FOSTERING QUALITY INTERACTIONS IN DISTANCE LEARNING

 

Thank you for joining us in using these lessons and activities we have developed for distance learning. These activities were carefully adapted from Understanding Language’s Persuasion Across Time and Space unit.* This unit was originally created by members of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative to illustrate how to support English Learners to engage in ambitious new conceptual, analytical, and linguistic practices associated with new standards. The Persuasion unit consists of five lessons that challenge and support students to read, analyze, and compose persuasive texts for a variety of purposes. The full unit is available at https://ell.stanford.edu.

 

Given the challenge of closed school campuses across the country, we have begun adapting the unit for distance learning. As we have moved this unit and lessons into a new digital format, we have kept a few key ideas in mind:

• Quality oral interaction is essential for language and concept development.

• Students will need flexibility in terms of timing.

• Structure within interactions is more important than ever.

 

To this end, we offer the materials in easily accessible digital formats that can be freely copied and used with classes of students. At the same time, we offer a range of flexible options for fostering interaction between students. Some of these structures will need to take advantage of the multimodal nature (e.g., email, voice-message, short video) of student-student interactions based upon their access to digital technology.

 

We hope you find these materials useful in your teaching practice. We are eager to hear your feedback, suggestions, and requests as we begin our journey together.

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To access the lessons, please click here.