Featured Speaker:
- Haiwen Chu, Research Director, English Learner and Migrant Education at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 19th 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, Promoting Ambitious Math Learning for Multilingual Learners. Our featured speaker today is Dr. Haiwen Chu, research director for our English learner and Migrant Education Team at WestEd. Much of his work focuses on our Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative, which works to improve systems and expand teacher capacity. Thank you all 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, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take 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 policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities, 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 Haiwen. Haiwen, take it away.
Haiwen Chu:
Thank you, Danny, as always, for that kind introduction. My name is Haiwen Chu, and I will be your presenter today as we explore how to realize the immense potential of multilingual learners in mathematics. And what we’re gonna do today is we’re going to connect systems level conditions, systems level capacity with the quality learning that we want multilingual learners alongside all of their classmates in mathematics classrooms to experience every day in every way. And so this is an exciting topic because although we will begin with practice, we really are going to look at what needs to happen at the level of education systems in order for us to realize English learners, multilingual learners’ immense potential. This is a future-oriented vision.
And so we’re gonna begin this presentation with some framing around the urgency with regard to demographic and achievement trends, and then we’re gonna move very quickly into what ambitious practice, what ambitious and quality learning looks like and sounds like in the classroom in mathematics. This is a familiar theme that I’ve unpacked before. But then the bulk of this presentation is actually going to be to understand, in order to reach that ambitious vision, what needs to be in place at a systems level. How does every level of the system, every professional, every educator that works on behalf of multilingual learners in systems, in education systems, contribute to that joint enterprise of their excellence and their futures that we are in the process of making with them. That’s actually the exciting thing.
Now that we’re one quarter into the 21st century, we really need to look at the future. And as we look back at the past quarter century and how different it has been for those of us who’ve been in the field a while, we can only imagine what it would look like, what it would feel like in 2050. And it will be multilingual learners who make that future. So all of that said, let’s take a quick look at some demographic trends, some demographic realities with regard to the enrollment of multilingual learners. So in the United States, the latest data we have available is from 2021. And so when we look at the 10-year trend from 2011 through to 2021, what we find is that actually the K-5 population of students bureaucratically designated as English learners as defined in federal law has actually mildly decreased to just over 3 million students in grades K through five in the elementary grades.
On the other hand, at the secondary level, which is to say grades six through 12, there’s actually been over that decade more than a 50% increase. So that as of 2021, more than 2.2 million students are enrolled in the secondary grades. And so when I share the statistic, educators often, leaders think, “Well, that must be because of immigration.” Now, immigration is a part of that, but the vast majority of students in the secondary grades who are classified as English learners were actually born and educated entirely in the United States. And so what this indicates is that our systems have not yet managed to adequately challenge and support English learners, multilingual learners, in realizing their immense potential. And we have not been successful yet in terms of having them learn the English language and content area knowledge simultaneously. So that’s on us in terms of why that population of the secondary grades has increased.
And it’s also on us, it’s also in our power to change this reality. At the same time, we do need to acknowledge that based upon the latest result from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2024 for eighth graders, that there is a significant, there is a substantial distance in terms of achievement when we compare English learners to students who are not classified as English learners. Whereas 5% of all English learners in the eighth grade were considered at proficient or above on the NAEP. Closer to 30% of all non-English learners in the eighth grade were proficient or above in 2024. And so that nearly 25 percentage point distance in achievement is something that we need to change. And the way that we’re gonna change it is by transforming classroom learning experiences, classroom learning opportunities that we offer multilingual students alongside all of their classmates.
And so that’s the main theme of this presentation. We need to understand what are the systems level conditions that then enable the kinds of quality learning that we want to have multilingual learners alongside all of their classmates experience every day and in every way. So on this slide, I’m showing you the complexity and the key amount of factors that we need to take into account. And so in this presentation, we’re going to start with a vision of what does quality learning look like and sound like for multilingual learners. We’re gonna unpack that. That’s on the right-hand side of the screen, and we’re gonna unpack each of those bullet points. And then we’re gonna begin to understand that that’s a consequence of systems being in place to empower and enable educators to realize the potential of their students in mathematics.
