Featured Speakers:
- Silvia Lenhof DeRuvo, Senior Program Associate and Director of Multilingual Learners with Disability Services, WestEd
- Gabriela Mottesi Day, Research Associate, Multilingual Learners with Disability Services, WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
All right, it’s 12 o’clock. Let’s get started. Hello everyone, and welcome to the 28th session of our Leading Together series. In these 30 minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, Finding the Golden Thread for Multilingual Learners with Disabilities. Our featured speakers today are Silvia Lenhof DeRuvo, senior program associate and director of Multilingual Learners with Disability Services at WestEd. And Gabriela Mottesi Day, research associate for Multilingual Learners with Disability Services at WestEd. Thank you all very, very much for joining us.
My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host. Now, I’d like to take just a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan 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, policymakers, and others, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Silvia. Silvia, take it away.
Silvia DeRuvo:
All right, well, welcome. I’m so excited to see so many people showing up in the chat. Well, I’m Silvia DeRuvo. I am a former special educator. I was born in Fresno. I saw Fresno being represented here. I was a special education teacher, primarily in the Central Valley of California, working with multilingual learners with disabilities. And really my teaching experience in the Central Valley and even up in the Roseville area, as well as the fact that I am an English learner, as a child of refugees from my parents who immigrated here after World War II, that really inspired my work around multilingual learners with disabilities and created this passion around this work to support students and families in being able to be successful in our educational systems. So, Gabriela.
Gabriela Mottesi Day:
Yes, hello. Good afternoon or good morning, everyone. As Silvia said, it’s so great to see so many people. My name is Gabriela Mottesi Day. I am a research associate here at WestEd. My background is as a bilingual special education teacher where I worked out in Denver Public Schools, also working with multilingual learners with disabilities. I absolutely loved working with my students, and I’m really grateful to continue getting to research and work at schools and districts on best practices to serve this wonderful population. So, very excited to be here with you all today.
Silvia DeRuvo:
All right, and in our short time today, we’re gonna cover a lot. We’re going to really look at what is the foundation of our work, the Inclusive Pedagogy Framework, and what that is. We’re gonna take an overview of collaborative strategies, and then look at some tools around collaboration and action that Gabriela’s gonna walk us through. We will talk about some upcoming events, and then Danny’s gonna close us out for our time together today. So we have curated for you all a number of resources and handouts for our time together today. The materials at the top, those are three different tools that Gabriela’s going to walk us through, something that you can take away from today and use back at your school sites or in your state. But we did include some more resources. What we mean by the Inclusive Pedagogy Framework, information about our summer professional learning, and then an article that really is very close to our hearts and really drives this work, and it’s by Sara Kangas out of Pennsylvania. You know, “Why Working Apart Doesn’t Work at All.” And that really drives this focus we have on collaboration. So those resources are on the Padlet wall. That QR code will get you there, and Danny is putting the different resources in the chat for you to be able to access it very easily.
Why, you know, the urgency behind our work? We both come from teaching experiences, where we’ve worked with multilingual learners with disabilities, and we understand that there can be a very nuanced approach to providing that appropriate instruction. But what we see nationally is that there still continues to be issues around special education identification. The national data confirms that multilingual learners are both over and underrepresented across the grade levels. In many districts, we find that students in the upper grades are over identified because they’re still struggling and there aren’t many other resources to support them. And then we also often find that students in maybe preschool or kindergarten are underrepresented, because there’s kind of a wait and see approach, or still that vast misconception that students have to be English proficient before we can assess them to see if they have a disability. So we’re seeing that both of those things still persist, and we have students who don’t need special ed services being identified and those who maybe need them not being identified.
But what we are also finding out is that multilingual learners with disabilities have poorer outcomes than their disabled peers. So multilingual learners with disabilities are less likely to graduate with a regular diploma and more likely to drop out than non-identified multilingual learners. We also found in the research that IEPs that really should drive that instruction for a multilingual learner really fall short. And the research found that in evaluating and really scrutinizing IEPs of English learners, it was not clear to those professionals that those students were English learners. And that that is an issue because no scaffolds and supports are being written into those IEPs. Those linguistically appropriate goals are not being written to support them in meeting those IEP goals, the language supports needed to meet those goals.
And then ultimately, as I mentioned, Sara Kangas, what we find is if a student is identified and identified appropriately, their instruction is often very disconnected. It’s very fragmented because they might be learning one strategy in their general ed classroom, and then they go to their ESL classroom and there’s something different going on, and their specially designed instruction looks different, and the students are not able to generalize that instruction. Everyone has a good intention in teaching the student those strategies, but we’re not working together to provide a cohesive instructional approach to meet the need of those learners who really, you know, need all of those things, but need them provided in a cohesive way.
So really, from looking at this data that drives our work, we knew there were very effective things out there, strategies and frameworks, and we thought, “How can we pull this together to support practitioners in meeting the needs of these multilingual learners sitting in their general ed class, in their ESL class, and in their special education services?” And so this Inclusive Pedagogy Framework really is a mindset of inclusion. The research really informs this framework that when we look at collaboration as the umbrella, these conversations need to happen based on what the student might need, what their particular strengths are, what their assets are, what they bring to the table with their second language. How do we then support them in getting access to instruction? Well, that’s through Universal Design for Learning. How do we meet the need of how frequently they need this instruction? Well, that’s through Multi-Tiered System of Support.
And what are those specific strategies that will support them in being successful in any of those different settings or with any of that instruction? And we looked at the high leverage practices for students with disabilities that are, you know, have been really curated and pulled together by the Council for Exceptional Children and the CeDaR Center. And then we looked at the PLUSS Framework, which is a framework that supports language development in any lesson, it’s an overlay over all lessons that support students in developing their English language. So when we look at this approach, we realize, if we are talking to each other and looking at access for all students, the frequency and intensity needed using evidence-based practices, students are going to be successful. And really then learning everyone belongs, everyone has access, and we end up with positive outcomes. So I’m gonna pass the ball to Gabriela and she’s gonna tell us about some of the tools and resources that we’ve used to support this work.
Gabriela Mottesi Day:
Yeah, thanks Silvia. So as we’ve just been talking about, we know that to really effectively support all of our students, including our multilingual learners and our multilingual learners with disabilities, we really have to prioritize working together as cross-disciplinary teams in that intentional collaboration. So on the screen, you see a quote that states, “At the core of successful inclusive pedagogy is teacher collaboration and equitable learning opportunities for all students.” So we know that collaboration is that foundation for our inclusive intentional practices and instructional practices. So today, we really wanna provide an introductory overview of a few collaborative strategies that school teams can use to create those meaningful pathways of support for educators. So while we know that collaboration is critical for all of our students, it is essential for our multilingual learners and duly identified students who are serviced by multiple programs and educators simultaneously.
Historically, we know that these supports for students have been operated in separate silos, right? So to best support our students, we wanna work to shift both our mindset and our common practices to move away from working in isolation, towards collaborating and harnessing the collective expertise of every team member, including ESL teachers, special education teachers, general education teachers, admin, content area professionals, and of course, families and students themselves. So to support this shift from siloed work to true cross-team collaboration, we are gonna be over viewing four overarching collaborative strategies that school teams can use when fostering and creating systems for that effective collaboration. So the four strategies we’re going to be talking about today are establishing cross-disciplinary communication processes, providing protected collaborative planning time, engaging in collaborative data analysis, and developing family and student engagement practices. So in the chat, as Silvia mentioned, this is a resource that we are sharing with you all today. And again, just going to provide that high level overview, but that resource really dives a little bit deeper into some more specifics, more examples that we hope that you dive into after today’s session.
Great, so the first strategy is establishing cross-disciplinary communication processes. So this is where cross-disciplinary teams really set those clear and agreed upon norms for how they’re going to communicate about students and instruction, both within internal school teams, but then also with families. So specifically, we are thinking about how communication happens, what information is shared, and when that communication happens. So you’ll see on the screen a few examples of what that can look like in practice. So we have co-constructing, again, group norms for how the team is going to communicate. Maybe it’s creating and establishing some shared agendas, having agreed upon communication systems and tools. So thinking about what digital platforms you’re gonna be using. Is it email, is it Google Drive, is it something else? And then defining some clear decision making processes and boundaries. So how is the team going to make decisions and what boundaries are there in place to really maintain that team culture and collaboration? So again, it’s really thinking about setting and creating transparent expectations for the team.
