For this final piece in The Century Foundation’s focus group series with teachers of English learners (ELs), we discuss the evolving practices around literacy. We asked teachers to reflect on how their practices have changed in recent years, both in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and in the country’s ongoing shift away from Readers Workshop and “whole language” literacy instruction.
Recently, I was teaching an undergraduate class on linguistic diversity for future elementary school teachers. We were discussing a classic elementary school practice: the read-aloud. The read-aloud is a simple exercise—a teacher reads a text aloud, as students follow along with their own copies of the book. It helps students to recognize words and hear their pronunciation and provides an opportunity for them to interact with their teacher about word meanings. One of my students chimed in that she had never seen her mentor teacher do a read-aloud. In fact, her mentor teacher used a YouTube video of a read aloud as a read aloud. I was horrified, only to find out that resorting to online resources was not unique to her mentor teacher. In fact, an increasing amount of teachers use YouTube for their lessons; there is a seemingly endless list of channels and read-alouds on YouTube. A read aloud via YouTube takes away the teacher–student interactions, the ability to pause and encourage student participation, and the basic engagement of the classroom teacher with her/his group of students.
There is no doubt that since the pandemic, technology has continued to play a major role in our K–12 educational institutions, and not always for the better. Resorting to YouTube for read-alouds is but one example, and this increasing reliance on technology in the classroom may actually be undermining teachers’ efforts at instruction: teachers report struggling to get students to put down their phones and ear buds and focus on the lesson at hand. One teacher shared,
I get to these juniors and it’s like torture for them to put their phone and their earbuds away for a half an hour to listen to some ACT prep things. It’s like they can’t help it almost because they’re so reliant on having that technology and it’s just such a big part of their life…. It’s like we have this huge reliance on technology, but also it’s a replacement for social interaction.
Absent a district-wide or school policy, teachers are tasked with finding creative ways to entice students to put away their phones. Teachers should be encouraged to go back to basics in some cases, too, and stick to an old-fashioned read aloud instead of a video on YouTube.
As massive as the pandemic’s impacts on classroom methods have been, teachers report that other developments are also significantly shifting their literacy instruction. Above all, the 2022 Sold a Story podcast by Emily Hanford pushed long-popular but now debunked instruction materials published by Lucy Calkins and Readers’ Workshop largely out of favor. In the intervening years, dozens of states have passed legislation directing schools and teachers to use instructional methods that actually align with the research consensus on how children best learn to read—known as the “Science of Reading.” (Late last year, two Massachusetts mothers even brought a lawsuit against Heinemenn, Readers’ Workshop’s parent publishing company, alleging that the methods were “deceptive” and “defective.”)
Many veteran educators in our focus groups described this change as a pendulum swing after many years of arguments over the best way to teach children to read. This latest push has shifted schools to research-backed literacy methods that include more explicit instruction on fundamental literacy skills such as phonics. With this revision to literacy instruction, it is imperative that these methods include the specific skills English Learners need to succeed, including oracy and fluency measures, for example.
Curriculum Design: Where Are the English Learners?
No matter what sort of literacy program their state, district, or school prescribes, one thing was clear: from California to Massachusetts, from novices to veterans, our teachers reported that English learners were not a high priority in the general education English Language Arts classroom. Many of our teachers remarked with disappointment and disbelief that, in a country with such a large number of multilingual learners, support for their instruction was nearly always relegated to a little text box in teacher guides.
When we asked teachers what they would do with a magic wand, one mentioned changing this text box to accommodate the needs and specific strategies for English learners. She said,
Gen Ed [General education] curriculum for English learners [needs] to be better accommodated for English learners like in the big Pearson or Savvas major publishing companies. There’s [only] a little box in the unit overview for your English learners….which means that everyone across the nation is reinventing the wheel for how to scaffold curriculum for our fastest-growing population in the country. We need publishing companies to provide more robust guidance and specific strategies for English learners so that the onus doesn’t fall on teachers to individually invent curricula.
