It was a dark and stormy night in Santa Barbara. January 19, 2017. The next day's inauguration drumroll played on the evening news. Huddled around a table were nine Corwin authors and their publisher, who together have devoted their careers to equity in education. They couldn't change the weather, they couldn't heal a fractured country, but they did have the power to put their collective wisdom about EL education upon the page to ensure our multilingual learners reach their highest potential. Proudly, we introduce you now to the fruit of that effort: Breaking Down the Wall: Essential Shifts for English Learners' Success. In this first-of-a-kind collaboration, teachers and leaders, whether in small towns or large urban centers, finally have both the research and the practical strategies to take those first steps toward excellence in educating our culturally and linguistically diverse children. It's a book to be celebrated because it means we can throw away the dark glasses of deficit-based approaches and see children who come to school speaking a different home language for what they really are: learners with tremendous assets. The authors' contributions are arranged in nine chapters that become nine tenets for teachers and administrators to use as calls to actions in their own efforts to realize our English learners' potential: 1. From Deficit-Based to Asset-Based 2. From Compliance to Excellence 3. From Watering Down to Challenging 4. From Isolation to Collaboration 5. From Silence to Conversation 6. From Language to Language, Literacy, and Content 7. From Assessment of Learning to Assessment for and as Learning 8. From Monolingualism to Multilingualism 9. From Nobody Cares to Everyone/Every Community Cares Read this book; the chapters speak to one another, a melodic echo of expertise, classroom vignettes, and steps to take. To shift the status quo is neither fast nor easy, but there is a clear process, and it's laid out here in Breaking Down the Wall. To distill it into a single line would go something like this: if we can assume mutual ownership, if we can connect instruction to all children's personal, social, cultural, and linguistic identities, then all students will achieve.

Take the Flip-to Book Tour! You have to see this book to believe this book. And once you use this book it will quickly become your most treasured teaching resource. What exactly is so remarkable? All of the best teaching tools in language and literacy are at your fingertips! Just flip to that strategy you want to learn or that literacy goal you want to reach for a wealth of ready-to-use resources to actively engage learners, build academic language, and strategically support literacy instruction. Much more than a resource for EL specialists, EL Excellence Every Day is written for every teacher, with a singular focus on improving the ways we all differentiate literacy instruction. Busy teachers especially will appreciate: Over 85 flip-to strategies that help you engage and support all learners 200+ prompts and linguistic scaffolds to facilitate academic conversations connected to specific literacy goals Lesson-ready resources for essential literacy goals: anticipate before reading, read to understand, read to analyze and infer, and write with text evidence Formative assessment tasks and if/then charts for personalizing teaching to every student Differentiation guides that demonstrate how to adjust supports across EL proficiency levels Intuitive, color-coded design so you can find what you need, when you need it No one lesson or strategy is ever the perfect solution for every student. No one student learns in the same way. If there's one universal truth in teaching it's that every child is unique. Devour this book and soon enough you'll provide the excellent literacy instruction each and every student deserves each and every day. "We need resources that clearly and quickly help us to meet diverse instructional needs every day in every classroom. Tonya Ward Singer's EL Excellence Every Day: The Flip-to Guide for Differentiating Academic Literacy is such a resource." --JEFF ZWIERS, from the foreword

The transformative professional learning model that advances equity in your school! How do we make educational equity a reality, lesson by lesson? Author Tonya Singer shows how team observation and learning can strengthen schools and support educational achievement by all students. Including video clips of actual teams, this book helps to: Implement best practices for observation-based professional learning Work as a team to create a culture of deep collaboration that closes opportunity gaps among students Use observation-based data to better reach culturally and linguistically diverse learners Develop and implement strategies that build students' skills for future success