And so Danny’s gonna drop into the chat a link where we have a wealth of resources. This content is largely based upon a WestEd Perspectives brief, which connects the characteristics of effective systems with the quality learning that it enables in the mathematics classroom. And so we’re gonna dive right in to this question of, what is quality learning for multilingual learners? And so first and foremost is a question of access. Put quite simply, it is not possible to learn quality mathematics if you don’t have access to deep engaged learning. And so one of the unfortunate consequences of the way that systems have unfolded in this country has been often, language is unfortunately viewed as a prerequisite for deep understanding rather than as something that develops alongside well constructed learning opportunities.
And so the fundamental premise is, multilingual learners deserve and require access to those quality learning opportunities. And it is actually through accessing the challenge that forces them to stretch, that challenges and supports them in growing, that they’re gonna simultaneously develop language and mathematical ideas simultaneously. And so that requires a firm commitment to multilingual learners working alongside peers, working alongside classmates who bring with them a wealth of different experiences with regard to culture, with regard to language, with regard to ideas that they then share, compare, and all connect to the learning of mathematics. So access is a question of access to coursework at the secondary level and to learning experiences in the elementary classroom as well. You basically have to be there in order to learn.
But then let’s take a look at what that learning looks like, because as technology advances in the United States and across the world, what we find is that which actually did require human beings to actually compute manually now is sort of at our fingertips. I’m fond of saying, when I was growing up, nobody told me that I’d have a supercomputer in my pocket that would enable me to basically calculate anything I wanted to. So mathematical procedures are now easy to have access to. What is more challenging and what is ever more critical is the conceptual understanding of those mathematical procedures, of those arithmetical operations. It’s a question of a connected understanding of why those procedures work, when to use them, and what they’re good for.
And so in that increasingly complex world, we want multilingual learners to put that technology, to put those procedures to work for them, and that means they need to engage in mathematical practices. Because after all, it is through mathematical practices that new mathematics is created. So this idea of conceptual understanding is going beyond being able to do something but knowing why it works, how it works, when to use it, and also when not to use it. That kind of conceptual understanding is gonna benefit all students, and it is especially critical for multilingual learners. So then what does that learning look like? Well, part of the fundamental premise around learning is that learning is not an individual act. Rather, it is a social act that emerges through interaction with others.
So learning occurs when multilingual learners are challenged and supported to participate, to engage in sustained talk and reciprocal interactions with their peers about the mathematics, because actually all adolescents, all children are quite capable of sustained and reciprocal interactions about something that they’re interested in. The art of teaching is getting them to talk about mathematics and getting them to connect their everyday lived experiences with the kinds of more abstract or generalizable mathematical ideas. And so what we want to be able to see is those inviting opportunities for them to participate, so that over time they become more experts, they become the teachers, they become the posers of questions and the generator of ideas, and even new conjectures and new mathematics.
So that’s what we mean by participation by design. We begin in a very low stakes kinds of ways, and over time we have multilingual learners become more central participants in that kind of activity. And so that’s how we’re looking for learning, as changes in participation over time. And all along the way, language is not a prerequisite, but rather is something that develops alongside ideas and alongside the kinds of mathematical practices like making sense of problems and persevering and solving them, like looking forward and making use of structure. And so the idea is we need to acknowledge that all human beings, and actually adolescents in particular, teenagers, are immensely gifted with language. I think part of it is just to confuse us, but they create that language for their own purposes.
And so it’s on us as educators to understand how do we connect their immensely inventive uses of language to the kinds of language that will be useful for them to participate in the existing community of mathematicians, to participate in getting more precise connections between ideas. And it’s that sort of critical understanding of how language works that has the potential for multilingual learners because they are conscious of how they’re learning language, that they can put that language to work for them and to be able to be creators of meaning that they then share with others. And so language is actually part of everything that we do. We need to move away from approaches that view language as a prerequisite, and instead view language as something that needs to be nurtured and reflected upon so that it becomes naturally more sophisticated over time, provided that the learning opportunities are well constructed very carefully.
