Tech Savvy Mama

Parenting in the Digital Age

How Teachers Can Support English Learners Through Micro-Credentials

By

This is a sponsored post

“Let me tell you my story,” Joel said as we sat down to a Haitian meal the day before Haiti Projects was opening their community library in Fond des Blancs, Haiti. Joel and I had just met in the lunch buffet line and as we sat down to lunch, this soft-spoken man with a firm handshake, bright eyes, and a big smile leaned close and told me in a hushed voice what it was like to immigrate to the United States as a teenager with no knowledge of English. Joel had attended private school in Haiti. He was a good student who studied hard and enjoyed his classes in Haiti but when he started high school in Boston, he told me “the teachers thought I wasn’t smart because I didn’t speak English.”

As a former teacher with a high percentage of English language learners (ELL) in my classes, I know how important it is to support this section of the student population but many educators feel unprepared to provide instruction to ELL kids in their classrooms. Our student population is becoming more diverse so it’s even more critical to understand how instruction influences actual student language use and development but this often requires additional professional development. Thankfully, many options exist to support educators that make it realistic to continue coursework necessary for subject area competency. Online options such as micro-credentials through Digital Promise exist to help busy professionals earn necessary credits or gain knowledge to help their students even if they’re limited in time and financial resources.

Supporting English Learners Through Micro-Credentials

Understanding how instruction influences actual student language use and development is an invaluable skill for today’s educators and micro-credentials offered by Digital Promise can help teachers help their students. The Digital Promise Micro-Credential Ecosystem is designed to take educators through their instructional practices to recognize the role they play in students’ ability to leverage language to access content. Content is on-demand, personalized, shareable, and competency based, focusing on an explicit skill.

Each Digital Promise micro-credential is developed using a framework to ensure they:

  • Focus on a single competency
  • Are supported by research
  • Require evidence of competence
  • Include a rubric for evaluation

A variety of stacks assist teacher professional development in supporting English learners. They provide flexible learning to suit your learning needs as you support your students. These stacks can be taken independently of each other or as a series in any order you choose, depending on the needs of your population:

Supporting English Learners: Constructive Conversations Stack

Supporting English Learners: Language Fundamentals

Supporting English Learners: Mathematical Language Routines

Supporting English Learners: Supporting Argumentation

While each of these micro-credentials is unique in its distinct focus, all require educators to reflect on how their instruction influences actual student language use and development. Digital Promise makes it easy to prove competency. Teachers provide a video of their classroom instruction or examples of student work related to content in the stack.

It can be a challenge to deliver material to English learners but Digital Promise micro-credentials help educators striving to support English learners, like my new friend, Joel, thanks to competency-based learning. Digital Promise empowers educators to be better prepared to meet the needs of the diverse population of learners by providing powerful, personalized, skill-driven professional learning in a flexible way that meets the busy schedules of today’s teachers.

To learn more about micro-credentials and the role they play in teacher professional development:

This post was sponsored by Digital Promise and We Are Teachers. All opinions are my own.