Empowering Newcomer Educators and their students through History Instruction.
The UCBHSSP Newcomer Educator Initiative aims to address the needs of Social Science teachers of newcomer students around the Bay Area. Our focus is to help educators achieve their goals of addressing language development as well as content understanding for newcomer students. We are supporting educators in the following ways:
Local Communities of Practice: The UCBHSSP is excited to offer ongoing communities of practice for teachers and coordinators that work with Newcomers. In a collaborative effort to increase access to content and language learning educators are encouraged to meet 4-6 times in person or online during the school year. During these sessions, participants will learn new strategies, share existing strategies, review student work, and develop modifications based on their instruction. Please contact ucbhssp@berkeley.edu if you're interested in learning more about this program.
Community Convenings for Educators of Newcomers: These annual convening guide the work UCBHSSP does on behalf of educators that serve newcomer students in the Bay Area. Previous community convenings have centered adapting content instruction for newcomers in mainstream classrooms, systems and routines for newcomer programs and classes, creating common routines/ procedures and strategies, building effective newcomer teacher teams , and models for cohorting students/master schedules. The next community convening is scheduled for Fall of 2025. For more information, click here.
Professional Development: UCBHSSP offers a professional development series that presents schools and districts with support for newcomer students in the history classroom. The series can be delivered in person or online. It focus on:
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Cultural awareness and community building strategies in the classroom
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Planning to adapt content for newcomers
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Pedagogy and scaffolds for Integrating language development
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Developing a program and how to cohort the students
For more information on how the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project can work to support newcomer educators in your community, please email ucbhssp@berkeley.edu.
Click the image to see an expanded view of UCBHSSP's framework for providing support to newcomer educators.