 Welcome to our session on supporting multilingual learners through an OER development project. My name is Vanessa Clark and I'm a Program Analyst for Digital Learning at Oregon Department of Education. And my name is Susan Payne and I'm an Education Standards and Systems Specialist at Oregon Department of Education. Before we get started, I just want to point out that we'll be sharing Bitly links to provide you with access to the resources we're discussing and sharing with you. And you can access our slide deck at bitly-slash-3-sl-m-i-e-z. These are the learning outcomes for this session as outlined in the program. Our hope is to provide some inspiration and to share lessons learned along with some of the resources and tools that we developed that might be useful to others developing similar projects. We had three major goals for this OER development grant project that directly align with the three touchstones that anchor our Oregon Open Learning Team's work, equity, empowerment, and efficacy. First, we want to provide equitable access to high quality materials for educators and for students. Second, we want to empower educators by engaging them in high quality professional learning to improve instruction. And in this grant, the focus was on integrating supports for multilingual learners. And finally, we want to increase educator efficacy by building and growing partnerships that will lead to further development of shareable high quality materials. The OER development grant took place between November and June of last school year, and we had 32 grantees working on the development of lessons designed with intentional supports for students who are multilingual learners. There were three phases to the work. Phase one was intensive in terms of the professional learning, which was focused on pedagogical supports and also covered the basics of OER and open licensing. In phase two, we supported grantees through the process of piloting and revising their newly developed lessons. And in phase three, grantees engaged in a peer evaluation process using our OER quality framework with final evaluations being conducted by ODE staff and our professional learning providers. In designing the project, it was important to our team that we included input from many sources to ensure that we were taking into consideration the needs of educators and providing an experience that would be a valuable and worthwhile use of their time. To guide our engagements, our team crafted an equity and inclusion framework, adapted from the city of Ottawa and city for all women initiatives, equity and inclusion lens handbook. Our framework includes questions for consideration at each stage of the project. We use this framework to guide our engagements with the various groups you see on the screen. Our team plans to continue using this framework to guide future projects related to OER development and curation. Here you can see some examples of some of the questions and considerations in the project planning stage. And here you can see some of the questions from the equity and inclusion framework focused on recruitment and contracting. Through our engagements and planning, we recognized a few challenges in the work ahead. The Oregon Open Learning Hub, Oregon's K-12 OER repository on OER Commons, was launched in May of 2020. This still new hub launched during a time when so many were dealing with the traumatic impacts of COVID-19. This meant that there was a general lack of awareness of OER and the hub among Oregon's educators. To increase awareness before launching the grant project, we held two Oregon Open Learning Institute sessions during the summer preceding the grant. These virtual sessions were full day interactive events that taught educators about OER and the Oregon Open Learning Hub. And participating educators were paid a stipend for their time and participation. We asked that these participants share about upcoming OER grant and professional learning opportunities with others in their districts. Another consideration was the general feeling of overwhelm and even burnout that many educators were feeling entering the 21-22 school year. We worked to address this challenge through predictable project design and intentional opportunities for relationship building. Predictable project design meant that the sessions were routine, mostly all occurring on Thursday evenings at the same time. And all of the session times were provided upfront when the grant application was released. We also had one long Saturday session, which we gave an option of two different dates for educators to attend. A final consideration was around how to recruit educator participants that reflect the diversity of Oregon's student body, as this is often a challenge for ODE's grant funded projects. We tried to address this challenge through intentional design structures. One was to broaden our recruiting avenues and work with many different partners to get the word out about the opportunity. We also incorporated incentives that honor diverse funds of knowledge and address unique needs of BIPOC educators. And we were intentional about goals and outcomes that center equity, anti-racism, culturally responsive instruction, and social justice. Next, we'll have our partners from Western Oregon University talk about how they structured the professional learning for the grantees. Hi, everyone. My name is Maria Dantes-Whitney. Hi, I'm Kristen Pratt, and we are going to be talking to you today about the professional learning sessions that we conducted in partnership with OER. A quick overview of our professional learning sessions, we organized these sessions into three phases. And the first phase was grounding the learning for folks thinking about asset based and culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies, then how to implement those pedagogies and instructional strategies into lesson plan design. The second phase was piloting the lessons that folks developed, and then the third phase was evaluating those lessons. And we are going to go through some of the examples and some of the details of what we covered in each phase today. So the first phase, grounding and learning and the curation of resources. We worked with participants to develop their expertise so that they could explore and evaluate evidence of cultural and linguistic responsiveness in materials that were found in the Open Educational Resource Hub. We worked to develop participant understanding of language learning processes in order to be critical evaluators of materials and of their own lesson design. We also helped participants develop expertise in supporting students who are emergent bilingual