In Christina Gomez’s kindergarten classroom at Mt. View Elementary, in a neighborhood of Nashville, Tenn., students took turns summarizing what they’d just read about the four seasons and farm animals.
The children shared detailed responses, some carefully pronouncing their words.
“You know what Ms. Gomez has been noticing when we have our discussions?” Gomez said to the class. “You guys are elaborating in your sentences.” While enunciating the word “elaborating,” she slowly moved her hands apart to mime out the word’s meaning.
The hand movement is a visual cue meant to help the 13 English learners in the class of 19 students grasp the meaning of the complex word. Gomez learned the trick from Olga Dietz, who co-teaches with Gomez and two other kindergarten teachers in the school.
About six years ago Dietz had Gomez’s job title. But as the school and district English-learner population grew, Dietz saw the writing on the wall. She switched to becoming an English-learner co-teacher.
“I really wanted to help the EL population as a co-teacher so I can give them extra support, with the classroom teachers,” she said.
At Mt. View, the proportion of English learners has nearly doubled since 2016-17, and they now make up about 60% of the school body. That growth is even faster than what’s playing out across the country as a whole; from the 2002–03 to the 2021–22 school years, the number of identified English learners nationally grew by 21.3%, according to a recent federal report. (In contrast, the entire K–12 student population increased by only 1.7% during the same 20-year period.)
But as the number of English learners has surged, the growth in the number of teachers with specialized training hasn’t always kept pace. That means general education teachers who want and are expected to help English learners in mainstream classrooms aren’t trained in how to work with these students, nor do they always have access to co-teachers with expertise, like Dietz.
That comes even as teachers of English learners are more in demand than ever, and more of a consensus has emerged around research and best practices for how classroom educators can support those students. Where teaching jobs focused on English learners were once seen by some as support roles, the work is now regarded as more prestigious and requiring a high level of expertise that’s valuable to gen ed teachers as well.
Even so, today’s EL teachers say districts have a lot to learn when it comes to making systemic changes needed to ensure all educators are willing and able to best educate these students.
“They’re not your kids. They’re not my kids. They’re our kids,” Dietz said.
Ideally, EL teachers say, the solution looks something like what they’ve developed at Mt. View Elementary, where Gomez and Dietz seamlessly take turns leading discussions and working with students who may need some extra help in understanding what’s being said.
It’s called parallel co-teaching, which requires Dietz and Gomez to plan lessons together. Silos that might have, in a different school, kept the two educators apart have come down.
“The goal is for somebody new to our building, [when] they come into the classroom, and they see us both at the front of the room [they’ll think] ‘Well, who’s the English-learner teacher?’” Dietz said. “It is two teachers, one with the content expertise, and one with the language-development expertise, working together.”
Districts hire more specialized staff to keep up with demand
The rapid growth of the English-learner population has been driven by several factors, notably more foreign-born students enrolling and immigrant families having more U.S.-born children. But the distribution of those students across school districts varies enormously, as do states’ estimates of how many teachers are needed to serve those populations.
When state education agencies were asked in school year 2020-21 how many additional EL instructors they estimated they would need in the near future, 11 states said they needed to roughly double their EL instructor workforce, and Nevada and Kentucky, specifically, estimated needing an 800% increase. In contrast, North Dakota and South Carolina projected needing very few additional instructors.
Looking at student-to-instructor ratios for the same period of school year 2020–21, the ratio was about 12 English learners per one specialized EL instructor nationwide. But the ratios varied widely by state: Montana had a much lower ratio (about 2:1), while Kentucky’s ratio was extremely high (about 426:1).
The huge growth of the population in Kentucky has been accompanied by a shift in how education leaders there have thought about the best way to serve those students.
Twenty years ago, about 5% or fewer students in the Jefferson County, Ky., district were identified as English learners. There were few certified teachers for these students, and those educators were spread out across schools. The district opened a Newcomer Academy in a move that was welcomed because it enabled teachers specializing in helping those students to feel like a team. The academy was a particular help to students living in the U.S for three years or less who needed additional language and cultural support, said Gwen Snow, who leads the program.
When Renee Wilson, an EL-certified teacher, applied to the district eight years ago, she was urged to join the Newcomer Academy to best utilize her skillset. Today, however, 1 in 5 students in the district are English learners, and one academy can’t meet the demand.
“I suspect that if I were looking for a job now, there would be less of that idea that ‘We’re going to pour our energy and attention into a newcomer school,’ and more an idea that we need to be spreading that out,” Wilson said.
Essentially, that’s what the Nashville district has aimed to do.
It’s invested in hiring hundreds of EL teachers and paying existing teachers to get an English-learner endorsement, said Molly Hegwood, the executive director of the district’s office of English learners.
But hiring more specialized teachers doesn’t always cut it. Dietz was a general educator for 20 years, and although she took classes for her EL-endorsement covering the basics of the EL population about a decade ago, she said she needed a lot more professional development and support for the EL co-teacher job.
She initially struggled to figure out how to get English learners to speak up in class, and how to connect with students who spoke multiple languages.
“The beginning was different. It was more challenging because I did not have all the tools that I needed to give our EL students the support they need,” she said.
To address these challenges, the Nashville district’s staffing investment includes developing instructional-leadership teams at each school with coaches specializing in English-learner instruction. Funded through the district’s Title III funds, federal dollars designated for supplemental support for English learners, the coaches provide feedback on how teachers implement strategy and make sure the co-teaching relationships are working smoothly.
It was a coach that first taught Dietz the art of the hand gestures for words like “elaborating,” a technique she later passed on to Gomez and others.
