Today’s increasingly-interconnected digital landscape offers a multitude of options for professional development. The field of education is no exception. Now more than ever before, teachers are leveraging online resources to build, strengthen, and refine their practices in the classroom. This is especially true for those tasked with reaching marginalized students with special needs.

Creating a Cooperative ELL Community is an ongoing project reflecting months of collaboration between students, teachers, and administrators across two continents. Since the beginning, our collective goal has been to design a teachers’ manual that takes a gender-sensitive, strength-based, trauma-informed approach to ELL education within the context of collaborative learning.

What you see here is the product of our efforts. It is structured to serve as a dynamic, interactive, and accessible resource. Our hope is that it positively informs and reinforces pedagogical strategies while introducing new research-based methods that can be implemented in the classroom to great success. The impact this could have on English language learners and teachers is bound to be substantial.