Which Tools and Resources are Available to Help Me Differentiate Instruction and Assessment for Students Learning English?

How do I use the Specialized Support Profiles?

Specialists can create a Specialized Support Profile for their students. Specialists can indicate if a student needs support in Reading, Writing, Language, Math, or Self-Directed Learning Foundations. Once a specialist does this, project and math teachers receive automatic recommendations for which students may benefit from being assigned a differentiated support resource that targets one of the Foundations categories.

As a teacher, you can view the Specialized Support Profile of any student that is in at least one of your classes.

Teachers and specialists can see how one another is planning and implementing supports for each student.

Teachers and specialists can easily access key reference data (e.g., MAP data, student progress in Projects/Units) to help identify appropriate supports and challenges.

How do I use the Specialist’s Hub?

Only users with the Specialist role have access to the Specialist’s Hub. The Specialist’s Hub provides additional features designed to meet the specific needs of support specialists, such as supporting caseload management based on individual student needs.

How do I assign resources and activities to students from the Plans tab?

In order to make use of these scaffolds and differentiated resources, teachers can use the Learner’s Tab to place EL students in a group for differentiated resource assignments or assign existing resources in Math Units or teacher-created resources to Learner’s Tab groups.

Executing the technical steps to set up groups in the Learner’s Tab enables the deployment of tagged resources and activities to the right students at the right time. 

The Projects in the Summit Learning Base Curriculum offer resources that have been tagged as supports for specific student needs. In projects, these Resources and Activities have an orange hand icon next to them and are intended for targeted assignment. Scaffolds intended to support Reading, Writing, and Language should all be considered for targeted assignment for students learning English. The Scaffolds are tagged by specific domain to avoid over scaffolding, for example, language proficiency assessment data may show that certain English Learners are developing Foundations in Reading, and Writing, but no longer require scaffolding for Language (aka Speaking and Listening). 

Learners Tab: How do I group students in the Learners Tab

You can use the Learners tab to group students by their previous Cognitive Skill scores, Focus Area data, or MAP scores. You can also group your students by Foundational Skills, including Language, Math, Reading, Self-Direction, and Writing. There are two approaches that can be taken with regard to grouping students who are receiving Special Education support through the Learner’s Tab.

• Ensure that you have created Foundations groups for all of the domains: Language, Mathematics, Reading, Self-Direction, and Writing. Assign students to domains for which they require scaffolding to participate at grade level. 
• Alternatively, you may choose to set up Custom Groups and assign differentiated resources and activities to each level.

Once students are grouped together in the Learners Tab, you can tag and assign resources for those groups.

Assigning Differentiated Resources: How do I use Differentiated Resources & Activities in Projects & Math Units?

There are multiple places within the platform where you can assign differentiated resources to specific students or groups of students:

1. On the Overview page in the Differentiated Resources section
2. On the Plans page in the Differentiated Resources section
3. In the Assign Project/Math Unit pop-up window on Step 3: Differentiate Resources

When assigning differentiated resources, you will automatically receive recommendations for which students may benefit from a differentiated support resource. These are based on the groups you’ve created in Learners Tab, or the learning needs that an educational specialist has identified in a students’ Specialized Support Profile.

Notebooks: How do I use the Text-to-Speech and Voice Typing tools?

Every Notebook includes Text-to-Speech and Voice Typing tools to support the needs of diverse learners. 

Where can I mark students as English Learners?

Marking a student as an English Learner increases the efficiency of customized focus area resources and enables content assessments to be taken in a language other than English.

How do I edit and add or remove resources from Focus Areas?

You can edit the title, description, and key terms of the focus area. You can also add resources under a Focus Area's introductory materials or objectives.

How do I add translations for Content Assessment Questions?

Some content assessments have been translated into Spanish, but not all. Schools have the ability to add translations in any language. Once all questions and answers have been translated, a content assessment can be assigned to a student marked as an EL, and the translated assessment will be saved for future assignments to all students marked as an EL.

Platform admins can enable text-to-speech on assessments to support the needs of diverse learners.

This adjustment is for students who require shorter content assessments (such as students learning English). The number of assessment questions can be reduced to 7, 8, or 9 questions. Mastery requires getting no more than 2 questions wrong for standard courses and no more than 3 questions wrong on AP courses. 

This feature is only available to platform admins.

A curated selection of research-based resources that teachers can use as scaffolds for classroom tasks for all learners-- especially those with Foundations needs. English language learners will particularly benefit from the research-based tools and strategies found in the Reading, Writing, Language, and Literacy in Mathematics sections of the Resource Bank. Some resources are instructional strategies and others are resources that can be customized, saved, and uploaded to the Summit Learning Platform for targeted assignment. 

Some students benefit from additional tools to help them browse and work independently online. This resource includes several embedded accessibility tools and Chrome extensions that can be particularly useful for improving the productivity and independence of diverse learners, including students with disabilities, students struggling with reading, and English Language Learners.