The cognitive flexibility that comes from being multilingual can give students a boost in math—if teachers know how to build on English learners’ strengths.
Seventy-seven percent of 8th-grade English-learners did not meet basic math achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2024, and their average math performance has fallen by nearly a year’s worth of learning over the last decade.
By contrast, former English learners performed nearly as well as native English-speaking students in math in 2024, and they have made significant strides in catching up academically in the last decade. Equal shares of native-English-speaking and former ELs reached the advanced level of achievement on the math NAEP.
That’s not a surprise to Pedro Rodriguez, a math and science dual-language teacher at the K-8 P.S. 161 Pedro Albizu Campos in Manhattan.
Multilingual students often outperform monolingual students in the executive functioning skills needed to start solving a problem in one way and then shift to a different strategy in response to changing demands.
“It’s important for teachers to understand the lens through which we’re working with [EL] students, because they are learning two languages,” Rodriguez said. “In essence, they’re learning the math language, and they’re learning the English language.”
Rodriguez, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child, is working with the EF+Math project—a network of teams of teachers and researchers working to improve math instruction and interventions for Black and Latino students.
Rodriguez spoke with Education Week about how teachers can leverage English learners’ executive functioning skills to boost both their language and math development.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you encourage your English learners to practice cognitive flexibility in your math class?
One of the most important things is just analyzing what do students bring when it comes to executive function and how you can leverage that in a classroom.
Students will push back and say, “Well, I don’t think that this is the right solution.” And then, I’ll stop the class and say, “OK, let’s have a conversation. What do we see from this student’s strategy and what do we see from this other student’s strategy? Can we apply it to another problem?”
How do cultural differences affect how students and families approach math?
A lot of times we tend to think that because students speak Spanish, they’ve all got the same education, [when] it’s important to understand the different backgrounds that students bring, and not automatically assume that because the students come from a respective country, that they automatically have this rich math education or that they don’t. There have been a lot of cases where [newcomer] students have been more advanced than some of my [native-English-speaking] students that I have in the classroom.
For a lot of my students, when it comes to just building that identity and math background, I teach it to them in Spanish, and then a couple days out of the week I’ll teach it to them in English just to see if they’re able to do that code switch when it comes to the language.
How do you build academic language and vocabulary in math?
It’s important to gauge what students know about a topic. If we’re doing equations, what do we know about “equation,” and what is an expression? We can flush out some of those semantics and even some of those misconceptions that might come up later on in the class.
If a student is using a certain [problem-solving] strategy, I’ll make a connection. I might say, “Oh, that looks very similar to using the Pythagorean theorem with this.” So when the student is making reference to it, they are not only building that [concept] but also understanding the proper term, or how they might hear in the future, if another teacher mentions it.
I also avoid front-loading the vocabulary, because when I start front-loading, students start getting more anxiety.
What is your most frequent challenge in teaching math to English learners?
Students, a lot of times, look at math as a race and they want to try to solve as many problems as possible; they don’t check their work. ... Slowing them down is one of the biggest challenges over the last few years.
I just give them different activities so they don’t have to just rely on traditional worksheets. ... For example, if I’m doing fractions, students play a game to add up the fractions. That’s one way that I have forced students to slow down and to apply their understanding and their learning to other areas.
How do you approach math word problems, which are often difficult for native English speakers and even more for ELs?
One strategy that has worked for me is doing three reads. The first time the students read the problem, I expose them to the word problem without the question, and just have the students focus on the context of the problem.
And then the second time we read the problem, we highlight and write down what information is important. And then the third time we read the problem, we’re focusing on what is the question asking us.
In a traditional period, we might tackle two to three word problems—and I’m OK with that. A lot of times people have looked at math like “more is better,” and I have noticed over the year that the less, the better. I just want to make sure that we tackle two to three robust, rich problems that can help the student better understand the content, rather than just a bunch of drill problems to let me see how they persevere from that.
You teach both math and science in a dual-language setting. How can teachers better collaborate across disciplines to improve EL instruction?
That’s been challenging because, especially right now with a shortage of teachers, we find ourselves wearing so many different hats. I have to split myself up, where some days I work in collaboration with the math team and sometimes I work with the science team. But the advantage of that is, in conversations I can tell them, “OK, when we’re in math we’re doing this; how can we leverage this in science?”
I teach science and math to the same group of 7th and 8th graders, and I notice a lot of times that I might have a student [who] might not do so well in the math, but do well in the science. Understanding why is it that a student feels much more comfortable participating in those science lessons than math helps me to understand how to change my approach.
