Years ago, the Beaverton school district in Oregon participated in a study to determine the right models for improving English learners’ academic achievement.
The results, which came out in 2019, pointed to two promising models, especially for the elementary grades: dual-language immersion, in which students learn in both English and another language, and an integrated, collaborative model, such as when a content-area and English-language-development teacher work side by side in the same classroom, ensuring English learners are exposed to grade-level academic content and vocabulary.
While beneficial to both English learners and native English-speaking students, dual-language immersion programs are costly and hard to find across the country.
So Beaverton, the Corvallis school district, and other Oregon districts have worked in recent years to scale up their use of integrated, collaborative teaching.
They’ve encountered some logistical hurdles adjusting to a new model—changing schedules, staffing classrooms with qualified English-language-development teachers alongside content-area teachers, and getting all staff on board with the shared responsibility of helping English learners learn English. But they’ve been able to address some of the factors that were holding English learners back.
In Beaverton, students who retained the English-learner classification into high school were missing some electives and core courses because of the time they had to spend in English-language-development sessions. And in Corvallis a decade ago, half of Latino students—including many who were English learners—weren’t graduating on time.
The switch to the collaborative model has allowed the districts to tackle those problems.
“We know that language learning cannot just take place one period of the day in an English-language-development period,” said Andrew Robinson, an assistant administrator for multilingual programs for the Beaverton district, which is located outside of Portland. “It must be supported throughout students’ entire day, so that is where we’re focusing a lot of effort now: clarifying roles, helping people understand and build capacity so that not just the ELD teacher, but all teachers, can support language development.”
As the population of English learners continues to grow nationwide, Oregon districts such as Beaverton and Corvallis offer a case study in how to use the collaborative model to help English learners learn English through academic content.
Integrated, collaborative models take different forms
Generally, the integrated, collaborative model takes two different forms: co-teaching and consulting.
In the co-teaching model, English learners take a high school course, such as social studies, alongside their non-English learner peers. The English learners in the class are at about the same level of English-language proficiency, but there’s nothing that really sets them apart in the classroom. They’re not taken out of the room for special instruction or given a different curriculum.
In the classroom are two teachers, the social studies teacher and an English-language-development teacher, answering questions, planning lessons, and teaching together as equals.
With consulting, the content-area teacher teaches alone, but shares planning time with English-language teachers to ensure lesson plans feature English-language instruction strategies, Robinson said.
Beaverton and Corvallis use a combination of these models.
In Corvallis, both English-language and content-area teachers have told Marcianne Koetje, the district’s multilingual programs and equity coordinator, that the collaborative model has not only helped English learners but all students in the classroom.
But there are several logistical and cultural challenges to these models.
In Corvallis, the switch to the collaborative model required administrators to think about English learners’ schedules first when preparing master schedules each year, said Koetje said.
And Beaverton—a much larger district about 100 miles north of Corvallis—is working now to extend the collaborative model to the high school level.
But one of the biggest hurdles for both has been getting all teachers onboard with the idea of playing a part in language instruction through academic content.
“Especially at the high school level, there’s this fixed mindset that I’m a content teacher and I’m endorsed in science or I’m endorsed in social studies, and language has always been somebody else’s [job],” Koetje said.
Overcoming challenges to these models requires district support
Koetje has had to be strategic in choosing whom to hire as English-language-development teachers. The district now looks for teachers with general classroom or coaching experience that can translate to co-teaching or consulting.
“I think that has really helped us as a district, because in the past we had language-development specialists who had only ever been trained on how to do small groups, and we noticed there was a huge disconnect, because when they were co-teaching, when they were doing integrated ELD, they didn’t really have the skill set necessarily to work with all students,” Koetje said.
With content-area teachers, Koetje and her team have found often that it’s not that they don’t want to engage with language instruction altogether, but rather they are afraid to admit they don’t know how to do it. Professional development and schedules that allow for shared planning time with English-language-development teachers have helped, she said.
In Beaverton, district leaders must sort out how to set up planning and classroom schedules, as well as how to pair content-area teachers with English-language-development peers, Robinson said.
Beyond these logistical challenges, the larger challenge Beaverton—with more than 50 schools and nearly 39,000 students—faces is how to coach so many teachers with different degrees of experience with either language or content-area instruction on this new model.
The district has turned to professional development to try to address this.
In one session, a high school English-language-development teacher led a mock health lesson for various content-area teachers completely in Spanish. She used language-learning strategies that help students learn content even if they’re not proficient in the language of instruction. These are the same strategies teachers would be expected to use to help English learners in their own classrooms where they’re teaching in English.
The exercise put teachers in the proverbial shoes of English learners so they could better understand how language instruction through content works, said Katherine Hart, a teacher on special assignment at the district as part of the high school multilingual team.
“One of the main goals of our PD is to really get the content-area teacher to see the ELD teacher as a partner, and you can’t just hand over your lessons and expect them to be adopted and then get them back. It is really a team effort, and you’re really planning together,” Hart said.
English-language-development teachers are getting professional development on stepping into coaching and co-teaching roles that they may not be used to after years of working primarily with small groups of English learners in separate classrooms.
The Beaverton and Corvallis districts, along with several other districts and researchers from Oregon State University they’re working with, have also developed a district-level guide for using integrated, collaborative models to help other districts in the state—particularly those that are smaller and more rural.
