1. Building Academic Language
Framing Professional Development
This year’s district Professional Development for ALL educators is focused on Academic Language. The PD will be delivered in three hour modules spread over 5 half days. Today you will be attending munites workshops, but before diving into our content for the first of these workshops, we want to give you a brief overview of why we have chosen this focus on academic language, and what you can expect from your workshops today.

2. Focus
Increase the amount of and caliber of student talk in each school
Build a robust toolbox to increase student talk in your school and build academic language
Discuss the four bullet points on the slide. Be sure to emphasize that most educators will be exposed to a lot of new information today, and that we DO NOT expect them to master it all and start using it all tomorrow. Assure them that we will be revisiting the specific techniques for increasing student talk and building academic language that they will seeing and experiencing in today’s workshops in more depth in future sessions.
What we do hope they take away from today is an understanding of why this work is so important, and at least one new idea or technique they can start implement in their classroom and/or interactions with students. Remind everyone that whenever we talk to students we have an opportunity to build their academic language skills.
Note that we are having all educators participate together in today’s workshops as they serve as an introduction to some important background information on academic language development. Some educators in our district will be familiar in particular with some of the techniques we will be introducing in today’s workshops through the SEI courses they have taken, or through the Academic Language PD that was offered over the summer. In future sessions this year, we will be drawing on their knowledge and expertise to support our collective efforts to develop a thorough understanding of key concept and techniques that support academic language development.
At the end of the last workshop they will be asked to share one thing they learned, one question they still have or something they are wondering about, and one strategy they will try out in their practice over the next month.

3. Connections to NAPS 5 Steps
Student Learning Objectives
Assessments of Student Learning
Learning Activities (Agenda)
Higher Order Thinking
Differentiation
So why are we focusing on academic language this year?
First, it will help us enrich our work on the five elements of our lesson planning framework. (This graphic should be familiar to everyone – it has framed all our PD for the last two years.)
Steps 1 & 2: We have been working on developing content objectives (linked to the standards) and using them effectively as a teaching tool. This year you will learn about language objectives and begin to incorporate them into your practice by year’s end to help focus our instruction to build students’ academic language. And just as with your content objectives, you’ll need to plan how you will know whether those language objectives have been met by each student.
Step 3: When planning your lesson activities (or your interactions with students), you will be introduced this year to a wide range of techniques you can use to increase student’s opportunities to use and hear academic language.
Steps 4 & 5: You will also learn how to adapt complex thinking tasks for students who are still developing their language skills so that language deficits do not become thinking deficits.

4. Connections to the Standards
Our focus on academic language also supports the state standards in literacy, math and science. This graphic focuses on the practice standards in math and science, and the College and Career Readiness capacities of literate individuals from the Common Core literacy standards. If you look closely at the intersection of these three disciplines you will see that building students academic language will help us meet these standards that cross all three disciplines.

5. Connection to Evaluation
Standard II – Teaching All Students
Student Engagement
Meeting Diverse Needs
Collaborative Learning Environment
Third, your skill in teaching academic language will assist you in meeting the standard of teaching all students.
By increasing student talk (which is the focus of one of your workshops today) you will increase student engagement.
By utilizing scaffolding for language development language you can make complex texts and task accessible to more learners.
The collaborative character of your learning environment will all increase as your incorporate more structured opportunities for student to student talk into your practice.

6. Improve Student Learning
Large at-risk population in NAPS
Teacher identified language deficits at all levels
Changing landscape of what it means to be College & Career Ready
Limited growth and achievement as exhibited by MCAS data and trends over time
Finally and most importantly, we see improving our instruction around academic language as a lever to improve students learning. Go over the four bullet points above.

7. PD Objectives Increase quality and quantity of student talk
Embed direct, explicit vocabulary development in instruction
Use quality language objectives as a teaching tool
Here are our overarching objectives for the PD series this year.