In today’s reality of standards-based instruction, it has become increasingly challenging to ensure that all students receive high quality and equitable access to a culturally relevant education. For English language learners (ELLs), the challenge is even greater. ELLs are faced with the task of acquiring content knowledge while learning a second language. As the number of ELLs throughout the United States continues to increase, it is critical that teachers, both mainstream and ELL specific, consider how best to enhance ELLs language proficiency in order to increase understanding of academic content. This article seeks to equip teachers with different ways to support and engage English language learners in the mainstream classroom.

As school begin to address the challenge of reopening schools, a greater concern of how to address learning loss created during remote instruction has taken center stage. Now, more than ever, administrators, teachers and families continue to question how best to meet the learning needs of their students, especially after losing more than a quarter of the 2019-2020 academic year to the current pandemic. One recent study, conducted by NWEA, predicts that students will experience a learning loss of 30% in reading and as much as 50% in math as a result of the pandemic. Left untamed, these types of academic setbacks could have significant negative implications for students who were previously preforming on grade level and even more disastrous for students who were already behind. This article hopes to discuss the how differentiation practices can be leveraged to address lost learning during pandemic remote instruction, while also highlighting procedural steps to effectively accelerate learning.

As you know, Massachusetts' teachers holding a Provisional license* are expected to advance to an Initial license during their fourth or fifth year of teaching. The traditional route to licensure (Route 1) requires grad school, intensive study and student-teaching scenarios. For some people, like Katherine Flynn, this felt like a ‘step back’. An experienced Special Educational Needs teacher, just three classes away from her Masters in teaching, Katherine started to research alternative ways to achieve licensure – quickly:

"What you get for your money with Class Measures is worth way more than anything you could get at grad school." 

Before his move to Massachusetts, Stephen Pettit had been a teacher for a long time. His route to teaching was a more unusual one. Despite having always wanted to teach, Stephen graduated from his undergraduate degree in the early 1970s and was advised not to go into teaching, because at that time there was a glut of teachers and no one was hiring. So he began a very successful career in the steel industry, working his way up over the next 30 years: