Featured Speakers:
- Lee Hartman, Senior Program Associate, WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
All right, let’s get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome. This is the 29th session of our Leading Together webinar series. Thank you all very much for joining us. Today’s topic, Beyond Language Development, Designing Quality Opportunities to Learn for Newcomer Students. Our featured speaker today is Lee Hartman, senior program associate at WestEd. His work focuses on our Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative, which works to improve systems and supports teachers’ development of expertise in providing students high-challenge learning opportunities. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host. And now I’d like to take a moment to introduce WestEd.
As a nonpartisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with schools, districts and state leaders, policy makers, and others, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. And now I’d like to pass the mic to Lee. All right, Lee, you’re up.
Lee Hartman:
Hi, everyone, and good afternoon. My name is Lee Hartman. I’m here today to talk to you about newcomers, kind of going beyond language development to designing these quality opportunities for them to learn. A little bit about me, as Danny said, I work for the Quality Teaching for English Learner Initiative here at WestEd, but I’m still a teacher at heart. So I did all of my teaching in a newcomer classroom, secondary level, in a school that was designed specifically for newcomers. And I wanna talk a little bit today about my journey and kind of what happened to me with QTEL, and my understanding of when I went from being a language teacher to being a teacher that taught literature and how to communicate and how to really change students’ lives.
So that’s what I mean by going beyond language development. So I found this quote, and I know that this quote is a little bit dated. It’s actually over 20 years old, but the reason that I chose it is because this is still kind of what’s happening, what I’m seeing when I’m working with newcomer teachers and with newcomer students around the country, that we’re still looking at second language acquisition, what we’re at least calling development now, right, as being more about skills that are acquired as opposed to the use of language in real life and making meaning and being powerful for students and learning opportunities. So I’m sorry if I’m going really fast.
I’ve just got so much that I wanna talk about and so much that I wanna say in just a short time, but I’m gonna try to make it through it all. So just to kind of set it up, and I see a lot in the chat that a lot of you are multilingual directors at the Department of Education, for the state, for the office, and supporting teachers and things like that, and some newcomer teachers. And so what we see when we go around from districts when I’m supporting teachers is what’s happening in these newcomer classes, in these ELD classes, is that newcomers are often in what we call a “no learning opportunity” zone, where they’re really being supported, but the level of challenge or the level of rigor that we see in these classrooms is just not there.
And so that’s what we’re gonna focus on today. We’re also seeing materials that lack quality coherence and meaning that aren’t really connecting with students. And I’m gonna try to show you an example of what I mean about that in a minute. We also see that students are sitting together, but they’re not working together, right? There’s not true collaboration happening in the newcomer classroom. And that students are using L1 to help them, as they should, right, with learning and learning in a new language, but kind of indiscriminately and willy-nilly. So the reason that this is so important is because as we know, newcomers is not the biggest group of English learners in the United States.
Our biggest group is those that are classified as long-term English learners. But those long-term English learners were at once newcomers. So if we don’t work with students in intellectually rigorous ways when they very first come to us as newcomers, we condemn them into this category of long-term. And most of us on this call already know what that brings with it, the lack of opportunities and how we box students in for their educational careers and many times can affect their entire lives. So what we’re gonna look for today is changing that mindset, shifting away from that. I’m gonna talk about that as kind of the meat of my talk today, how we can shift from a “no learning opportunity” zone to an apprenticeship zone.
And if you see this quadrant here, that’s high challenge with high support. So normally in newcomer classrooms, we have the high support there, right? The students are being supported. What we need is to kind of raise that challenge for them a little bit so that they can appropriate or make their own the practices that we’re trying to teach them. So this by definition has to go beyond language, right? Because we’re teaching language practices, but always in service to disciplinary practices. Teaching the students something through supporting them and making sure that they can do and participate in what we would like for them to do and to learn. So that kind of sets that up there.
And then I see a lot, like I said before in the chat, different levels of titles and responsibilities, in the classroom, out of the classroom, at the district level, maybe even, I think I saw there, sorry, it’s gone by really fast, in Kansas, right, at the state level. So I wanted to offer this idea as well as that seeing all of this that we’re talking about, right, going beyond language development, as happening in a system that’s inside a system that’s inside a system, right? This is how, this is our ecological perspective of what education should be for all students and especially for those that need the most support like newcomers.
