If you've been following GSTA's programming over the past few years, you know how critical it is to incorporate literacy into science teaching. This seminar will share how literacy learning cycles make it easier to hit literacy goals while remaining firmly in a science inquiry mindset. Additionally, we'll look at the Once Upon a Science Book series from NSTA, which offers complete literacy-based lessons for middle grade classrooms in life science, Earth science, and physical science. While the book series targets middle grades, teachers in grades K-12 will gain valuable insights from this session. Registrants will receive an email with the Zoom link on the morning of March 26th.
Jodi Wheeler-Toppen is the author of the Once Upon a Science Book series from NSTA. She holds a Ph.D. in science education from the University of Georgia with a focus on literacy in science, and has been teaching and helping teachers integrate literacy and science for over 20 years.
How can teachers in bilingual, dual-immersion, and mainstream classrooms support student language use? How can we move beyond a focus on language as vocabulary to engage students in using all of their diverse linguistic and semiotic resources to engage in science? Across the country, new standards and frameworks for language development promote the bridging of disciplinary content, language, and literacy to support students in their academic learning. In doing so, they move beyond seeing language as listening, reading and writing to understanding it as engaging in scientific uses of language, such as modeling, explaining, and communicating.
This workshop will focus on how teachers can use different tools and strategies to support ELLs in developing their language while meeting three-dimensional science standards. Participants will engage as learners in activities that involve the practices of modeling and argumentation and include embedded support for language development and collaboration. Based on their engagement, participants will identify the language opportunities afforded by the science and engineering practices and concrete strategies to support student-to-student discourse and collective sensemaking.
3 Key Takeaways
Emily Adah Miller taught preschool, elementary, and middle school for more than 2 decades, the last ten as science specialist and ESL/Bilingual teacher. She was a co-writer for the NGSS and the NGSS Diversity and Equity Team’s Appendix D. Adah Miller served as Co-PI on the Multiple Literacies in Project-based Learning Grant and PI for Supporting Multilingual Learners in Scientific Sensemaking through an Interactional Approach to Language. Adah Miller collaborated with Wisconsin Center for Education Research to design Discourse Tools aligned with the ELPD Framework, and co-chaired the adoption of the WIDA 2020 ELD Framework standards in Wisconsin. Adah Miller advocates for teacher voice, professionalization, and agency in decision-making as essential ingredients for high quality and equitable science learning environments.
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