Another teacher shared,
My only problem is that the curriculum is always designed with, again, the monolingual in mind. There’s a little box on a side with a checkbox saying, for multilingual students, the visuals, sentence frames, cognates, the three go-to things…. Teaching ELs is not as simple as cognates, sentence frames, and visuals. I have a problem with us always having to modify a curriculum that is not designed for our multilingual brains.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that EdReports, a company that ranks curriculum to ensure high-quality materials for students, does not currently have a tool to assess materials for EL accessibility. It should. That could be a game changer for future curriculum development.
Translanguaging: A Change in Traditional Language Learning Practices
Many English-dominant adults may have memories of past French or Spanish classes where we were not allowed to use English. These practices are changing for ELs. For example, in the traditional U.S. English as a Second Language classroom, students were discouraged, and sometimes punished, for using their non-English home languages. While that may still be a practice in some parts of the country, translanguaging—the practice of employing one’s whole linguistic repertoire—is gaining traction, particularly in dual-language classrooms. In a classroom that celebrates translanguaging, a teacher will acknowledge and validate the student’s response when he/she uses their native language for a term that they may not yet know in English. The teacher may repeat the word in English so the student can make the connection.
One focus group teacher shared the impact of this practice at her school. She said,
Translanguaging is a huge difference. I know that in my departments early on, they used to have a “rana de vergüenza,” [frog of shame] that if you were caught speaking English, they would pass the rana.… Whoever had the rana when the bell rang would then clean up the room.… Now that, all of that is gone…and it’s celebrating the linguistic repertoire students bring and their community cultural wealth.
Similarly, this year, DC Public Schools created Learning Lab classrooms in each of their eight dual-language elementary schools. The focus has been translanguaging, and giving teachers specific instructional “micro-moves,” such as cross-language bridging and tips for helping students with fluency.
Using these practices helps leverage the learners’ skills and access the text. One teacher shared,
We adopted just this year a new science of reading curriculum for literacy from HMH [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]. Previously, we had used Lucy Calkin’s workshop model. Basically, our English learners just did their own curriculum with the ESL teachers. They weren’t expected to follow Calkin’s. This year, though, all students, including our English learners, are expected to access and work with grade-level content. We are putting in scaffolding and modifications so that they can access the text.…The non-ELs are doing a five-paragraph essay about an environmental issue that ties in with the text that we did in this unit. The English learners are [writing] with sentence frames and they’re doing one paragraph. Some are doing two paragraphs…because the expectation is that everyone is working with grade-level text this year, the kids are flying. It’s phenomenal what they can do.
More Than a Support Teacher
Many of the teachers with whom I spoke shared their perspectives of feeling like a support teacher and not valued for their work as teaching English as a second language (ESL). For example, one teacher discussed the importance of recognizing and advocating for ESL as an independent subject. She said,
ESL is its own subject with its own standards. I have been working with the Department of Education in Massachusetts, to give more importance and emphasis to the role of the ESL teacher and what we do, which is different from sheltering the content, which is a misconception a lot of people have.… Mostly general education teachers consider me as someone who’s going to support their work, which is true in part, but I also have my own standards to cover the four domains of language.… We know how important developing the oracy in language learners is for many reasons, but also for developing their reading and writing.
Looking Ahead
How can education leaders respond to the significant concerns teachers raised in our focus groups? First, the more districts and school leaders support their teachers, the more the teachers can focus on what matters most: their students. Second, districts and instructional leaders can help teachers best meet the needs of their students by prioritizing curricula that offer comprehensive supports for EL students. Not all curricula are created equal, and districts need to support the adoption of materials specifically targeted for ELs and/or newcomers, like District 87 in Bloomington, Illinois. This sort of intentional focus on linguistic and cultural equity should also be particularly central in districts and schools’ decisionmaking about obtaining and using learning technology. Finally, instructional leaders need to ensure that Science of Reading implementation does not threaten the focus of promoting ELs’ bilingualism and biliteracy—particularly in dual language immersion programs.
TCF’s focus groups have uncovered valuable insights on the mental health of both students and teachers, the latest trends in teaching literacy, the flexibility of teachers to meet ELs where they are, and their high expectations of these students in the face of adversity. One thing is clear: The teachers of our EL students are dedicated and aim to meet the needs of this unique group of learners. Let’s give them the support they need to do their best. A YouTube video is no substitute.