So a lot of times we tend to focus on where the student is, which you see right here in the middle, in that microsystem. And of course we do because that’s our North Star, that’s who we’re here to help is our newcomer student. We focus on the classroom in that microsystem, the teacher, making sure that we have the right books in there, they’re making sure all the schedules are correct, because the learner is there in the microsystem. And then a lot of times we think the newcomers aren’t learning, it’s the fault of the microsystem. But what we’re offering here today is to look at that microsystem as inside other systems, not necessarily underneath as it might kind of look here, but more nested inside.
So you see there that microsystem, and then just beyond that microsystem is the meso-system, where you have the schools, the families, the neighborhood outside of the classroom. So you see there all of those arrows going back and forth, it’s a little bit busy, it’s because there’s so many relationships going back and forth inside these systems here. But I’d like for you to really take notice of the lines that separate one system from the other. If you’ll notice they’re perforated here, they’re porous, and the gray arrows that you see at the top are bi-directional, right? They go both ways. Because what we want is for the microsystem to influence the meso-system, and the meso-system to influence the microsystem.
So as you’re thinking about where your position is, what your responsibility is as an educator who supports newcomers, kind of think which system you’re in and how you can influence, and what we talk about today might be useful for you, to influence not only where you are in your system, but also the other systems. Or even outside of that meso-system in the larger system, which we’re calling here the exo-system, which is where state mandates live, right? District policy. So a lot of times we see education as the state tells the district, the district tells the school, the school tells the principal, the principal tells the teacher, the teacher makes it all the way down to the student, right? Kind of a top-down approach.
What we’re looking at here is the interconnections of how these systems work together, always with the student in the center, not at the bottom. And then of course that macrosystem is just society at large. ‘Cause that’s really what we’re here for is to change society, right? And to change students’ lives, not just give them another way of expressing themselves in a new language, which is just a bonus, right? So I wanted to talk about some shifts, and these are described more in the book that you see here. But these I thought had a lot to do with what’s happening in the language development classes.
What I’m seeing as I enter those classes and work with those teachers is that in order for this to happen and for these wonderful systems to work together, it all sounds so good on paper, what we need as educators, no matter what system that we find ourselves in, is to begin to shift, to begin to see the education of newcomers in a different way. So I wanted to give you a few of those just to kind of get you thinking and then show you an example of what that might look like in real life if I have time here.
So if you think about like more traditional ways of learning language, we believe that there are prerequisites for engaging in really deep and high challenge work like we were talking about before. So it’s, my students have to be ready and then I can give them the challenging work, right? So when I very first started teaching newcomers, it was, someone told me your ELD class is a vocabulary class. You’re just pumping their heads full of words, and then next year they’re gonna use those words to do actual things in life. And what we found is that especially at the secondary level, we don’t have time to do that, right? We need to start learning and we believe learning happens in participation.
So we don’t have to wait for students to be ready. We give them these opportunities or we create the learning opportunities for them so that they develop. So development is not a prerequisite. It is caused by giving them these opportunities to engage in activity that they can’t do on their own, right? Not just memorizing long lists of words and doing lots of grammatical tasks and worksheets and things like that, but something that they’re using the language for to be involved in real work. Another shift that’s needed, especially for newcomers, is seeing language as something that is learned as a process of acquiring just structures and functions as it says here, right? So we memorize these words. We’re doing adjectives today.
We’re doing present progressive today, right, for the sake of the structure. I always think about this. My Spanish teacher told me that she, when she very first learned English, she learned the phrase, “My tailor is rich,” right? She was acquiring this about her tailor. Then she said she came to the United States and she couldn’t speak to anyone because she never went to a tailor, right? It’s just language for language sake. Rather, we need to look at language as action. It’s a way that we get things accomplished. And of course, when we start to learn a new language and we’re learning to do things in this new language, the language is not perfect at the beginning, but we can still get so much accomplished with imperfect language that will come later.
So when working with newcomer teachers, I’m always encouraging to look at what the students can do, not exactly in the language that they’re producing because the language will come. And then again, and this is something that I see a lot at the secondary level with newcomers is using simplified or simplistic text. So that doesn’t mean that they have to be reading Shakespeare on day one, right? There’s a lot of big ideas that come in text that are not long and that are not, have lots and lots of vocabulary that students might know. But we mean simplistic text, like texts that are stripped down of big ideas and things that students can do with them, which rob them of these opportunities.