specifically through equitable access to the language and content of the lessons by use of principle sheltered strategies in understanding lesson design. Some of the examples of activities that we conducted were helping participants to deconstruct their own identities to think critically about racial linguistic ideologies and to engage in understanding about trans-languaging as a strategy in classes. We culminated those activities with helping participants think through a lesson plan template. The lesson plan template was designed with students who are emergent bilingual in mind to afford intentionality around the language used in the lesson plan design to afford equitable access to the content. The second phase of we piloted resources for participants. Participants worked really hard to develop the lesson plans that they had been practicing that they would be able to use in their own classrooms and applying the principles that we have been thinking about in critical ways in our classes, in our professional learning sessions. After the participants piloted their lessons, they engaged in critical peer feedback with one another, looking at their lessons, thinking critically about how those pilots went, and then engaging in critical self-reflection of what went well, what didn't go well, sharing those findings with their peers, and then implementing recommendations and revisions. With that, I'll pass it over to my colleague Maria. Thank you, Kristin. Here are some examples of some of the things that we did during that phase. We introduced a feedback tool, like a template for our participants to use in terms of providing peer feedback to each other regarding their own lessons. We also brainstormed ways that they could seek feedback from their own students, in particular students who are emergent bilinguals. And then we also introduced a tool for self-reflection, self-evaluation, so that they could engage in critical reflection of their own lessons as well, a tool for helping them do that. We also talked about how to get feedback from colleagues who would either pilot their lessons and or observe their lessons as well. Lots of group work, lots of opportunities for collaboration during this phase as well. Finally, during phase three, we utilized the OER quality framework as an evaluation tool, right? As an evaluation tool in particular to think about creating high quality lessons for either ELD, dual language instruction, and or content area instruction, right? So participants utilized this quality framework to think about their own instructional practice and to also think about impact on student learning and outcomes. So there was a lot of exploration of the OER quality framework during this phase, and really there were three different steps, right? They utilized the quality framework as a self-evaluation tool to think through their own lessons, right? If they were reaching all those standards, also to evaluate a familiar lesson, perhaps a lesson that they had already given a lot of peer feedback for one of their peers. And then, of course, thirdly, to evaluate a new lesson that they hadn't engaged with before, a new lesson for them. So this was a process where not only did they learn about the quality framework, but they also did a lot of self-calibration and peer calibration to make sure that they were scoring themselves and scoring their peers in a way that was consistent with each other. And then at the very end of the process, we did this graffiti wall, which was a way for us to gather some informal summative feedback from the students too. Now throughout the process of the professional learning, we gathered a lot of feedback, both formal and informal, and both formative and summative. So here is just some examples of some of the comments that we got from our participants. They really appreciated the meticulous process of lesson design. They appreciated learning new concepts that would help them engage with their students who are emergent bilingual, in particular the concept of trans-languaging was a concept that came up a lot with our participants. And then also, all of them felt better equipped not only to serve their students who are emergent bilingual, but also to advocate for them within their spaces, within their buildings, within their districts, with their colleagues. All right. Well, thank you so much. In addition to the professional learning provided by Maria and Kristen, our Oregon Open Learning team engaged participants in learning about OER and our Oregon Open Learning Hub. It was important for participants to have a foundational understanding of the basics of OER and to know how to find resources. We also wanted them to be familiar with open licensing, so they could recognize and apply it. And finally, we wanted to prepare them to be OER advocates, both during the project and beyond. We offered a one-day institute during phase one, which was a synchronous virtual workshop, and we had a couple of structural elements that worked really well for participants. One was the institute workbook, which we used to facilitate an interactive learning experience. You can take a look at it by using the bit.ly link on the slide. A second element that was really effective was using Zoretta Hammond's lesson framework to organize each learning segment. This helped us to be intentional about how we were chunking the content and making sure that participants had opportunities to process and apply the information. You'll see this reflected in the design of the workbook with the exception of the Ignite piece, which was incorporated in the slide deck. In phases two and three, our team continued to provide individualized support through office hours, and we partnered with Maria and Kristen throughout the lesson development and refinement phases by first introducing the OER quality framework and building understanding of the criteria, and then engaging grantees in the quality review process by introducing the evaluation tool and facilitating scoring calibration. Next, you'll hear from some of the grant participants speaking about their experience and how they think OER might continue to impact education. How did the opportunity to collaborate with other Oregon educators impact your experience on this project? It definitely made a difference because one thing we were able to do was to see each other's strengths. Sergio was amazing with technology, and then I felt like I was pretty strong with planning and ideas, and we kind of saw each other's strengths, and we were able to collaborate on other things also because we share a lot of students. And so it brought us a lot closer, and even though Sergio isn't at our