In this piece, a teacher educator and two secondary teachers describe how they implemented the Learners' Lives as Curriculum model (Weinstein, 2004) with adolescent English language learners using a unit from a pilot secondary curriculum titled Lives Unfolding (Weinstein & Cloud, 2007). They discuss the development and adaptation of the Names unit and how their work around this theme transformed their classrooms into participatory communities of successful and highly motivated English learners.