It brings the challenge down, and they’re once again in that “no learning” zone area that we’re trying to avoid. So I always think about this in, and I’ve seen this, right, in secondary classrooms where students are reading books like see Spot run, run Spot run. But it’s very difficult to know what Spot’s motivation is for running there. What’s going through spots head? Who is he running from? Who is he running to? How could I do an analysis of Spot? How could I compare him to other characters in literature? It’s very hard to do that with a text that doesn’t get me there.
So we wanna move more towards when we’re thinking about curriculum adoptions and what type of texts that we’re using in the classroom, complex materials and not be afraid to give students chances to figure out what’s happening with the language so that they can make meaning of a text that really speaks to who they are as people, their identities, their concerns, what they’re seeing happening in the world around them so that we can help apprentice them into being more critical thinkers. We’ll talk about this later, but now more than ever, right, in the world we live in now more than ever, we need critical thinkers, not just people who are regurgitating grammar and language that we’re giving them to learn.
And then of course, we see, we wanna shift from seeing language as a linear progression, right? We learn past tense today, we learn present tense tomorrow, we learn future tense the next day. And at the end, we know that we’ve learned it because we take a test and we make 100. And once we make 100 on the present tense, we get to do the present progressive tense, right? This is not how language works in real life, so it’s not how language should work in the ELD classroom and with newcomers anyway. So obviously if we’re giving them rich texts with high challenge learning opportunities, they’re going to need all types of language, and they’re gonna look for the language, and we need to help them look for the language that they need to do the thing that we’re asking them to do, right?
To get something accomplished in real life, as we said before. So that of course means that language is nonlinear. It’s messy and it’s complex and that’s okay. And sometimes like we said before, it’s imperfect. But what we’re looking to do is make meaning, not just learn a language. Because if I know a language, but I have nothing to say in it, why does it matter that I know this language, right? So you’ll see, we call this spiraling. And I know that word is used a lot in education and people say, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, spiraling.” But really deliberate spiraling to where we’re hitting these ideas and these big actions and practices in the disciplines again and again.
And the language becomes more solidified and more solidified as we use it. And students develop those language practices over time. And anyone who’s worked with newcomers knows how that works and how amazing it is to actually see it happen. And then we’re trying to move away from focusing on accuracy, to where, input output, right? I teach them something, they regurgitate it, some kind of language structure and I tell them, “You got it right, you got it wrong, try again.” Each individual student to having students work and really value collaboration together with these comprehensive actions so that they can build them together first.
So like I said, way at the beginning, this high challenge type of pedagogy is, it’s an apprenticeship model where appropriation is the last step, right? When I make something my own, what I did with my teachers and my peers in my classroom, now I can do by myself. But that doesn’t happen in one day, right? So we have to value students’ joint actions first and then it becomes more and more individualized as they go through. So those are just a few of the shifts that are needed to make sure that all those beautiful things are happening in all of those systems to get our students to a high challenge, high support pedagogy.
So I wanted to show an example of what that might look like in practice is the family tree, right? So in a newcomer classroom, it’s like the second week, we all do a family tree and students memorize papa is father, mama is mother, and primo is cousin and padrastro is stepfather, right? All of these different things that they have to learn, and then they say, “My family has blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then once we know the family, we can move on and we can learn the weather or whatever that is. Well, we wrote a curriculum where we tried to really take those shifts into mind and show what the students could do with language as they are appropriating it and using it to do something, in this case, in ELA and literature.
So we had the family tree, but we went on and we offered them the text “Hairs” in its original from Sandra Cisneros. If you haven’t read it, I know it’s popular in elementary and secondary and all of them because it’s a short little vignette, but it’s full of a lot of things. And what Sandra Cisneros does in this vignette is she uses metaphor and simile to really get at how her family is, who her family is, how they make her feel, who she is as a person, what her identity is, right? So we have the students go through, and I don’t know if you can see it here, but they compare, they identify what the author is comparing.
In this case, she compares the hair of each of her family members to really talk about their personality. So she says, “Papa’s hair is like a broom, it sticks straight up,” right? And the kids draw a picture of this, but they’re using that family vocabulary to do something in ELA, which in this case is figurative language. Then they go through many tasks in the lesson, but at the end, they talk about their own families, but they go on merely describing them to also using metaphor and simile to describe their families and one special person in their family, just like Sandra Cisneros did it in “Hairs,” which is her mom in the second paragraph of the vignette.