The second strategy is protecting collaborative planning time. So I’m sure as every person on this call is well aware, time is a really scarce resource in education. I know I definitely felt that when I was teaching. It can be really, really hard to find those joint times to meet together. So because of that, we know it’s integral to have that time to work together and share and plan. So that’s where we wanna think about how we are proactively designating and finding that protected structured time for our cross-disciplinary teams to meet. So when the special educator, the ELD teacher, the gen ed teacher, can come together to really collaboratively plan, and then also reflect as a team to think about how we move forward and continue to support our students. We know that this time also helps to not just foster strong relationships within our internal team, but also to ensure that our instructional alignment across various content and language goals is put into place to effectively support our students’ both academic and linguistic growth.
So this type of planning really creates that shared sense of ownership for our students, and again, sets that transparent expectation on how we’re gonna be moving forward together. So a few, again, examples that you see on the screen, outside of just finding that time, which can be hard on its own, we’re thinking about how often we’re meeting. So figuring out as a team, is that check-in going to be weekly? Is it gonna be biweekly, monthly, quarterly? Whatever works best for the school team, but maintaining that that time, right, is protected. And then I can also be using co-planning templates and protocols to help guide those co-planning or just like planning meetings together. Again, you’ll find a lot more examples within the resource that we shared in the chat too.
The next strategy we have on the screen is using collaborative data analysis processes. So this is really focusing on teams and how teams use data that’s collected across different classrooms and programs to guide data-based decision making. We know that when teams are able to analyze both that academic and linguistic data, along with other data that’s collected from other service providers and programs, teams can more effectively work together towards supporting the whole child, right, to make those evidence-informed decisions. So this can look like having a shared tracker, where all different educators across these different programs and classrooms are able to share their progress monitoring data in one place. It also looks like regularly reviewing that data together to make those effective database decisions. And then when we’re able to make those decisions, we can think about how we then adjust our interventions, our scaffolds, our accommodations, and also how they can help inform future IEP goals.
And of course, while data really helps us hone in on areas of growth, places we can continue to support students, it’s also really important to celebrate those areas of growth, right? Celebrate those areas of growth. There’s a lot of success out there. And so making sure we’re having time to see that success, honor that success as a team is also really important. And then the last strategy we’re gonna be reviewing today is developing family engagement practices or practices, excuse me. So we know that families are our students first teachers and our greatest resource as school teams. So we really wanna develop systems and practices that center families and students as active partners in their learning, because that really helps foster trust to support increased family engagement and also ensures that the educational decisions that we’re making as a team reflect our students’ lived experiences, including their cultural background and their linguistic strengths.
So this may look like scheduling regular check-ins with students and families, and as we know, we should be scheduling those regular check-ins, but it’s having that set time that is agreed upon within the school team and the family. It also looks like building or engaging in culturally responsive communication. So it’s really important to consider how the team is prioritizing culturally and linguistically responsive communication. So how we are sharing information, is it in the family’s home language? And how we’re authentically sharing knowledge with families. So is it in a specific platform that is responsive to our family’s needs? And in order to do that, we need to make sure we’re communicating with our families to set that expectation as a group. Additionally, it’s really actively including them in setting the goals and making decisions for students. Again, as we’ve already talked about, they have such a wealth of knowledge about their student and their student’s home life.
So making sure that they’re brought in as an active member of our team can really also include having them be active members and setting those goals. And then when we’re thinking about those meetings, perhaps it’s also sharing a meeting summary before the parent comes to the meeting, just giving them an opportunity to prep, have the knowledge that we’re going to be sharing so that they can be prepared to come with maybe some questions or ideas as well. So, in addition to the strategies that support effective collaboration, we also wanted to spotlight two other resources that we think can be very supportive of your own school-based team decision making moving forward, maybe even tomorrow. So the first document is a Cross-Collaboration Student Support Plan. This was a plan that was actually born out of my own experience teaching. I had a student that was serviced by multiple programs, multiple educators, and we were finding it really, really hard to have time to not only meet together, but share information as a team and make those decisions together.
