Welcome to Secondary English Language Learning

St. Paul Public Schools

An Interactive Workspace for Teachers

Experts in the field of second language acquisition advocate the teaching of second language through, not prior to, academic content; in recent years, the ELL programs in SPPS have been guided by this philosophy.  The district’s ELL programs provide instruction in which learners acquire English through participation in age-appropriate, academic content that is driven by national, state, and district standards.  The teaching of English through academic content requires ELL instruction that is aligned with and integrated into grade-level curriculum. Academic content must be differentiated as necessary to make standards and curricula accessible to ELL students at all levels.

During the 2009-2010 school year, our focus was to collaborate with The Leadership and Learning Center as well as our district colleagues to identify priority ("power") standards in each of the content areas.  In addition, ELL secondary teachers have worked together to identify English language proficiency (ELP) power standards.  With both content area and ELL power standards identified, ELL teachers have been able to work together to create ELL Engaging Classroom Assessments (ECAs).  The ECAs are intended to be common formative assessments that measure students' English language proficiency growth throughout the school year.

The intensive collaboration described above has both highlighted the incredible strengths of our secondary ELL programming as well as what we need to do to further align our curriculum with that of the mainstream.  This wiki is a place we can store and share all the hard work ELL staff has done up to this point and what we continue to do now and in the future.