Past Courses

Empowering students to have meaningful conversations with one another is critical to personal and academic success. In this course, you’ll learn teaching methods that are effective in fostering productive and constructive academic discussions for all students. You’ll gain a solid understanding of the role of conversation in all content areas and the tools to create a classroom culture of interaction-based learning.

Most standards emphasize improving the quality of student-to-student conversation as a major feature of instruction. The new standards specifically describe the importance of students understanding the reasoning of others and engaging in meaningful conversations using evidence for claims.

This course is targeted towards both elementary and secondary school teachers.

The course will result in high quality, curriculum-connected instructional assessment tools that support effective implementation of comprehensive curricula in high school, with best-in-class design for English learner-designated students.

The course will result in high quality, curriculum-connected instructional assessment tools that support effective implementation of comprehensive curricula in high school mathematics, with best-in-class design for English learner-designated students.

New College- and Career-Ready standards emphasize the importance of speaking, listening, and engaging in argumentation as both a means of learning learning AND a valuable goal of learning. Starting March 20, Drs. Sara Rutherford-Quach, Jeff Zwiers  and Erika Johnson at Stanford Graduate School of Education will offer an online professional development course that focuses on student argumentation, Supporting Student Argumentation in English Language Arts and Social Studies. The overall purpose of this course is to help teachers prepare students, and particularly language learners, to clearly communicate well-structured oral and written arguments about content-area concepts and topics.

This argumentation course is based on a previous course offered by Rutherford-Quach and professors Karen Thompson and Kenji Hakuta. The current course has been revised and augmented based on participant feedback and to reflect the content-area specializations. Classroom teachers and instructional coaches are encouraged to take the course together with their colleagues and friends.

The College-and-Career Ready standards emphasize improving the quality of student-to-student discourse as a major feature of instruction. The new standards specifically describe the importance of students understanding the reasoning of others and engaging in meaningful conversations using evidence for claims. Yet this type of student-to-student interaction tends to be rare in classrooms. Common classroom teaching activities such as whole class discussions, jigsaws, and think-pair-shares can have the appearance of constructive interactions, but they often do not provide adequate opportunities for all students to engage in back-and-forth dialog. This course looks closely at student-to-student conversations and addresses ways to improve students' abilities to engage in the types of interactions described in the new standards. We will also examine the use of formative assessment as an instructional practice to gauge where your students are in their learning by gathering evidence of their learning, assessing the evidence, and planning the next steps in instruction.

The main goal of this course is to support mathematics teachers in getting better at hearing, seeing, and supporting students' English language development in the context of mathematical reasoning. Here we will provide a framework for organizing strategies and special considerations to support English language learners in learning both mathematics and academic uses of language. This framework is intended to help teachers address the specialized academic language demands in math when planning and delivering lessons, including the demands of reading, writing, speaking, listening, conversing, and representing in math. The course includes instructional activities and routines to be used across lessons and units to meet the linguistic and cultural needs of English learners and other students who struggle with the language demands of learning math. Even though listening, speaking, reading, writing, and conversing are highly intertwined and interdependent, often happening in one lesson, we have chosen to emphasize them separately in this course's sessions, in order to build up your expertise in each one.