Multilingual Learners

In an era of global climate change, intertwined with social and ecological predation, there is growing recognition of the importance of building socially, environmentally, culturally pluralistic, just and sustainable futures. Yet many of the calls for reform and discourses around sustainability are authored and defined through top-down approaches, by those who have power, privilege, and cognitive authority, and excludes the voices, identities, and epistemologies of those in the margins.

Teachers’ confidence and facility with strategies that position and support students who are English learners (ELs) as active participants in middle grades mathematics classrooms are key to facilitating ELs’ mathematics learning. The Visual Access to Mathematics (VAM) project developed and studied teacher professional development (PD) focused on linguistically-responsive teaching to facilitate ELs’ mathematical problem solving and discourse.

School, home, and neighborhoods make large amounts of garbage every day. In answering the driving question of the unit, “What happens to our garbage?”, students investigate a series of subquestions (e.g., “What is that smell?” and “What causes changes in the properties of garbage materials?”) that address a targeted set of physical science and life science performance expectations. Over nine weeks of instruction, students develop a coherent understanding of the structure and properties of matter to make sense of the anchoring phenomenon and to answer the driving question.

School, home, and neighborhoods make large amounts of garbage every day. In answering the driving question of the unit, “What happens to our garbage?”, students investigate a series of subquestions (e.g., “What is that smell?” and “What causes changes in the properties of garbage materials?”) that address a targeted set of physical science and life science performance expectations. Over nine weeks of instruction, students develop a coherent understanding of the structure and properties of matter to make sense of the anchoring phenomenon and to answer the driving question.

Design Technology and Engineering Education (DTEEL) for bilingual English Learner Students is a K-5th grade curriculum focused on language development through engineering design and problem solving. Each grade level includes a series of units focused on different aspects of engineering: Materials, Structures, Mechanisms, and Work & Energy. The last two grade levels add units that synthesize these engineering components with a Systems focus on Systems. Each lesson includes instructional strategies to strategically integrate language use and engineering content.

This article describes one mathematics professional development program designed to support all K-5 students' engagement in productive mathematical discussions, in particular emergent multilingual learners.

Malzahn, K., Sztajn, P., & Heck, D. (October, 2019). Talk is the ticket to teaching math to English learners. The Learning Professional, 40(5).

Many mathematics teachers agree that engaging students in high quality discourse is important for their conceptual learning, but successfully promoting such discourse in elementary classrooms—with attention to the needs of every learner—can be a challenge. Activating Math Talk tackles this challenge by bringing practical, math-specific, productive discourse techniques that are applicable to any lesson or curriculum.

Conventional assessment analysis of student results, referred to as rubric‐based assessments (RBA), has emphasized numeric scores as the primary way of communicating information to teachers about their students’ learning. In this light, rethinking and reflecting on not only how scores are generated but also what analyses are done with them to inform classroom practices is of utmost importance.

Using findings from a 4‐year research and development effort, we propose an updated model of sheltered instruction for science classrooms that leverages the opportunities provided by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to better support multilingual learners in middle and high school science.

In this paper we use practice theory, with its focus on the interplay of structure and agency, to theorize about teacher engagement in professional learning and teacher enactment of pedagogical practices as an alternative to framing implementation research in terms of program adherence and fidelity of implementation. Practice theory allowed us to reconsider assumptions about characteristics of effective teacher professional learning, and to rethink our own notions of agency.