News

North Central ESD (NCESD) is offering several GLAD® trainings this year to support the needs of school districts across the region, including Early Learning, Elementary, and Secondary trainings. View upcoming trainings here!

NCESD is proud to have seven GLAD® Trainers within the agency – all certified by the National Training Center at Orange County’s Department of Education. These trainers have an average of 30 years experience in the classroom from pre-school to adult education, and are certified in early learning, elementary, and secondary.

While curricula and standards (Common Core, Content-specific, and Grade Level) tell teachers what to teach, GLAD® shows teachers how to teach. It uses demonstration, real-time modeling, and research to give teachers a structure to follow and strategies to employ. The GLAD® philosophy is teach to the highest and scaffold for the neediest. All students have access to grade level materials, and those that are at their individual level.

Recently, NCESD trainers completed a GLAD® training in Manson School District in a third-grade classroom and included teachers from Brewster, Tonasket, Cascade, and Lake Chelan. In this short week of instruction teachers saw students develop voice, practice responsible decision-making, problem solving, and other social emotional competencies as they worked in teams and individually.

Students were properly using vocabulary like philanthropy, industrialization, advocate, and more. This is because GLAD® strategies support all learners through poetry, chants, graphic organizers, pictorial input charts, color-coding, repetition, intentional questioning, formative assessment, cooperative learning, family involvement, choice, connections, and celebrations. The training showed how children’s life experience, language and culture are valued and integrated into learning.

With priorities across Washington state including Early Learning and Dual Language access, NCESD GLAD® trainers are in a unique position to provide training and support to teachers across the region.
Early Learning GLAD® is one of two specialty areas of certification offered through the National Training Center. At the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, there were only 11 certified Early Learning trainers across the nation – three of which are right here at NCESD sharing their expertise with pre-K, transitional kindergarten, and early learning centers.

The second speciality area of certification for trainers is GLAD® in Español. While NCESD’s bilingual trainers are not certified in this area yet, certification is under consideration in order to best support the Spanish language instruction teachers in the region. This is increasingly more important considering the initiative of the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Chris Reykdal, that all students will have access to some sort of dual language education by the year 2032.

GLAD® is more than “a training” and not “something” a teacher does. NCESD provides ongoing support and coaching to its teacher participants once they are in their own classrooms. GLAD strategies offer practice and feedback for teachers, in the moment, with their own students and ignites teachers with renewed enthusiasm for teaching.

If this is something you are interested in for your educators, please contact the Language Acquisition Cooperative coordinator, Cyndy Valdez at 509-665-2610 or email today.

Project GLAD® (Guided Language Acquisition Design) originated in California at the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) and focuses on effective instruction that allows for universal access to content and language.

Project GLAD® trainings are taught by certified GLAD® Trainers and start with the GLAD® Foundations where participants spend 12 hours researching and learning about the theory behind language acquisition, culture, and brain research as they apply to children and adolescents. During this part of the training, teachers learn about many of the carefully cultivated set of over 70 instructional strategies designed to make lessons more comprehensible and engaging for students.
After the foundational training, a teacher participates in Demonstration Week alongside others. During this multi-day training, the group of trainee teachers observe the strategies studied, and many, many more. During this part of the training, the morning is spent in the classroom where a GLAD® trainer is modeling the strategies while teaching a super condensed six-week unit of study, and a second GLAD® trainer is in the back of the room coaching the teachers; discussing what strategies are being used, how they help all students, and how they pertain particularly to multilingual learners. The afternoons, then, are spent reviewing, answering questions, and creating teacher materials to use in their own classrooms.