Multilingual-learner Education, Research, and Innovative Teaching - MERIT

We are very grateful to all the participants from Gwinnett County who joined us this week for our Summer 2026 IC Foundational Institute where we spent about 30 hours together, virtually and in-person, learning about collaborative, conversation-based instruction!

Shout out to our NSF grant partners— the amazing Meadowcreek Team! Thank you for all of your hard work and collaboration this year dedicated to making science accessible for multilingual learners in high school classrooms! Wishing you a wonderful summer!

Join us on June 22nd-25th for our Summer 2026 IC Foundational Institute #1 — a 4-day (30-hour), interactive, foundational professional learning Institute focused on a collaborative, conversation-based pedagogy and its application in classrooms.

All educators are invited! Register with the link in bio!

This month, participants from Gwinnett, Cherokee, Walker, and Fulton joined us for an engaging, interactive one-day workshop!
Our “Integrating Language Goals into Content Instruction” workshop moves beyond traditional vocabulary lists and helps educators uncover the Key Language Uses embedded within content standards. Participants explore how students are expected to Inform, Narrate, Explain, and Argue, and identify the specific language functions and features students must master to demonstrate true conceptual understanding.
If this sounds like something you or your school would be interested in, head to our bio to learn more!

Paula Mellom and Rebecca Hixon from MERIT, alongside their Meadowcreek High School colleagues from Gwinnett County Public Schools— Robin Osborn (Ecology Teacher), Wren Cheatum (Chemistry Teacher), and KeShaun White (ESOL Teacher)— recently conducted an interactive workshop at the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) national conference where they presented on materials developed and lessons learned from their NSF grant looking how science teachers and ESOL teachers can collaborate to design lessons that engage multilingual learners in science and engineering practices (SEPs) through the Instructional Conversation (IC) Pedagogy.

We would like to thank the 9 participants who joined us for the Accelerating Multilingual Academic Language
Development One-Day Workshop — where we spent 8 hours together engaging in and learning about collaborative, conversation-based instruction to:
• better meet the needs of Multilingual learners
• integrate Multilingual learners productively into content classrooms
• actively develop Multilingual learners’ academic language skills

If this sounds like something you, or your school, would be interested in, please follow the link in our bio for more information on our upcoming workshops and institutes this summer!

Join us this Summer for IC Foundational Institutes — a 30 hour 4-day, interactive, foundational professional learning Institute focused on a collaborative, conversation-based pedagogy, and its application in classrooms. Choose from two sessions: June 22–25 or July 13–16, 2026.

All educators are invited! Register with the link in bio!

MERIT is excited to be collaborating with University of Georgia’s Child Development Lab (CDL) at McPhaul to explore applying the Instructional Conversation (IC) Pedagogy in early learning settings to support CDL teachers in lifting the linguistic, cognitive, and social emotional development of their students.

Join us on May 12th for an interactive one-day workshop that will introduce educators to the language “functions” embedded in disciplinary content standards. This interactive session moves beyond vocabulary lists and offers educators the opportunity to identify what Key Language Uses (e.g. Inform, Narrate, Explain, Argue) are embedded in the content standards and what associated Language Functions and Features the standards ask students to master to demonstrate their conceptual understanding of content.

Register from the link in bio!

Join us next month for MERIT’s Accelerating Multilingual-learner Academic Language Development Workshop!

This one-day workshop offers the opportunity to explore and practice research-based principles and techniques for collaborative, conversation-based instruction to:
better meet the needs of Multilingual Learners
integrate Multilingual Learners productively into content classrooms
actively develop Multilingual Learners’ academic language skills

All PK-12 Educators are welcome!