Transcript
1 turns · 21 min[upbeat music] Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Boucher, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. [upbeat music] Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. I'm really glad you are here today. I wanna start by painting a picture that I think a lot of you are going to recognize. It is Sunday evening. School starts in a week, or maybe it already started. You sit down to plan your ELL lessons, and you open a blank document, and you stare at it. You have your roster in front of you. You know your students are at different levels. You have the groups you're working with. You know what the district says you should be teaching, and you have absolutely no idea where to actually begin. A lot of different places you could begin, right? There's a lot of different paths you could take. So maybe you do what most of us do, and what I definitely did for a long time in my teaching. I went onto the internet to search for something, or maybe I go-- now you'd go to AI, find something, Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers. Maybe you open a drive that you have from last year and try to see if something pops out. And what happens is you end up with a collection of things that might work, maybe a great vocabulary activity here, or a reading passage there, or a writing prompt that looks pretty promising. But here is the thing, those things do not build on each other. Each lesson is essentially starting over, and your students are not building language. They are experiencing a series of disconnected moments that feel like learning, but are not producing the kind of growth you know they are capable of. So today, I want to take you from that to show you a completely different approach. And maybe you're already doing things like this. Maybe you're moved past that style of teaching or of lesson planning where you're, you know, starting fresh every night. I hope so. But if you're not, we wanna get you there. We don't want this to be a constant thought in the back of your head of, "What am I teaching tomorrow? What do my students actually need?" We wanna give you a simple framework for planning your ELL lessons two to four weeks at a time. We need to create connection within our lessons, not standalone learning. And the beauty is, this isn't complicated, but if you start to incorporate this, it will change everything about how your instruction feels and what it produces. So let's dive in. Now, before I give you the framework, I want to name what is actually happening when ELL lesson planning feels like starting from scratch every single time. What's happening is a lot of times ELL teachers are planning horizontally, one lesson at a time, one skill at a time. Monday is vocabulary, Tuesday is reading, Wednesday
Episode notes
In Episode 216 of the Equipping ELLs podcast, Beth Vaucher addresses the Sunday evening reality most ELL teachers know well — sitting in front of a blank document with a roster of students at different levels and absolutely no idea where to begin. Most teachers default to collecting disconnected resources that feel productive in the moment but produce no lasting language growth because nothing builds on anything else. This episode offers a completely different approach.
Beth opens by naming the core problem with how most ELL lesson planning happens: horizontal planning. One skill per day, one topic per week, one vocabulary set that disappears as soon as the next one arrives. Language does not build that way. Language is acquired through repeated, varied exposure to the same vocabulary and structures in meaningful context over time — and horizontal planning produces the opposite of that.
The framework Beth introduces has four stages that work together to create connected, purposeful instruction across two to four weeks. Stage one is knowing your students — not through test scores from months ago but through real-time observation. Beth simplifies this to three questions: what language stage is each group at, which domain shows the biggest gap, and what language function are students struggling with most. She names the language function question as the one most commonly missing