Where Do I Go? What Do I Do? Training Educators of Rural English Learners to Provide Accessible Instruction and Assessment

This chapter describes a federally-funded grant project to train West Virginia educators and parents on accessible assessment and instruction for K-12 English learners. West Virginia is a rural state, but individual districts and schools may not be rural. Districts are large and represent an entire county. Some districts may have only one itinerant English learner teacher. Some teachers in rural areas work in isolated locations. For these reasons, the project developed on demand training for general educators so that they could better instruct English learners who enroll in their schools on short notice. Teachers can take the online training when they need it, regardless of their geographic location in the state. Similarly, a flexible tool to support parent participation in decisions about accessible assessment and instruction for their child was created to be useful to parents from a variety of backgrounds and home languages. This chapter details the educational participants and landscape of West Virginia to situate the distinctive nuances of ‘rural schools’ in West Virginia. It then describes the design and development of teacher professional development modules and a parent-educator toolkit. Adaptations created to make the materials relevant and meaningful during a pandemic are also described.