What current limitations do we face in our educational system when it comes to data collection about students with limited or interrupted formal education (or SLIFE students)? How can project-based learning and group work help support SLIFE students and their classmates so they can better learn from one another? What are a few steps educators can take to be more equitable and mindful of SLIFE students in instruction and assessments?

We discuss these questions and much more with Orly Klapholz. Orly's expertise includes Special Education and second language acquisition with specialized training in Orton Gillingham curricula. She has extensive experience teaching multilingual students, particularly those with limited or interrupted formal education, and has presented her research at numerous conferences and trainings. In 2021, she co-founded Inlier Learning with Merary Martinez-Cobian, taking a tech-forward approach to creating integrated solutions for the multilingual population.

As is the case with most of our guests, we learned about Orly’s work through a member of our ELL Community. If you have an idea for a topic or guest for a future highest aspirations episode, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.