K-2 Spanish Bilingual Teacher

Title: K-2 Spanish Bilingual Teacher

Location: Northside, Chicago

Reports To: Principal

Salary: Starting at $65,000, commensurate with experience

Employee Type: Regular Full Time

Start Date: November

Distinctive Schools creates diverse, joyful, welcoming communities rooted in social justice and rigorous learning. We support all learners to be engaged, curious, and to achieve their full potential. Our students become confident advocates, creative problem-solvers, and collaborative leaders.

Distinctive teachers cultivate a love for learning in every student through strong relationships, high expectations, and a belief that all students can achieve great things in school and beyond. Teachers have a laser focus on instruction that engages learners and provides multiple opportunities for application of learned content. All teachers engage in individual and team lesson internalization aligned to grade-level standards based on student language proficiency levels.

Checks for understanding, student work, and assessments are used to make real-time and planned adjustments and deep review of student work to address gaps in instruction. Teachers have strong content knowledge in the subject-matter they teach in order to recognize, understand and respond to the content problems. At Distinctive, teachers grow through cycles of practice, feedback, practice, and feedback. Teachers build classroom communities with strong routines, rituals, and management practices that maximize time for instruction.

Teachers maintain effective and ongoing communication on progress with students and families.

Additionally, the Bilingual Teacher will have a dedicated classroom and provide personalized academic and language instruction to English Learners in both English and the native language (Spanish), sheltered instruction, English Language Development, and ESL strategies across content areas. A Distinctive Schools Bilingual Teacher must be a passionate advocate for biliteracy and demonstrate a commitment to supporting students in their development of the language skills and subject matter needed to be productive classroom citizens.

• Maintain a student-centered perspective in decision making
• Believe that all students can learn and can achieve great things
• Contribute to the equity work of the campus and network and engage in culturally responsive decision making
• Build and foster a culture of belonging through positive and strong relationships with students, families, and staff
• Cultivate a strengths-based, equity focused mindset
• Foster positive climate and culture
• Serve as a positive role model
• Believe that a students’ languages and cultures are a tremendous strength and asset

• Implement the DS Academic and Bilingual Model
• Administer tests and language assessments for the purpose of evaluating students' language ability
• Implement the WIDA Standards in daily lessons
• Analyze culturally & linguistically diverse (CLD) student work
• Provide direct Bilingual and ESL services and instruction to a classroom of students
• Provide ESL grades for students served
• Develop and deliver lesson plans that utilize appropriate instructional techniques that enable Spanish proficient students to overcome barriers that impede equal participation by these students in the district's instructional programs
• Deliver Spanish Language Arts and ESL curriculum
• Deliver strong Instruction where students hold the cognitive lift and do the thinking during the lesson and are deeply engaged in the learning
• Utilize a variety of instructional methodologies and curriculum resources geared specifically towards CLD students
• Assist and support the administration of the required English Language Proficiency screeners and assessments
• Assist with the administration of the ACCESS test and support administration of state required assessments to CLD learners
• Provide consistent opportunities for all students to work on grade-appropriate assignments using the core curriculum, resources, and strategies with frequent checks for understanding
• Commit to student-centered, learning that puts every student in the driver’s…