Hello and welcome to our video! Thank you for stopping in to learn more about the RIEL Biology project! Our project is in its first year and is a partnership among the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and high school biology classrooms in Alachua County Public Schools and Hillsborough County Public Schools.

RIEL Biology supports science learning for emergent bilingual students through an instructional framework containing six elements of culturally and linguistically responsive teaching. In no particular order, these elements are: affirming science identities, attention to language, collaboration, funds of knowledge, multiple modalities, and sociopolitical consciousness.

We'd love your thoughts on any of the following as you watch our video. We are especially interested in teachers' perspectives:

• What online professional learning experiences have been valuable for you and/or those you educate?
• What instructional approaches have helped your multilingual students engage meaningfully in content and practices?
• Of the six RIEL Biology elements (above), which might be the most difficult to bring about in the science classroom? Why might this be so?
• Which, if any, of the following resources would be valuable to you: exemplar lesson plans, video-recorded modeled instructional strategies, video recordings of participating biology teachers sharing their own experiences implementing RIEL Biology instruction? Anything else that we might have missed?

Thank you again for taking the time to interact with our video. We appreciate it!

Great video. I'd be interested in hearing more about your team's approach to using multiple modalities and the coordination of those different modalities.

This is wonderful!  I've often said that learning biology _IS_ like learning a new language because of the difficulty and amount of vocabulary.  Teaching it to emerging english learners is definitely a special challenge, and what you all are doing is impressive.  Well done!

This is such a great project! Our team is working on creating culturally competent video resources for emergent bilingual students in STEM, and one of our big questions is how to measure the success of the project. As you've been working on your project, what metrics are you using to evaluate success? Do you look at qualitative measures like test scores, or have you been focusing more on attitudes and self efficacy? 

What a great video! As others have commented, it is so important to see projects specifically addressing how to help teachers work with their bilingual students. You all mentioned the need to switch to online PD during this Covid time, I was curious to know more about this transition. PD around culturally and linguistically responsive teaching is hard in a normal year, were there aspects of the PD that were easier to adapt to online? Were there aspects that were harder?

Julie:

I enjoyed learning about the great work you and your team are doing.  I'm looking forward to seeing your findings.

Fabulous work and really exciting! Disparities on the biology (and other) EOCs are a concern for us here in El Paso TX as well. I think exemplar lessons and video-recorded instruction modeling the strategies in your project would be tremendously helpful in pre-service teacher education. I teach a course specifically for secondary content-area teachers and focused on translanguaging strategies for content instruction for emergent bilinguals -- videos like you describe would be an excellent resource! Our project is incorporating translanguaging and culturally responsive strategies into middle school science and math. I'm interested to hear more about the attention to language element of RIEL Biology -- what are some points that have felt key in your work with attention to language? I'm guessing both teachers' attention to language as well as students' attention to language?

Thank you for sharing your video. You encapsulated the deep need for supporting language usage and development as part of an instructional approach in Biology really well. I also like how you described the transition to online during COVID. We're just migrating to that to Canvas now at my university. What a good idea to use that as a sandbox space. What a good strategy. You also mentioned getting ready to conduct the end of year focus groups now. We're about to do our second year focus group and so it's very much on my mind right now. Are there any particular questions that you're most eager to see what the response is to? 

Hi Julie and Team,

Wonderful work. This is a great example of an innovative adjustment post-COVID. I'd love to do a deep dive into each of your six design elements but, due to space, I'll ask about one: What are the ways the teachers have worked in sociopolitical consciousness into the lessons, if at all? What are the ways you're investigating the robustness of that principle? What are the outcomes of interest? Finally, how are teachers balancing the crazy push for "vocab-mania" in HS biology with the depth needed for a sociopolitical approach? This is so challenging, but I'd love to see your project become a model for what this kind of culturally and linguistically responsive biology instruction looks like. 

Thank you, Heidi! We appreciate the kind words and great question. 

Actually, we have not yet reached the point in the school year where we've seen teachers' sociopolitical consciousness lessons in action. COVID delayed our project start with teachers by over a month. But, this is such an important (and difficult!) area for science teachers to tackle that we are eager to learn how they design and implement their lessons. 

The 'vocab-mania' has indeed been present due to End of Course exam content. However, we've seen an upside to this, as it is the space where teachers often use multiple modalities to help students access and negotiate the terms. They came into the program with strong repertoires in multiple modalities-based instruction, which we were quite encouraged by!

What an interesting and critical project! I've done some work recently with science teachers of English learners and we found that incorporating and when needed adapting instruction to student background knowledge is one of the most challenging aspects of promoting more inclusive pedagogy. It does take a certain level of content and pedagogical dexterity to reframe/adapt. What have you noticed with your project around contextualizing biology with emergent bilinguals? Im excited to learn more about this work here. 

I love this project and really appreciate your discussion of the need to pivot during COVID. What are some of the lessons learned around teacher PD and reflection that you are now doing virtually that will carry over in a post-COVID implementation? For example, I love your approach to collective teacher reflection using the rubrics that you're using online. Will this remain once you move back to face-to-face? 

You are to be commended for the program you provided in light of COVID.  You are addressing a needed area.  I would, however,  like to know more about the professional development (PD) provided, especially since the project had to switch to online professional development. Secondly, how will the project be evaluated? How will success be determined/measured? I am also concerned about the modules that were provided by another institution. Construction a module is time-consuming. How do they differ from the original classroom content and approaches? 

Given this year was so technology focused for many schools that were at least partially remote, did you find any tools that helped to facilitate learning for emergent language learners?

Thank you for your question, Daniel! Because our project is situated in Florida, all of the emergent bilingual students we work with are on-campus in face-to-face instruction. As a result, we have not explored online learning tools in this way. It's an area of great need, though, and I am glad you asked about it!

As a bilingual learner, I really appreciate the focus of your work. I will look forward to learning more about the outcomes of your work! 

Such important work!  In addition to the observation protocol, are you assessing students' identities and connections to STEM?

Hi Bridget--thanks for the positive feedback on our work!  It's been so great to work with teachers and other researchers across Florida. I'm thrilled to be part of this work.

And, yes, we are trying to find innovative ways to connect science content to students' identities, and in the process, help students' see connections between their identities and disciplinary practices. 

One of our graduate students is looking into multimodality and biology engagement, which I'm sure you'd find interesting :)

I hope you're doing great in Boulder!

Mark

Thanks, Mark and Karl.  I will look forward to updates on your project.   Mark, hope to see you at LRA!

Hi Julie and team, It feels great to see you and learn about your work! It's an amazing project and I look forward to getting to know more about the revised observation protocol. While the online format of providing professional development to teachers might have been quite challenging initially, I am wondering about the strategies you adopted to encourage networking and collaboration among your teachers. Did they meet in small groups which were consistent throughout the past year to brainstorm lesson ideas? Were there any teacher leaders within the group?