Huntington Educators Present at Stony Brook Workshop

Huntington UFSD faculty members Judy Goris Moroff and Angela Berner recently presented at a professional development workshop at Stony Brook University attended by about 70 educators in all.

The topic of the presentation was “The Oracy Imperative: Scaffolding Language Development for ELLs.” The workshop took place at the Wang Center’s Lecture Hall 1 on the Stony Brook campus.

The two hour workshop was organized by Stony Brook’s MA TESOL program. (Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.)

"Judy and Angela provided a truly outstanding Professional Development workshop focused on scaffolds provided to ELLs to encourage language use in the classroom. Current students and alumni of the Stony Brook University TESOL program, as well as faculty, got to attend the workshop and learn ways to foster the growth of Academic English in our classrooms, no matter our students' level of English. The importance of ritualistic activities and how impactful strategies such as "Novel Ideas Only" or "Reading in Four Voices" could be, was made clear as attendees got to participate in group activities and practice these strategies firsthand during the workshop. Attendees, both current teachers and pre-service teachers, truly felt like they walked away from the workshop with a wide variety of tools to add to their teacher toolkits and felt confident with implementing these strategies in their classrooms right away. We are beyond appreciative of Judy and Angela for coming to visit the Stony Brook University TESOL program and we look forward to our continued partnership with them."

Ms. Moroff is Huntington UFSD’s director of world languages, English as a new language and bilingual programs. Ms. Berner has served in a variety of roles from elementary classroom teacher to coordinator of elementary English language arts and director of the district’s teacher center.

“This professional development session will give teachers a practical ‘taste’ of how to scaffold instruction for English learners while maintaining high expectations,” states a workshop overview. “Participants will review an exemplar lesson that incorporates scaffolds designed to support oral language development and provide meaningful access to rigorous content. They will leave with strategies that balance high challenges with high support, empowering them to create classrooms where multilingual learners can thrive both academically and linguistically.”

Participants in this week’s workshop were granted two CTLE (Continuing Teacher & Leader Education) hours.