Instruction as Advocacy

By Amber Ingram
NJTESOL/NJBE Middle School Special Interest Group Representative

As a District Instructional Coach, I spend a majority of my time traveling from building to building in conversation with building administrators, teachers, paraprofessionals, students and their families. Concerns around the instruction of multilingual students often feels trapped in a silo, but, I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to know, many of them are the same. Multilingual students, in addition to the obstacles around the journey of learning English, deal with similar struggles non-ML children face. They want to play Roblox. They want to make friends. They don’t want to clean their rooms. And above all else, they want to matter.

Mattering, as defined by Dr. Bettina Love (2019), is “the internal desire we all have for freedom, joy, restorative justice… and to matter to ourselves, our community, our family, and our country”. In schools that is a personal connection that students have to their learning space and the people who inhabit it. I am always moved by the great lengths that educators utilize to cultivate spaces for our society’s most vulnerable, however it’s important that educators don’t get stuck in the stage of loving to forgo the urgency of learning.

Of course, we want to ensure that students feel safe in their educational spaces. We know from Maslow’s Hierarchy that students need to have their physiological needs met in order to address their desire to learn. However, in the mission of truly moving multilingual students towards indicators of success (i.e. using academic language across multiple languages, analyzing and synthesizing texts, supporting their opinions with evidence etc.), educators have to move past the work of ensuring students belong and move to towards the work of ensuring that students truly matter. We can do this by giving them access to intentional, specific, and explicit instruction.

Rigorous instruction, yes, addresses grade level content and language standards, but it also allows students to interact with their classmates in authentic ways. Often, we exempt MLs from lessons or overscaffold tasks with the intention of protecting our students. In reality, we are shielding them from sharpening the tools they need to understand this vast world. By maintaining a challenge for our multilingual students, we are telling them that they are worthy of knowledge. We are bridging linguistic and cultural gaps, while cultivating their innate penchant for curiosity, empathy and analytical thinking. In order to do this, educators must:

• Operate from an Asset-Based Approach! Use what students have in their language tool box to unlock connections to new content. This can include but is not limited to using cognates, anticipating misconceptions from L1 to L2 and connecting with student interest and culture.
• Facilitate Metacognition! As you are introducing and practicing a skill, explain to students how it connects to the next. Building schema assists in retention. Language doesn’t happen in one lesson, it is actively constructed through application and practice.
• Don’t Over Scaffold! Data-informed instructional decisions ensure that students are being taught at their level. Remind students that there will be some frustration or uneasiness when learning something new, especially a WHOLE LANGUAGE.

In short, multilingual students DESERVE to be taught with the same level of intention and rigor that any other student receives. We as educators should be pushing students towards independence, not holding them back. Kids want to know and understand as much as they can about the world and it is our duty to facilitate those pathways to knowledge.

Further Reading:

Burleson, W. (2005). Developing creativity, motivation, and self-actualization with learning systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 63(4-5), 436- 451.

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.

Pebley, A. R., &Sastry, N. (2018). Neighborhoods, poverty, and children’s well-being. In The Inequality Reader (pp. 182-195). Routledge.