The Center for Multilingual-learner Education, Research and Innovative Teaching (MERIT) at The University of Georgia offers a 30-hour, interactive, foundational professional learning institute focused on a collaborative, conversation-based pedagogy and its application in classrooms.

This institute will introduce teachers to:

• The linguistics of second language learning

• Strategies for integrating language goals into content teaching

• Tools for encouraging collaborative conversations

• Ways to make content and language standards real and relevant for all learners while maintaining complexity

• Our Online Professional Learning Platform

The power of this system is that it provides a structure for teachers to integrate focused language goals with rigorous content instruction, rather than creating "one more thing" that you have to find the time for. The Instructional Conversation (IC) System is a "way of teaching" and conceptualizing teaching and learning that positively impacts student language development and opens the space for formative assessment and differentiation. To get a better idea of what we are talking about, the research base behind ICs, and what an IC looks like, take a few minutes to view:

• A short video example of a real classroom enacting an IC. As you watch, notice the kinds of academic and social language that the students are using. Also, note that this is a mixed ability group with ELs (including one child who arrived in the US with no English only 4 months before this video was filmed):

  • Short Video Example of an Instructional Conversation (IC)

• A 30-minute video with an overview of the Instructional Conversation System:

  • Instructional Conversation Overview (IC)

• An interview of students talking about what they gain from ICs and how they perceive IC lessons impact their learning:

  • Students talk about Instructional Conversations