Best practices are intended to support multilingual learners (MLs) in all classes, no matter their proficiency level. These strategies are expected to be used by all teachers within lessons, assignments, and assessments to support MLs and all learners. Best practices are strategies that educators can quickly implement within daily instruction, activities, and classroom assessments.

Description

A graphic organizer is a visual and graphic display that depicts the relationships between facts, terms, and ideas within a learning task. Graphic organizers are also sometimes referred to as knowledge maps, concept maps, story maps, cognitive organizers, advance organizers, or concept diagrams.

Foldables are multi-dimensional graphic organizers that can be used for skills reinforcement, practice, and/or information organizing. Not only do Foldables reinforce skills and strategies essential for reading success, they provide a kinesthetic tool for organizing and analyzing learning. 

Examples:

• Venn diagrams
• Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM)
  • PWIM is beneficial for all students of varying English proficiency levels.
• illustrations of writing before students write

	Teacher	Student
	The teacher models the use of the graphic organizer or foldable to demonstrate the how and why to support the organizational process.	The student will draw a graphic organizer or create a foldable to record their responses.

	Teacher	Student
	The teacher explains how graphic organizers and foldables are beneficial to organize ideas/facts/opinions for contributing to a discussion and plan for writing.  "Use this graphic organizer in the planning stage of your writing."	"Can I use this graphic organizer to help me?"  "What are the steps? Do you have a picture of the steps? Is there a video?"

Recommended Domain(s)	Recommended Level(s)
Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing	All levels