And so put simply, if we have the conceptual focus, if we have participation by design, and we also have a purposeful focus on language that acknowledges that language is part of everything that we’ve just talked about, that is the vision of quality learning that we want to enable for all students. And so as a former classroom teacher, I eventually, it took a couple years, but I eventually figured out how do this in my own classroom. And so the main part of this presentation is going to be to turn to what is necessary at a systems level to enable that kind of practice to emerge in individual classrooms. And so beyond the issues of access that I’ve already begun to explore, what we were are gonna focus on is, at a systems level, how critical it is that just like learning for students is not an individual act, the development of educator expertise, the development of the expertise of professionals and of teachers to challenge and support English learners is also not a solo act.
Professional learning must be fundamentally social. It must be that teachers with their colleagues share a vision and deep motivation for what learning is with students. Learning is not transmitting mathematics from the 20th century, ’cause we’re already more than halfway than halfway into the 21st, it really is offering students the competencies, the abilities, and the ways of approaching knowledge and doing things that will set them up for the future, a future that we cannot yet predict. And so in all of teacher professional learning, there need to be opportunities for teachers to reflect and to engage in reasoning, to understand what works for whom and why and under what conditions, and to be able to connect knowledge to practice. And that happens when there are these rich opportunities to collaborate.
And so what we need to offer all educators is around this joint enterprise of offering multilingual learners quality opportunities in mathematics, we need to develop some mutual engagement around working together on the same lessons, the same activities alongside each other in order to over time develop a shared repertoire of a processes, a shared repertoire of quality lessons, a shared repertoire of ways of engaging students through activity structures that enact this promise of conceptual focus, participation by design, and a purposeful language focus. And so the role of systems is to really facilitate that kind of professional learning and collaboration, so that we’re not having individual teachers reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Rather, we’re having them collaborate in purposeful, concerted, and in meaningful ways so that we are incrementally making progress toward this shared vision of quality.
And so that kind of systems level capacity development around professional educator expertise is something that really does require concerted investment and time so that teachers can truly collaborate and create something greater than they would be able to on their own. And so it’s that vision of professional learning and collaboration that also is critical as we consider the critical role of high quality instructional materials. And so I’ve been in the field of mathematics education long enough that were I to name the curriculum that I used as a new teacher twenty plus years ago, I would probably be safe. But I’ll not name names in terms of instructional materials because it’s not about any particular brand or any particular set of materials. It really is a question of, how are those instructional materials putting the needs and the assets of multilingual learners at the center so that they are foremost in efforts at implementation?
And so in implementing high quality instructional materials as many districts and many states and many schools are doing across the country, one key message here is we need to not have multilingual learners be an afterthoughts, but really look at the potential of instructional materials to offer, once again, those three ideas that I mentioned at the beginning. That keen conceptual focus, opportunities to participate by design, and a purposeful focus on language that recognizes that language develops through activity. It is not a prerequisite for activity. So that’s the lens that all instructional materials as they’re being implemented need to be considered with because the quality comes in the implementation, the quality comes in how teachers are intentionally scaffolding, how teachers are providing both designing and contingent supports that enable multilingual learners and all students to grapple with, to engage with academically challenging, academically demanding, and rigorous learning opportunities.
So that’s the lens that all of these instructional materials need to be viewed through. Is there adequate conceptual focus, is there enough participation built in by design, and is language really something that is intentionally developed throughout rather than something that is viewed as a prerequisite that ends up denying multilingual learners opportunities to grapple? And so, so far, in terms of talking about systems, I’ve primarily focused on classroom learning experiences. I guess as a classroom teacher, back in the day, that’s what they paid me for. But as I look back on my broad career and on the learning experiences of a lot of the students I’ve had over the years or worked with, I also sort of recognize that the classroom is not the only place where learning happens in mathematics.