English Learners Are Being Left Out of Literacy Instruction Reform
For this final piece in The Century Foundation’s focus group series with teachers of English learners (ELs), we discuss the evolving practices around literacy. We asked teachers to reflect on how their practices have changed in recent years, both in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and in the country’s ongoing shift away from Readers Workshop and “whole language” literacy instruction.
Recently, I was teaching an undergraduate class on linguistic diversity for future elementary school teachers. We were discussing a classic elementary school practice: the read-aloud. The read-aloud is a simple exercise—a teacher reads a text aloud, as students follow along with their own copies of the book. It helps students to recognize words and hear their pronunciation and provides an opportunity for them to interact with their teacher about word meanings. One of my students chimed in that she had never seen her mentor teacher do a read-aloud. In fact, her mentor teacher used a YouTube video of a read aloud as a read aloud. I was horrified, only to find out that resorting to online resources was not unique to her mentor teacher. In fact, an increasing amount of teachers use YouTube for their lessons; there is a seemingly endless list of channels and read-alouds on YouTube. A read aloud via YouTube takes away the teacher–student interactions, the ability to pause and encourage student participation, and the basic engagement of the classroom teacher with her/his group of students.
There is no doubt that since the pandemic, technology has continued to play a major role in our K–12 educational institutions, and not always for the better. Resorting to YouTube for read-alouds is but one example, and this increasing reliance on technology in the classroom may actually be undermining teachers’ efforts at instruction: teachers report struggling to get students to put down their phones and ear buds and focus on the lesson at hand. One teacher shared,
I get to these juniors and it’s like torture for them to put their phone and their earbuds away for a half an hour to listen to some ACT prep things. It’s like they can’t help it almost because they’re so reliant on having that technology and it’s just such a big part of their life…. It’s like we have this huge reliance on technology, but also it’s a replacement for social interaction.
Absent a district-wide or school policy, teachers are tasked with finding creative ways to entice students to put away their phones. Teachers should be encouraged to go back to basics in some cases, too, and stick to an old-fashioned read aloud instead of a video on YouTube.
As massive as the pandemic’s impacts on classroom methods have been, teachers report that other developments are also significantly shifting their literacy instruction. Above all, the 2022 Sold a Story podcast by Emily Hanford pushed long-popular but now debunked instruction materials published by Lucy Calkins and Readers’ Workshop largely out of favor. In the intervening years, dozens of states have passed legislation directing schools and teachers to use instructional methods that actually align with the research consensus on how children best learn to read—known as the “Science of Reading.” (Late last year, two Massachusetts mothers even brought a lawsuit against Heinemenn, Readers’ Workshop’s parent publishing company, alleging that the methods were “deceptive” and “defective.”)
Many veteran educators in our focus groups described this change as a pendulum swing after many years of arguments over the best way to teach children to read. This latest push has shifted schools to research-backed literacy methods that include more explicit instruction on fundamental literacy skills such as phonics. With this revision to literacy instruction, it is imperative that these methods include the specific skills English Learners need to succeed, including oracy and fluency measures, for example.
Curriculum Design: Where Are the English Learners?
No matter what sort of literacy program their state, district, or school prescribes, one thing was clear: from California to Massachusetts, from novices to veterans, our teachers reported that English learners were not a high priority in the general education English Language Arts classroom. Many of our teachers remarked with disappointment and disbelief that, in a country with such a large number of multilingual learners, support for their instruction was nearly always relegated to a little text box in teacher guides.
When we asked teachers what they would do with a magic wand, one mentioned changing this text box to accommodate the needs and specific strategies for English learners. She said,
Gen Ed [General education] curriculum for English learners [needs] to be better accommodated for English learners like in the big Pearson or Savvas major publishing companies. There’s [only] a little box in the unit overview for your English learners….which means that everyone across the nation is reinventing the wheel for how to scaffold curriculum for our fastest-growing population in the country. We need publishing companies to provide more robust guidance and specific strategies for English learners so that the onus doesn’t fall on teachers to individually invent curricula.
