Newcomer Educator Support

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:

1. The Community of Practice:  The UCBHSSP is excited to offer a community of practice for teachers and coordinators that work with Newcomers.  This collaborative effort to increase access to content and language learning will meet 4-6 times online during the 2024-25 school year. During these sessions, participants will learn new strategies.  Additionally, educators will share their own strategies, the resulting student work, and modifications based on instruction. The meetings 4:00pm on zoom.  Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, December 10th!  Please register at this link if you are interested in participating.

2. A Conference for Educators of Newcomers: Held on Nov. 2nd 2024 at UC Berkeley, this educator-led conference featured workshops on:

1. Adapting content instruction for newcomers in mainstream classrooms

2. Systems and Routines for Newcomer Programs and Classes

3. Creating Common routines, procedures and strategies

4. Building Effective Newcomer Teacher Teams

5. Models for cohorting students/master schedule

3. 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: 

1. Cultural awareness and community building strategies in the classroom

2. Planning to adapt content  for newcomers 

3. Pedagogy and scaffolds for Integrating language development

4. 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.