Caslon Publishing and Consulting for Language Educators

CONNECTIONS -- COLLABORATION -- CREATIVITY -- CHANGE

Welcome to the Caslon Community.

Our mission is to support the professional development of K-12 administrators and teachers so every educator can make informed language in education decisions for all of their students, particularly bilingual learners, including those with special needs. Administrators, teachers, and policymakers have serious questions about how to...

• Support academic English language and literacy development across the curriculum for all students, not only for ELLs but also for English speakers
• Implement comprehensible standards-driven, content-area instruction for bilingual learners in general education programs and classes, given consideration of students’ English language proficiency levels, first language literacy, and prior schooling
• Promote multilingualism and multilingual literacies for all students to the greatest degree possible
• Ensure that English language learners with special needs get appropriate response to intervention
• Provide defensible evidence of bilingual learners’ growth relative to content and language goals
• Ensure shared responsibility for ELLs’ language and literacy development among general education teachers and administrators and bilingual/ESL specialists.

The specific questions that administrators and teachers have reflect the decisions they need to make. Some questions are about the bigger picture: federal, state, and local policies and accountability requirements; curriculum, instruction, and assessment; appropriate programming (development, evaluation, and restructuring); movement of students (from identification to placement to exiting to monitoring to proficiency); and meaningful professional development. Other questions are about classroom strategies, how students learn in two languages, linking the school and community, addressing challenges that arise, and advocacy.

Our vision is to create a Caslon Community in which networks of professional educators communicate with each other to answer these kinds of questions, and together address the language in education challenges that students, teachers, and administrators face in linguistically and culturally diverse schools. We share resources and strategies, collaborate in knowledge creation and flow, and advance the understanding that linguistic and cultural diversity are resources to be developed. We work to ensure that language education programs (English-medium, bilingual, foreign language, and heritage language) are pedagogically-sound, well-implemented, and deliver results.

As a member of the Caslon Community, you can access free professional development resources that we (Caslon authors) have developed and use to facilitate professional development for K-12 administrators and teachers in districts and schools across the county. These PD resources include powerpoint presentations from conferences where we have shared our work, handouts from workshops or courses that we have organized, and activities or strategies that we have used. Many of these PD resources are organized around the books that we publish in response to needs we identify in the field, and are intended to enhance teachers’ and administrators engagement with these books. Since we are all active in the field, we continually add to this site in response to the questions and challenges we identify in schools and districts across the country. Please use these resources, adapt them, let us know how they work for you, and turn to us for on-line or on-site consulting if the need arises. And invite your friends to join the Caslon Community.

When everyone shares responsibility for educating English language learners, ELLs can and do succeed in school.

Click here to view a directory of our PD Resources.

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns please feel free to contactus@caslonpublishing.com.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Freeman Field

Director, Language Education Division, Caslon Publishing and Consulting