Another teacher shared,
My only problem is that the curriculum is always designed with, again, the monolingual in mind. There’s a little box on a side with a checkbox saying, for multilingual students, the visuals, sentence frames, cognates, the three go-to things…. Teaching ELs is not as simple as cognates, sentence frames, and visuals. I have a problem with us always having to modify a curriculum that is not designed for our multilingual brains.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that EdReports, a company that ranks curriculum to ensure high-quality materials for students, does not currently have a tool to assess materials for EL accessibility. It should. That could be a game changer for future curriculum development.
Translanguaging: A Change in Traditional Language Learning Practices
Many English-dominant adults may have memories of past French or Spanish classes where we were not allowed to use English. These practices are changing for ELs. For example, in the traditional U.S. English as a Second Language classroom, students were discouraged, and sometimes punished, for using their non-English home languages. While that may still be a practice in some parts of the country, translanguaging—the practice of employing one’s whole linguistic repertoire—is gaining traction, particularly in dual-language classrooms. In a classroom that celebrates translanguaging, a teacher will acknowledge and validate the student’s response when he/she uses their native language for a term that they may not yet know in English. The teacher may repeat the word in English so the student can make the connection.
One focus group teacher shared the impact of this practice at her school. She said,
Translanguaging is a huge difference. I know that in my departments early on, they used to have a “rana de vergüenza,” [frog of shame] that if you were caught speaking English, they would pass the rana.… Whoever had the rana when the bell rang would then clean up the room.… Now that, all of that is gone…and it’s celebrating the linguistic repertoire students bring and their community cultural wealth.
Similarly, this year, DC Public Schools created Learning Lab classrooms in each of their eight dual-language elementary schools. The focus has been translanguaging, and giving teachers specific instructional “micro-moves,” such as cross-language bridging and tips for helping students with fluency.
Using these practices helps leverage the learners’ skills and access the text. One teacher shared,
We adopted just this year a new science of reading curriculum for literacy from HMH [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]. Previously, we had used Lucy Calkin’s workshop model. Basically, our English learners just did their own curriculum with the ESL teachers. They weren’t expected to follow Calkin’s. This year, though, all students, including our English learners, are expected to access and work with grade-level content. We are putting in scaffolding and modifications so that they can access the text.…The non-ELs are doing a five-paragraph essay about an environmental issue that ties in with the text that we did in this unit. The English learners are [writing] with sentence frames and they’re doing one paragraph. Some are doing two paragraphs…because the expectation is that everyone is working with grade-level text this year, the kids are flying. It’s phenomenal what they can do.
More Than a Support Teacher
Many of the teachers with whom I spoke shared their perspectives of feeling like a support teacher and not valued for their work as teaching English as a second language (ESL). For example, one teacher discussed the importance of recognizing and advocating for ESL as an independent subject. She said,
ESL is its own subject with its own standards. I have been working with the Department of Education in Massachusetts, to give more importance and emphasis to the role of the ESL teacher and what we do, which is different from sheltering the content, which is a misconception a lot of people have.… Mostly general education teachers consider me as someone who’s going to support their work, which is true in part, but I also have my own standards to cover the four domains of language.… We know how important developing the oracy in language learners is for many reasons, but also for developing their reading and writing.
Looking Ahead
How can education leaders respond to the significant concerns teachers raised in our focus groups? First, the more districts and school leaders support their teachers, the more the teachers can focus on what matters most: their students. Second, districts and instructional leaders can help teachers best meet the needs of their students by prioritizing curricula that offer comprehensive supports for EL students. Not all curricula are created equal, and districts need to support the adoption of materials specifically targeted for ELs and/or newcomers, like District 87 in Bloomington, Illinois. This sort of intentional focus on linguistic and cultural equity should also be particularly central in districts and schools’ decisionmaking about obtaining and using learning technology. Finally, instructional leaders need to ensure that Science of Reading implementation does not threaten the focus of promoting ELs’ bilingualism and biliteracy—particularly in dual language immersion programs.
TCF’s focus groups have uncovered valuable insights on the mental health of both students and teachers, the latest trends in teaching literacy, the flexibility of teachers to meet ELs where they are, and their high expectations of these students in the face of adversity. One thing is clear: The teachers of our EL students are dedicated and aim to meet the needs of this unique group of learners. Let’s give them the support they need to do their best. A YouTube video is no substitute.