And so systems must ensure that multilingual learners alongside all of their classmates also have a full spectrum of choices because not every learning format, not every learning opportunity is gonna work for every student. Rather, there needs to be a wide variety of quality learning opportunities that can extend beyond the classroom. They can happen before school, they can happen after school. They need to offer multilingual learners opportunities to apply what they’ve learned and to stretch their understanding. And so both those before and after school programs can be powerful.
The summer can also be a powerful place for ambitious learning. In fact, I’ve spent a number of my summers working alongside multilingual learners in summer programs as they were really stretching their learning and really experiencing the kinds of quality learning opportunities that we’ve described here. What’s critical there is we need to change the conversation in terms of summer learning being an opportunity for amplification and or acceleration rather than remediation. And so that forward-looking, that future-oriented perspective is going to be critical as we consider summer learning as yet another venue for students learning. And in much the same way, high quality tutoring. I know that in the beginning, there was a large emphasis on high dosage tutoring.
And I understand that this is valuable to have a lot of time in order to grapple with another interlocutor in order to focus on learning. But high quality tutoring is how I refer to this idea that we want tutoring not to be another form of telling, but really to be an opportunity for multilingual learners alongside other classmates who may need additional support to develop their ideas, to unpack and to explore it in ways that meet their needs and actually work in their zone of proximal development. So tutoring actually does offer a venue to realize the promise that Vygotsky offered us, which is this idea that in a one-on-one or in a sort of more intimate setting with adults and students, you can get this idea of these students being able to learn in interaction with others and actually being capable of doing more than that which they would be able to do independently or on their own.
It’s in that interaction with a tutor who is a more expert other, that students then have the opportunity to stretch their understandings. That’s what we mean by high quality tutoring. We don’t mean we remediation or repetition, we mean changing the script in terms of what they’re being offered and how they’re being challenged and supported to stretch their understandings in interaction with a highly qualified tutor. And so the way that you look for that is their growing agency over time, their growing sense of efficacy and their ability to be increasingly independent and sophisticated in how they’re thinking about, talking about, and using language in mathematics.
And so somehow we have covered an immense amount of landscape. And each of these ideas actually could be the subject of its own webinar. And I wanted to summarize all of this in the form of this graphic. I want you to look at one key thing, which is, on both sides of the graphic, access is still in the center, ’cause access is critical to this vision that we have laid out. And the other message is that which education leaders, that which systems put in place on the left-hand side in terms of effective systems and those elements are what enable the quality learning for multilingual learners across a variety of settings across the nation. And so Danny’s gonna drop in another link to that post because we have actually unpacked each of these eight elements further. Beyond the WestEd Perspectives brief, there are also additional blog posts for each of these elements. And so I’m going to stop sharing my screen as we transition. We might have a moment for questions.
Danny Torres:
Yeah, yeah, you can… There are some questions in the chat that you might want to take a look at. So feel free to do that, and I’ll share my screen.
Haiwen Chu:
So for us, the question of high quality instructional materials comes back to these elements of, these elements of conceptual focus, of participation by design, and of a purposeful language focus. Those are the criteria that we use. And so there are other frameworks out there as someone asked in the Q&A. And as long as you have those three elements, they may call them by different names, but those are the elements that we look for. Because what we want is not the arrangement of ideas. We want the design of learning, right? So that’s why I’m saying implementation matters, because no matter how good the materials are on paper, it’s how they’re implemented and how they invite and support multilingual learners that makes the difference in terms of the learning opportunities. Yeah.
Danny Torres:
All right, well, thank you, Haiwen, for another great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. For those of you interested in learning more about our Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd, visit us online at qtel.WestEd.org. And feel free to reach out to Haiwen via email. If you have any questions about the work that we discussed today, you can reach Haiwen at [email protected].
And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics, including STEM and artificial intelligence, and there’s a lot more to come. During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. For more information about our Leading Together webinar series, visit us online at WestEd.org/leading-together-2025. And finally, you can sign up for the WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at WestEd.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very, very much. We’ll see you next time.