Zehr is an assistant editor at Education Week.

Ms. Zehr's article also highlights findings from a recent symposium on English-Language Learners. The "2008 English-Language Learners Symposium", sponsored by Educational Testing Services (ETS) and co-convened with the National Council of La Raza, addressed issues related to the instruction and assessment of English-language learners and research that begins to lay a foundation to craft educational solutions. Very useful Videos and Lecture Notes of the symposium are also available on-line.