So with that in mind, I created this document as a space where everyone could house their information in one place, where we could continue to iterate, to add to it, and also use it in communicating with families as well. So this is an editable templateized version where you can then collect information to help support your own collaborative planning. And you’ll see within that document, there is space to outline student interests, what current instructional strategies and supports are in place, what systems are in place for interdepartmental and family collaboration, who is responsible for collecting which progress monitoring data and how the team is going to move forward with that, so some roles and responsibilities. And then also has a list of some ideas for increased collaboration practices. And then the second resource we have featured today is a Learner Profile. This is also an editable template that practitioners can use in their co-planning and progress monitoring evaluation activities.
Similar to the Cross-Collaboration Student Support Plan, it also has that space to gather information from students, from families, from educators to help us create and build that full picture of the student. This is something that we found has really empowered educators to support them in creating that individualized and asset-based instruction and has also, we found, been a really great support in helping build those relationships within teams and increase those communication practices among educators and parents. And with that, I’m going to hand it back over to Silvia to begin closing us out and talk about some feature learning opportunities we have.
Silvia DeRuvo:
Okay, well, I’m glad to see in the chat that people have found the Padlet and they’re enjoying the resources there. But we wanted to share an upcoming learning opportunity, and that’s our Virtual Summer Institute. So that will be held July 21st through 23rd. It ends up being six 90 minute sessions that cover some of what was discussed today, but goes a lot deeper into each framework. And we focus it on a case study. So you’re able to look at the framework and then look at how it applies to a student that probably many of you as educators have had in your classroom as a multilingual learner, so that you can apply your learning in real time. We will focus on each framework also and how it informs IEP development, especially, and both of these tools that were shared are just essential to developing a good strong present level of academic and functional performance, and how linguistically appropriate goals focus on language development.
So, you know, how can I take that PLAAFP statement and then also based on that statement, build linguistically appropriate goals that build in the scaffolds that students, that multilingual learners need in order to reach their grade level standards. This virtual PD will provide an opportunity to learn from other practitioners across the country. We found that to be a real strength. Each year, we have some international person attending at midnight in their time. So it really is a great opportunity to learn from others across the country on what their practices are and to problem solve together. You will have access to all the materials on that Padlet wall, along with the recordings and the resources for at least one year, and you have an option for graduate credit that is available along with everyone who attends, will receive a certificate for 12 hours of professional learning. So we hope you check it out. That flyer information is also on the Padlet.
Then if you’re interested in the services that we provide, more information about services to schools, to districts, and to states, you can visit our website to get more information on the strands that we provide around pre-referral practices and special education evaluation and IEP development. And we look at, you know, what does that specially designed instruction look like? And then also we take a look at, what are the administrator leadership essentials to being able to provide the environment that allows for this collaboration to support their teachers? So take a look at what we offer and you can reach out to us anytime if you’re interested in discussing that work. And I’m going to hand it back to Danny.
Danny Torres:
Great, well thank you, Silvia and Gabriela, for a great session. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really, really appreciate you being here. You can feel free to reach out to Silvia via email if you have questions about the work that we discussed today. You can reach Silvia at [email protected]. And if you’d like to learn more about our work around supporting multilingual learners with disabilities, you can visit wested.org/multilingual-learners-with-disabilities. And that’s the link that Silvia, or the page that Silvia referenced earlier.
And you can check out recordings of our past Leading Together webinars online. We’ve covered a range of topics, including literacy, generative AI, assessment, special education, mathematics, and our next session is May 28th. The focus of that webinar is Beyond Language Development, Designing Quality Opportunities to Learn for Newcomer Students. To access our Leading Together webinar series recordings and to register for upcoming events, you can visit us online at wested.org/leading-together. And finally, if you’re interested in learning more about WestEd and staying connected, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen. We also have pages on LinkedIn and Bluesky, so you check us out there and follow us. With that, thank you all very, very much, and we’ll see you next time.