Highest Aspirations

What strategies can we use to help students overcome the significant challenges associated with learning in a remote environment? How can we implement tried and true strategies like sentence stems, anchors of support, choral reading and others to help strengthen English learners academic language skills? How might teachers use newly acquired skills to help strengthen EL instruction as we transition back to school? We discuss these questions and more with Steven Mendoza. Steven teaches 7th grade mathematics at Burnet Middle School in Austin, Texas, where he was selected as Teacher of the Year in 2018. 70% of students at Burnet are English learners and 95% are economically disadvantaged, which was one of the reasons Steven decided to work there. A common theme in Steven’s classroom is “Be Respectful and Do Your Best”. He instills this mantra in his students and points to these traits as necessary to the success of their future endeavors, whether this means going to college, contributing to the workforce, or sim