Notes from the Field

CSAA experts and invited guests blog on core areas of our work.

June 23, 2024

Got Curriculum? English Language Development Teachers and the Search for High-Quality Materials

In this post, Christine Snyder, with Laura Bennett, explore strategies for ensuring that English learner students are receiving instruction that is based on culturally sustaining curriculum that is aligned with English language development standards. 

Attention teachers, administrators, and all who are invested in improving equity and access for linguistically gifted students. To what extent do you agree with the following statement?

Content teachers are usually provided with curriculum that makes explicit how to effectively integrate English Language Development (ELD) into content area instruction.

And how about this one?

Designated ELD teachers are usually provided with high-quality curriculum for their courses.

You may not be surprised that in a WestEd webinar on April 25, 69 percent of participants selected “disagree” or “strongly disagree” for both statements. I was not surprised either. In fact, my hunch that those would be the results led me to develop “Curriculum Development for English Language Development: Planning Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Instruction, ” a webinar that presented a model for developing and supplementing curriculum for culturally sustaining and responsive ELD instruction.

I had known that pairing “curriculum” and “English Language Development” in the title would ring a bell for others like me—educators who had spent years trying to design affirming, engaging language development instruction for multilingual and English language (EL) learners. One such educator is my expert colleague Laura Bennett, Multilingual Learner Lead at San Dieguito High School Academy in Encinitas, California. She and I have been thought partners for each other since early last year, and I reached out to her to talk more about her perspective on the challenge of providing EL students with culturally sustaining curriculum that is aligned with ELD standards.

In this first of a three-part blog series, Laura and I share our perspectives on this challenge—and, most importantly, on how educators can work in communities of practice to address the challenge.

The Need: Collaborative Sensemaking

Teachers need materials, but materials are not in themselves the answer. The California English Learner (EL) Roadmap (CDE, 2023) reminds California educators that to give students what they deserve—assets-oriented, needs-responsive schools and high-quality instruction—systemwide conditions must support effectiveness. For teachers of EL students, those conditions include having materials aligned to the state’s ELD standards (CDE, 2012) to help teachers deliver on the promises of the California education code: for EL students to receive both designated ELD instruction (i.e., protected time during the school day for focused instruction in the ELD standards) and ELD integrated with content area instruction (i.e., rigorous, grade-level content area instruction in which the ELD standards are used in tandem with content standards).

California teachers must use the materials adopted by LEAs but for grades 9–12, for example, there is no statewide-adopted curriculum for designated ELD. And even when we have curriculum, we can (and must) supplement it to meet students’ needs. Teachers across the United States report that their EL students are inadequately served by their instructional materials (Wynn & Zahner, 2022) and a widespread lack of representation in curricula means teachers must enhance instructional materials so that EL students see themselves and feel affirmed in classrooms (CDE, 2020). But unless teachers are supported in a coherent system, the onus for that complex curriculum work—the supplementing and the enhancing—can fall on the shoulders of the supplementers and enhancers: the teachers in the classroom.

But who has time to do extensive solo backwards planning, beginning with what our students need to know, then determining what evidence is needed to assess learning progress, and finally planning instruction to ensure that learning? And even though teachers in California are fortunate to have robust ELD standards and a coherent vision for language and literacy development in our English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework (CDE, 2015), these standards are not self-explanatory—because no standards are. Using them requires collaborative, interpretive work—teacher sensemaking—to create common understandings of the ELD standards and how to develop standards-aligned instruction.

I promise you, Grade 7 EL students can meet the ELD standards for analyzing text structure (PII.A.1) and cohesive devices (PII.A.2). But I promise you it cannot happen for all our linguistically gifted students if the instructional design model entails all teachers planning day-to-day, in isolation. It is lonely work, guzzling coffee during late-night planning sessions, eternally falling forward into the next day’s Google slides rather than leaning sturdily backward, tugging on the deep roots of the ELD standards in a well-designed unit with clear learning goals.

Laura’s Insights: A Shift in Mindset

The model I proposed in my webinar was grounded in recent work from RAND (Wang et al., 2024) outlining what researchers typically mean when they talk about alignment and coherence. In brief, a coherent instructional system is typically described as one in which all components—including professional development, teacher evaluation practices, and more—send mutually reinforcing messages about what and how to teach. Standards, instructional materials, and assessments are aligned within that system (Kaufman et al., 2023).

Teacher collaboration guidance is usually provided by the school or district to guide teachers’ use of—and focus on—peer collaboration time. A professional learning community (PLC) or common planning time are examples of peer collaboration.

Who does that aligning? All of us working together. If alignment occurs within a supportive, coherent system, the responsibility for that alignment does not fall solely on individual teachers. And when it comes to the complex, interpretive work of using the ELD standards to design or supplement curriculum, collaborating in professional learning communities is not optional. It is a requirement.

Laura describes her perspective on the concept of a coherent instructional system that supports curriculum design for EL students as follows:

As teachers, we want to support our students, but we often find ourselves without the time or resources to consistently and effectively plan for the specific language needs of our multilingual learners. In my work supporting teachers in both designated and integrated ELD classrooms, I have observed that the most effective way to build teacher capacity is by intentionally carving out collaborative planning time in which content area teachers sit alongside a language specialist. This can take place in a variety of ways, from a co-teaching model in biology, to ELA and social studies teachers collaborating during release days, to language specialist push-in support for a content area classroom with scheduled time afterward for the specialist and content area teacher to reflect, to collegial “observation clubs” in which teachers co-observe a colleague and then they all gather to reflect together on their practice.

Laura gives the following explanation for how those collegial conversations can be the rich soil from which to grow curriculum for high-quality, culturally sustaining ELD instruction:

District leaders, administrators, and teachers all want and need instructional materials that will meet the needs of our diverse multilingual learners…. But there is no magic bullet or perfect instructional materials for all our learners. The task is to create a shift in mindset from looking for the “right” materials to building teacher capacity to understand the language needs of their students—in both integrated and designated settings. It is about research-based best practices and a shift in mindset from wanting a magic curriculum to pursuing the goal of understanding and embedding language development into all classes. It is about supporting content teachers to develop clear learning and language goals grounded in content and language standards. It is about using language proficiency descriptors as a way for teachers to set student expectations and ensure that grading practices center progress and learning.

If you are humbled by all that wisdom, I was too. Which proves the point: We are better together. Curriculum work is too complex to do alone. To learn more about what research and practitioner expertise can tell us about doing this work together, check back for our next blog post. Until then, I offer a call to action:

  • As I pointed out earlier, 69 percent of participants in my webinar disagreed with the assertion that teachers have the curriculum they need to deliver high-quality, designated or integrated ELD. Take some time to reflect on the curriculum used for designated or integrated ELD in your context. If you are an educator who is looking for curriculum support, can you start a conversation with one colleague about collaborating in one of the ways Laura outlined?

 

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