Last week DSST hosted a training series called Secondary Constructing Meaning Institute for teachers and leaders this week around best practices for supporting multilingual learners with access to grade level standards across content areas. This two-day session was part of a five-day training series, which was attended by teachers from across all content areas.

Constructing Meaning provides teachers with the process and tools for weaving explicit language instruction into content-area teaching. Lesson planning is driven by the content and academic language demands of discipline-specific learning. Based on backward design and a gradual release of responsibility model, the Constructing Meaning process prompts teachers to:

• understand the role language plays in content learning
• decide what language knowledge students need to access content and express understanding
• provide appropriate, explicit oral and written language instruction and practice