“I’m not only teaching the students, but also teachers, helping them to grow,” Dietz said.
English learners need access to grade-level content
As the national English-learner population grows, and districts invest in staffing to meet demand, EL teachers say their jobs are evolving, right along with the research on language acquisition.
Tameka Marshall has worked in the Nashville district for over 20 years in roles as an elementary teacher, secondary English-learner coach, and now an 8th grade English-learner teacher at John F. Kennedy Middle School.
She got her EL endorsement more than a decade ago. Back then, she said, language instruction for English learners didn’t always align with grade-level content.
The district has since urged all educators to embrace the research that shows the value of teaching language through academic content.
“It’s a difference from thinking about [English-learner instruction] as a remediation,” said Marshall, who works primarily with newcomer students. “It’s not a remediation. We can’t wait until you’re proficient in English before we start teaching you grade-level content.”
In early December, 8th graders at the Kennedy school were studying a unit on the Holocaust, reading texts such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
Marshall showed her class of newcomer English learners an annotated version of Wiesel’s speech on a projector. The top of the page included symbols: The silhouette of a person for people. A house for place. A smiley and frowning face to mark positive and negative emotions.
Students read the speech aloud as Marshall called on them to highlight words and phrases and correctly mark them with a symbol. For instance, in the line “It pleases me because I must say this honor belongs to all the survivors and their children …” the students agreed that “pleases” connoted a positive emotion while the words “survivors and their children” referred to people.
Through the lesson, Marshall’s students are still accessing the same grade-level content as their non-EL peers while also learning aspects of the English language.
One of the challenges Marshall has found is a lack of curricular materials that are both rigorous and accessible for her English learners. The legend of symbols at the top were Marshall’s own creation. Nationally, teachers working with English learners have said in surveys they too have struggled with finding appropriate resources.
“I want you with your highlighter to highlight where it says the ‘kingdom of night,’” Marshall told her class, “Because that is some very powerful figurative language. And let’s put the little lightbulb here, for a big idea.”
EL teachers are advocates for their kids’ strengths
At one point Wiesel’s speech refers to “the fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.” Marshall wanted to mark the word “history” as an expression of time, but a student argued he believed Wiesel was expressing a big idea, or concept, rather than fixed time as in the past.
Rather than correct him, Marshall used the student’s sharp observation as a learning moment for the class on how some words hold multiple meanings. It demonstrated something EL teachers emphasize to their gen ed colleagues: that English learners bring with them assets and insights that benefit fellow students and teachers alike.
An asset-based mindset is key for working with English learners, EL teachers say. It means not judging students for speaking with accents. Setting high expectations for English learners. And recognizing the increased cognitive load these students take on as they learn unfamiliar content in a second or third language.
But that mindset also needs to carry over to the EL teacher role, Marshall said.
Most schools don’t have sufficient staffing to allow for gen ed and English-learner teachers to co-teach. More often, EL teachers pull students out of mainstream classrooms, and they may not have a lot of collaboration time with their gen ed colleagues to ensure students are keeping up with grade-level content.
And gen ed teachers themselves, often not trained in working with English learners, miss out on the language-learning strategies and tools that English-learner teachers are using in their own classrooms.
Fewer than half of educators surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center last spring said the instruction and professional development they or their school or district’s teachers received on working with English learners was sufficient; nearly 1 in 5 said they’d received no training at all.
Even when gen ed colleagues could be relying on the expertise of EL teachers, Marshall has seen cases where those teachers continue to be perceived more as support staff rather than full-fledged teachers. She also sees EL teachers short-change themselves instead of advocating on their own behalf.
“It’s a matter of positioning EL teachers to where they know their benefit and their expertise,” she said.
Challenges remain to ensure equity for English learners
Sometimes that takes district-level messaging.
More than a decade ago, someone at Dietz’s school labeled the English-learner teaching position as an English-learner support teacher, implying it was a ancillary role rather than a full-time classroom teaching role.
“A teacher came up to me and she’s like, ‘I want to do that role, but do they get the same insurance?’” Dietz said.
Since then the district has worked on messaging that emphasizes the true nature of the EL teaching role, its value to the school community, and the role all teachers play in the education of English learners.
Dietz herself didn’t fully understand what the EL teacher workload entailed when she worked as a gen ed teacher. She had English learners in her mainstream classroom, but she didn’t know how to get the particularly shy ones to practice their English in lessons.
Years later, she and Marshall feel they are still learning how to connect with students from varied backgrounds and life circumstances, how to ensure equitable education in classrooms where students speak over 20 languages, and how to get their gen ed colleagues to learn alongside them.
They’re also working with a student population that the federal government no longer seems to prioritize. The Trump administration almost completely gutted the one federal office dedicated to English learners, rescinded landmark guidance on preserving English learners’ rights, and withdrew a policy that limited immigration enforcement near schools, among other actions taken last year.
Still, Dietz feels she made the right choice in becoming an English-learner teacher when she did.
On a December morning, Dietz sat with a group of English learners in a mainstream kindergarten classroom down the hall from Gomez’s room.
The students were also working on a lesson about farm animals, filling in a graphic organizer with sentences on what farm animals can do.
“What does the cow give us?” Dietz asked the group.
“Leche,” a little boy said.
“That’s good. Now can you say it in English?”
He hesitated, but Dietz encouraged him to remember the word from the previous day.
“Milk!” the boy exclaimed, beaming with pride.
Dietz shares his joy.
“It boils down to the satisfaction that I get from working with our students,” she said. “They come from many different backgrounds, so they may not even speak a word of English, or they may not want to. And to be able to pull that out of them is rewarding in itself.”