So we offer them these learning opportunities that go beyond just regurgitating the vocabulary of who your family is. And of course, students are all over the place because their families are all over the place, and they wanna use different words and they’re looking up different things and we don’t go in order as it were, but we get there with lots of support and they’re able to write, you saw in that last slide, with a lot of structure given by the teacher, but the ideas are the students always trusting that the language will come later. So this idea is based on, Levenwenger’s here, peripheral but legitimate participation. And this is important for everyone who’s learning anything that’s new, but especially for multilingual learners.
And I would say, especially for newcomer multilingual learners, right? On the periphery, but their participation is legitimate. For where they are, they’re doing something legitimate. So what we want to do is take them from this periphery where I’m giving them all of these supports to describe their families, to understand literature, to use literary devices in reading and in their own writing. They’re on the periphery right now. We wanna bring them closer and closer to the middle, right? To appropriating it and making it their own. So we do this through scaffolding, routines, and multiple authentic opportunities.
So as you’re making these types of decisions of what you’re gonna teach in your classroom, what kind of curriculum you’re gonna buy, what kinds of professional learning your teachers are going to be exposed to, think about that, right? How do we get students to appropriate more and more, not just the language, but also the disciplinary practices that we’re going for. So I just add this too, because when that happens, what happened with me in my experience is that I would go to PDs like this and I would hear these ideas and they’re all well and good, right? And we would spend all day talking about a theory, right?
So all these shifts that I’m talking about, the ecological approach, the high challenge, high support apprenticeship zone, that all sounds good on paper, right? If we just live in this theory bubble and it never makes it to the center where that student was in that ecological framework, it’s useless, right? It’s just, it’s fun, I get, well, for me, right? I’m a pedagogy nerd, but I have coffee, I talk to my colleagues about this, but it’s useless because it’s not changing anybody’s life, it’s never making it to the students. And if we think of it the other way and we go to practice without ever thinking about theory, which unfortunately, this is what I see a lot in newcomer pedagogy as well, is sometimes they’re not even given a curriculum, teachers, and they’re just going online and they’re pulling things and they’re not really knowing what to do and they don’t have this ecological perspective or a framework with lens to filter everything through that they’re reading online or they’re watching even on TikTok now, right?
You get a dangerous practice, which is just everywhere and sometimes has competing theories of how students learn and how language is developed just because it’s not driven by theory. So what we’re looking for is empowered practice, right, as we’re making these decisions to make sure that these shifts can happen. And hopefully, it was very fast, but that example that you saw, the Cisneros lesson, is taking that theory of I believe my kids can do it if I support them well enough and making it happen in practice to our students in their second month of an ELA classroom in the United States are writing vignettes using figurative language to describe people in places that are important to them and represent who they are as a person, which is a pretty big job, right?
So theory and practice always together because what happens is like our friend here. A lot of time what we get is we get ladders thrown at us in webinars and professional learning like this, and if we don’t really understand how to use them, it doesn’t really help us at all ’cause we can see our friend here, he has everything he needs to go over that wall, but his problem is he doesn’t understand how ladders work. So it’s very important that we understand these shifts that are needed so that we can make them happen, and only when they happen does pedagogy change, do the lives of our students change and does that microsystem begin to change for the learner.
So I would say with all of these shifts and everything I’ve been talking about so quickly is the biggest shift, the most important shift that needs to happen is teachers teach and students learn. So the medium of a webinar is not the best place to learn, right? It’s teachers need to shift to offering students quality opportunities to learn, and that begins with creating and designing them, right? Inviting them into the engagement, into the high challenge, high support apprenticeship zone classroom and then they begin to develop as the teacher supports them. So it’s not just me from the front telling you what to do and then telling you if you’re right or wrong, but it is you taking ownership of your own learning and the language will come.
So if there’s one thing that you remember from this webinar today, it’s that we gotta stop teaching and we gotta start creating opportunities to learn where the students work through it themselves, always supported by us. Because, I picked some of these very quickly, these headlines, but we all know that the world that our newcomers are living in is changing very, very rapidly for them, and we don’t have time for them to just learn grammar and focus on language. We need to give them agency, we need to give them voice. A lot of people are speaking for them right now and they need to speak for themselves.
