August 26, 2024
To benefit English Learners and, in fact, all students, how can state and local educational agencies (SEAs and LEAs) begin to reorient systems to coherently support teachers in delivering quality oral opportunities to learn? Researchers at WestEd and the National Research & Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners suggest focusing on (a) growing teachers’ abilities to engage students in deeply learning concepts through talking and on (b) systemically supporting the adoption of formative assessment processes that allow evidence of such oral progress to drive improvements to instruction.
Prioritize Teacher Education
To deepen expertise at scale in teachers serving English Learners, the National Research & Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners recently published Six Key Ways Teacher Developers Can Support Educators Who Work With English Learners. Teacher educators can select components from six modules to use as courses or professional learning sessions. Among other things, the modules recommend making “critical dialogic interaction” or “quality interactions” a central part of teacher coursework.
In a similar effort to build educator capacity at scale to support multilingual learners and English Learners in reaching their full potential, the Nevada Department of Education (NDE)—in partnership with the Region 15 Comprehensive Center (R15CC)—recently made the professional course EDU 288: Foundations for Teaching Multilingual Learners available to Nevada educators statewide through the Nevada system of higher education.
What began as a canvas course developed by the NDE, WestEd, and R15CC for teachers and teacher educators has since been piloted and repeatedly refined by the NDE through the continuous improvement process that was based on user and facilitator feedback. Today, more than 300 Nevada teachers representing three quarters of all Nevada school districts have taken the course.
“We applaud the department for having partnered with its LEAs and Truckee Meadows Community College to create sustainable systems of EL instructional support and continued learning,” noted Sandra Leu Bonanno, who led R15CC in contributing content expertise, tool development support, and thought partnership to the course and its subsequent iterations.
Indications from an internal review and external evaluation show that the course is being well received. For example, some 90 percent of the first cohort of EDU 288 participants reported having a greater understanding of
- an asset-based approach to teaching multilingual learners and
- a functional approach to language instruction.
Through participant survey data, one high school math teacher stated, “I’m hoping to use what I’ve learned in this course to better provide high quality education for my multilingual learners and improve how I think about writing my lesson plans. I’m also hoping to be more aware of my students’ assets, backgrounds, and experiences to become a better teacher for each of my students.”
Next Steps: The NDE, WestEd, and R15CC also created an observational protocol with guidance for LEA and school leaders to provide feedback of related instructional support for teachers.
Related Resources for State and Local Educational Agencies
- Nevada’s Strengths-Based, Research-Based Approach to Supporting English Language Learners and Multilingual Learners
- Supporting Integrated English Learner Student Instruction: A Guide to Assess Professional Learning Needs, created by the Regional Educational Laboratory West (REL West) and R15CC, includes a Teacher Self-Reflection Tool and a Classroom Observation Tool, and it outlines a 10-step process for aligning professional learning decisions with data collected from these tools.
- This webinar series, produced by the New Mexico Public Education Department and the Region 13 Comprehensive Center, addresses the ways educators can support multilingual and English Learner students within the context of distance learning.
On the Horizon: Some Western states are now collaborating around how to structure processes to support the implementation of formative assessments. This collaboration is occurring through a new community of practice (CoP) run by R15CC. The CoP will benefit from forthcoming learning from California’s new OPTEL tool.
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