The Ellevation office was abuzz last week with our first Strategy Summit! We were thrilled to host our five Dream Team Teachers from across the country. These talented and ambitious educators will be authoring effective student activities that classroom teachers can use to improve the language and learning outcomes for English language learners. Launching in the 2015-16 school year, these activities will be incorporated into our new Instructional Strategies feature and offered through Ellevation InClass.  

	Monica Grezlik  Monica is a fellow New Englander, joining us from Connecticut. She teaches K-8 English language learners in the Bristol School District. She has been teaching ELL for 10 years and has also taught ELL at the high school level.
	Michael Maiello Michael traveled the farthest to be here in Boston as he joins us from Carson City, NV where he’s been an elementary ELL teacher for four years.
	Marysa Sheren  Marysa traveled north to Boston from Miami Senior High School in Florida, where she has served as Literacy Coach. This August, she will begin graduate school in Education Policy at Harvard.
	Michele Szoka  Michele is a K-2 teacher at a bilingual elementary school in Phillipsburg, NJ. She has been working with English language learners for 6 years.
	Mandy Turkiendorf  Mandy joins us from the School District of Milton in Wisconsin. After teaching 7th grade language arts and literature for nine years, she is now the district 7-12 ELL teacher and coordinator.

Ellevation’s Instructional Strategies feature will allow teachers to quickly find, save, and recommend specific activities for use with students or classrooms, and will include helpful tips for adapting activities to different proficiency levels and content areas. Combined with Ellevation’s ELL student data platform, Instructional Strategies can be part of a student’s learning record within Ellevation, and provide a pathway toward English language proficiency and grade-level content mastery for all ELLs.

During the Strategy Summit, we dug deep into the instructional strategies framework and collaborated on ways to maximize its potential as tools for classroom teachers. As veteran ESL teachers and coaches, the Dream Team understands that all teachers need to be teachers of language. They are excited to scale up their impact to have these high quality activities reach thousands of educators, and millions of ELLs.

Looking ahead, the Dream Team will be working over the next six weeks authoring dozens of activities for our Instructional Strategies feature. If you would like to provide feedback, sign up today and stay involved in the work to help classroom teachers better support ELLs.