So even now it is more vital, it is more important, all of offering these authentic learning opportunities for them to be able to become a part of society and speak for themselves. So that’s pretty much my spiel. I think I did it, right? I still have three minutes and 48 seconds. Just a quick note, I’ll actually be in Santa Cruz and Seal Beach this summer if you’re still looking for some professional learning opportunities. We do have institutes, QTEL, the Quality Teaching for English Learner Initiative that I told you about. In Santa Cruz and Seal Beach, California and Austin, Texas, you can see the dates here. It’s all on our website if you’re interested. If you have any questions, you can contact me after the webinar.
Danny Torres:
Great, thank you, Lee. We do have a minute or two. We have a couple of questions in the Q&A. Are you open to responding?
Lee Hartman:
Sure.
Danny Torres:
We have two from Luis Rodriguez. He asks, “How would you approach supporting teachers of not only newcomers, but all learners of English as an additional language to understand that learning a new language is not a linear process and that it is an individual process?”
Lee Hartman:
Yeah, so I think everything that I’ve talked about today, we say it’s good for all students, especially good for multilingual learners, and I would say especially, especially good for newcomers, but it applies to anyone learning a new language or anyone just learning, even in their first language. And what I would say to teachers, it’s really hard, I think, for teachers to argue with something when they see a student able to do it. That’s what happened in my case, is I was willing to try something, this way of teaching, and when my students actually began to talk with each other, it was very difficult for me to stop.
So I think if you can get teachers at least willing to see it and try it, then you can capitalize on that going forward.
Danny Torres:
Great, thank you, Lee. We have another question from Christina Nelson. She’s curious what your feelings are for the curriculum that has been created for newcomers, especially at the secondary level. Personally, she sees a lot of what you mentioned, teaching language for the sake of learning language rather than using it as a vehicle for deep learning. Anything else to add to that?
Lee Hartman:
Yeah, so I mean, I will say, so what I’ve been doing when I work with teachers, when that happens, and I won’t name any names of publishers or anything like that, what I showed you is something that we wrote from scratch, so it wasn’t a big publisher or anything like that, is sometimes a colleague who’s probably in my audience right now, she calls it not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Like there are things in there that we can use, like the family tree, I could use it, but then we just take it one extra level to giving them something a little bit more rigorous, a little bit more challenging, with a little bit more meaning making.
So sometimes there’s things in the curriculum, but we always say the curriculum is never complete. And sometimes they’ll have a good text, right? They just don’t have the students collaborating around that text. So you can still keep the text and just change it to collaborative activities, to engaging activities. It depends really on the publisher, but I do think that one of the biggest shifts too, it wasn’t a slide of mine, is that like, I had to tell, I remember the day I said, I’m not an ESL teacher. That’s what we called ourselves back then. I’m not a language teacher. I’m teaching real things.
Having that lens when you look through your curriculum is where’s the real thing I can teach my students, the real disciplinary practice.
Danny Torres:
Right, great. Thank you so much, Lee. I think we’re at time. So I wanna thank you again for just a great session, and thank you to all our participants for joining us today. Feel free to reach out to Lee via email if you have any questions about the work he shared today. You can reach out to Lee at [email protected]. And if you’d like to learn more about our QTEL initiative and the summer institutes that Lee mentioned, you can visit us online at qtel.wested.org. You can check out our past recordings of the Leading Together webinar series. We’ve covered a range of topics, including literacy, generative AI, assessment, special education, and mathematics. And our next three sessions are on June 2nd, June 15th and June 16th.
And we’re focused on three different topics, including a new mathematics course for third and fourth year high school students. We’re gonna be addressing infant and toddler care and early headstart. And we’ll also focus on reading and writing in middle and high school. To access our Leading Together webinar series recordings or to register for upcoming sessions, you can visit us online at wested.org/leading-together. And we just released our latest Leading Voices podcast episode today. That episode focuses on creating a strong K-5 literacy culture. You can listen to our Leading Voices podcast online at wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast. And you can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music and other platforms.
And finally, if you’re interested in learning more about WestEd in general and staying connected with us, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates about our work. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe. Or you can scan that QR code here displayed on the screen. And you can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. And again, thank you, Lee. We’ll see you all next time.
Lee Hartman:
Thank you.