More general education teachers find themselves working with English learners in their classrooms these days, but not all of them feel prepared or equipped with the best curricular materials to adequately serve these students.
A new nationally representative survey from the RAND Corp. of about 7,500 K-12 public school teachers and 1,300 principals who serve multilingual learners found that about half of all teachers surveyed said they were not at all, or only somewhat, prepared to teach multilingual learners. These students currently account for about 10% of the overall public school student population and are the fastest growing subpopulation in national enrollment.
To better understand the disconnect, researchers asked about principals’ professional development priorities, as well as educators’ takes on how well curriculum materials serve students acquiring the English language, said Sabrina Lee, lead author of the study and an assistant policy researcher at RAND.
The study found only about 10% of surveyed principals who served multilingual learners said they were prioritizing both professional learning for teachers that addresses the needs of these students, and instructional materials that support them.
About half of all teachers who served multilingual learners said their materials were inadequate, and about two-thirds said they had a moderate or major need for more or better curriculum materials.
“[The study] validated a lot of things we have heard and seen in the field,” said Eric Hirsch, chief executive officer of the nonprofit EdReports, which evaluates the quality of curriculum products for schools and districts. The nonprofit, which did not participate in the study, recently updated how it reviews products’ support for multilingual learners.
Lee said the study findings point to opportunities for curriculum developers and state and local education leaders to better invest in both high-quality materials and professional learning opportunities for teachers working with a growing population of students who are learning English.
“Educators need to be well-equipped with the right tools, with the right materials, but they also need to know how to use these materials effectively,” Lee said.
Proper training and materials can help teachers support English learners
Of note among the study findings: When teachers had an English-as-a-second-language or bilingual credential or taught in classrooms where multilingual learners made up the majority of students, they were more likely to prioritize providing options to multilingual learners, such as access to high-quality curricular materials.
That phenomenon isn’t surprising to Margaret Overbagh-Feld, a multilingual learner lead at EdReports and a former English-as-a-second-language teacher.
“We’re looking at strong teacher development in line with strong materials that also need to be in line with strong district leadership,” Overbagh-Feld said.
It’s why Lee and her co-authors recommend state and local leaders invest more in things like collaborative learning time with other teachers and curriculum-based professional learning for teachers working with multilingual learners.
High-quality curriculum would mean nothing without teachers first having a solid foundation in how to best support multilingual learners, said Hirsch at EdReports. But even so, over the years he and his team have heard requests from school districts for better materials that integrate language-learning into academic content across subjects and grade levels while also meeting state standards.
It’s no longer enough for materials to simply have a pull-out box with suggestions for teachers on how to modify lessons for the multilingual students in the classroom, Hirsch said.
“We want to make sure that, as publishers and content developers are developing this content, they’re not just saying, ‘OK, we have to have texts that are engineered so that multilingual learners can access them,’” Overbagh-Feld said. “That’s great, but we also need to make sure that high-quality opportunities for speaking have multilingual-learner supports and [that there are] opportunities for multilingual learners to build academic language.”
In 2020, EdReports revamped its tools for reviewing curriculum materials to now include criteria specific to how well products center the needs of multilingual learners. The nonprofit further refined the criteria this January. The first reports of products to use the new criteria will publish next month, Hirsch said.
