Exciting news! Jon Nordmeyer, MLRC School Network Director, will be presenting at the ELLSA2025 Conference in Beijing on March 1-2.
Don’t miss the chance to attend Jon’s insightful sessions:
Recentering What Matters: Listening to Student Voices
The past decade has unbolted learning from the physical space of the classroom and accelerated the evolution of education: from factory schools of the industrial era to personalized, multimodal and digitized ecosystems of the twenty-first century. Most international schools have become more diverse and more inclusive in the past two decades, and both multilingualism and neurodiversity contribute layers of richness and complexity to the classroom. Centering the voices of students and families, particularly those at the margins, helps us to better understand the intersection of language, identity and learning. And when we can build on the assets of all learners, we can transform today’s schools – to produce tomorrow’s global leaders, international scholars and transnational agents of change.
Beyond Co-teaching: Catalyzing Collaboration to Serve All Learners
To truly serve a diverse community, international schools need to develop collaborative cultures, programs and practices. Collaboration helps both students and teachers flourish in today’s international schools. Teacher collaboration is also one of the most valuable and cost-effective forms of job-embedded professional learning. In this interactive session, participants will learn research about collaboration as well as practical tools and specific action steps for building a collaborative culture to improve teaching and learning: not only for multilingual learners, but for all students.
Accelerating Improvement through Action Research: Lessons from International Schools (with Dr. Ying Chu)
Research is essential to design, evaluate, and improve learning, and connecting practical wisdom with systematic tools of inquiry closes the gap between research and practice. Schools want to leverage the latest innovations, accreditation standards often name action research as a school improvement strategy, and school leaders value opportunities to engage with and in educational research. The MLRC is a university-based, research-practice partnership committed to learning about and improving outcomes for multilingual students. This session will feature insights from action research projects designed and implemented at international schools.
Steal this workshop: Leading professional learning at your school
Many EAL teachers have the opportunity (or the responsibility) to offer workshops for colleagues – during new teacher orientation, at faculty meetings or on PD days. However, finding, creating and delivering high-quality professional learning is time-consuming and can be stressful. In this session you will learn easy activities and approaches for facilitating professional learning at your school to help you build capacity for all teachers to serve multilingual learners. This workshop will provide share pro tips and effective approaches as well as some ready-made resources that can be replicated or adapted for your context. You’ll also have the opportunity to share what you have done and learn from what has worked in other schools.
Learn more at https://www.ellsaconference2025.com/