Jenni Torres has taken the helm as the new executive director of WIDA, the consortium that oversees English-language proficiency tests used by 41 states for English learners.
Before this role, she served as chief academic officer at Waterford.org, a national nonprofit focused on early learning and kindergarten readiness.
Torres comes to WIDA at a time when English learners’ English-language proficiency scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, and uncertainty about the federal government’s commitment to multilingual education during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Just a few weeks into the new role, Torres spoke with EdWeek to share her vision for WIDA’s future, and what educators can expect from the organization moving forward.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your priorities for WIDA for this year?
Continuing to work alongside multilingual learners, their families, and the educators [who] serve them, ensuring that we can really provide best-in-class, multilingual instruction with effective and measured outcomes. I hope that I can really help us to continue to be responsive to states, to educators, and to the youth that we serve, and help us to design the best products and services and offerings that can meet their needs, and also to find out ways to innovate.
How does WIDA hope to address the need to raise proficiency scores?
There [are] lots of amazing experts at WIDA [who] are focused on these details, but from a high-level perspective, the 2020 English-language development standards from WIDA pushed forward the understanding of how teachers can use those standards to be able to help multilingual learners understand language around all kinds of different content areas. And so WIDA is looking to expand and provide support to teachers beyond just those who are focused on traditional [English learner] coursework and expanding that to content areas. For example, working even more directly with science content area or math content area teachers, so that we can embed these best practices and these evidence-based standards across how students experience instruction in the classroom, no matter what classroom they’re in and no matter what part of the day they’re learning.
One of the things that we want to figure out is, how do we best serve educators? Educators are busy. They have a lot going on all day, and they have a lot of different needs in their classrooms. So how can we best [offer] them these effective practices, these research-based ways of working with multilingual learners in a way that’s effective for them.
Are there concerns over how English learners will be prioritized under the new federal administration?
We’re all watching and learning together what the federal level approach will be, but as an organization, we are really led by what our states want. We will be thinking about what each individual state wants from us and asks for.
How will WIDA continue to invest in professional development?
I know that the team is in the process of taking feedback that they’ve received from teachers at the [WIDA annual] conference, as well as in some other formats, to really build out that plan of what that can look like, and again, figuring out what state partners want and need. I’ve recently heard from some content teachers who’ve taken some of WIDA’s professional learning and found it super helpful to them, and they thought it was very helpful to understand the language of math or the language of science and how that impacts what they can provide to multilingual learners in their classroom every day. So we’re hoping to expand upon that, but I don’t have specifics yet, as the team is still building out the plan and the process.
Editor’s note: Tim Boals, the last executive director of WIDA, remains with the organization as a senior principal investigator and hopes to organize a convening of researchers and educators on big ideas related to multilingual learners.