school anymore, it also continued my connection with the dual immersion department, and so we're collaborating again really closely this year. If people are able to collaborate with colleagues out of their own system, it's really powerful in eyeopening because you get to experience and learn from each other in ways that you don't necessarily get to do in your own district. And as we all know, teachers are very isolated sometimes, and we don't have enough time to collaborate, so any opportunity to be able to collaborate and learn from each other is just priceless. What makes OER and more specifically the resources from this project especially useful? Our adopted materials don't differentiate very well. There's all sorts of opportunity in an OER lesson plan or OER resource to differentiate and to do many different layers of scaffolding because they are open resources that can be adapted and changed and updated. So that's very exciting. These lessons have been vetted and have been gone through with a fine-toothed cone, and anyone who wants to use the lesson already has the assurance that there isn't going to be a big piece missing. I found resources for a Socratic seminar and for some other things and just adapted them, but the stuff we made is the stuff I use the most. There would be like a piece that I really liked, like the criteria or the formative assessment, and then I would have just adapted it for what I needed. Is there a role for OER when a school already has high quality adopted instructional materials? My school's adopted instructional materials. We went through a pretty painstaking process to only adopt textbooks and support texts that we felt lent to or centered an ethnic studies prism, and so we're pretty happy with the materials that we have. That said, there's still gaps. To have diverse student identity reflected, represented, celebrated in our materials, we're going to have to go beyond textbooks, even if we have the best texts and textbooks that are available. How did the professional learning impact your practice and student engagement? A lot of the learning was review for me because I have an Yale endorsement, but I was able to look at it in a new way and think about some of the things I'd been doing just out of practice and kind of routine and realize, oh, I could tweak this little thing and it's going to get me so much more student success or more engagement or it really deepened my practice in a way that I was not anticipating. That was impactful for me to give myself the permission to not do it the way that I thought it had to be done, but to really layer things so that I'm going deeper with my students and giving myself the time and giving them the time to be able to think critically and ask deeper questions and look at text as an ELA teacher, having them look at text with a more critical eye. I shared with my students that I was putting this lesson together and they became co-planers with me and I think they felt empowered because they realized they were helping me to create something and that their feedback and their impact mattered. I actually started two lessons and then I asked for their advice. They did a Google form, which one they liked the best and so I felt their participation along the way was something that really added a lot to my class. What advice would you give to an educator who is thinking about using OER? If I was going to give advice to a colleague using the OER is just to dive in, just give it a try and give it and try it. It's really honestly a little overwhelming because there's so many hubs and there's so much information and there's so many lesson plans. Once you're in there and you know how to search for things, those lessons have been, a lot of the lessons that are in there have been heavily curated and developed and they have so many amazing resources that can be adapted or added to or made to fit whatever population and need that you have for curriculum. When I have shown teachers what I have found on there or what I've generated and put up there, they've gotten excited like, oh, that's super helpful to have as just something I can grab and use or grab and adapt. There's a hunger for those type of resources. We hope to provide future opportunities for educators to participate in projects that pair professional learning around sound instructional practices with the development of open educational resources. So it was important for us to recognize what worked well and what we might need to change. One of the strengths of this project that we recognized was the opportunity for educators to co construct meaning. Our participants came from several school districts and education service districts and from many different regions of the state. Participants noted that they appreciated connecting with other educators and specifically named the opportunity to connect with educators from other school districts as a benefit of the project design. This professional learning sessions gave participants the opportunity to build relationships and collaborate with each other, as well as providing each other with critical feedback on the lessons they were developing. Something that we could do to improve in this area would be offering opportunities for mentorship. This mentorship could be around the content and theory of the instructional practices discussed around the technical skills needed for developing and uploading resources to teachers or even by pairing more experienced teachers with those who have fewer years of experience. There are a few more ways that we could improve the project design as well. The professional learning sessions for this project started at the end of November, evaluating and refining the lessons took place in the spring, which is such a busy time of the year for educators. It would have been helpful to start this process a little earlier in the school year. Also notice that more scaffolding and formative feedback on the lessons earlier in the project would have supported more of the lessons meeting the quality standard set in our OER quality framework evaluation tool. And finally, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we received was that it would have been helpful to have an exemplar from the start of the project to help the educators better understand what they should be aiming for. Thank you for taking the time to learn about our OER development project. We hope that you find our lessons learned helpful as you consider your own OER development and initiatives. If you have questions or feedback for us, we welcome you to reach out to our team email address shown on the screen, Oregon Open Learning at ode.oregon.gov. Thank you.