Dr. Shelley Fairbairn

Former MIDTESOL Journal lead editor Shelley Fairbairn, Ph.D., is a veteran ESL teacher and a professor in the Drake University School of Education in Des Moines, Iowa. Her teaching foci include preparing pre-service teachers to design effective lesson plans and assessments for K-12 students and empowering both pre- and in-service teachers to meet the needs of multilingual learners through linguistically and culturally responsive practices. Prior to joining the Drake University School of Education faculty, Dr. Fairbairn concurrently taught English as a second language courses for the Drake University International Center and served as a K-12 ESL teacher in two Des Moines area school districts.

Dr. Fairbairn’s international experience includes three years of teaching English as a foreign language in Jakarta, Indonesia and one year of teaching ESL and ESL certificate courses at the Regional Language Centre in Singapore. She has conducted teacher professional development sessions and workshops in Belize, China, Canada, and the U.S., focused on linguistic differentiation of instruction, assessment, and grading. Her scholarly work has focused primarily on effective assessment and instructional practices for multilingual learners, but more recent publications focused on faculty self-care practices.

Her workshop is entitled “Weaving Hope through Academic Access: Linguistic Differentiation for K-12 Teachers," a how-to for differentiation across five levels of English proficiency