I thought readers might be interested in hearing some of the projects I’ll be working on over the next six months (and this post is also an excuse for me to begin to get a bit better organized, too!):

  • Our next book, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox: Hundreds of Practical Ideas to Support Your Students, will be published in the first week of April – three weeks from now!  Look for excerpts appearing in different places later this month. Katie Hull and I will also be doing a Facebook Live event with Education Week, along with a Twitter chat.  The book is filled with hundreds of practical ideas and over one hundred downloadable student hand-outs.  If you liked our previous two books, we think you’ll love this one (and we think you’ll also love the revised edition of our first book, The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide, which will be coming out in a couple of years)!
  • Diane Staehr Fenner is leading a webinar on March 19th on grading for English Language Learners, and I’ll be sharing my thoughts there, too.  You can read what Katie and I think at Grading English Language Learners – A Perspective From Two Teachers. Unfortunately, if you haven’t already registered for the free event, you won’t be able to participate because it maxed out at 500 teachers weeks ago.  Personally, I’m looking forward to doing more learning from others during the event than talking.
  • I’m working with fifteen ELLs to do a series of professional development sessions at our school.  Two have been completed and there are several more to go this spring.  You can read about it at Guest Post: Professional Development in Education – Involving Everyone, and I’ll be posted some videos from the trainings.
  • I’ll be planning an exciting class we’ll be piloting next year for Long-Term English Language Learners (see Here’s My Tentative Plan For A Support Class For Long-Term English Language Learners – Tell Me How I Can Make It Better).  It should be exciting!
  • This summer, I’ll be writing the fourth book in my series on student motivation. You can get tons of free resources from the previous three books in the series here.
  • Katie Hull and I are working with Education Week to create a series of video on differentiated instruction and on other topics (you can read some of our thoughts at an article we wrote awhile back: The Five By Five Approach To Differentiation Success. I’m thinking that the first ones might be out this summer.  You can see the first animated video I did with Ed Week here – it’s on transfer of learning.

It looks like I’ll be keeping busy!  Happily (for me, at least), I’ll be working with Katie on some of the major projects!