My name is Madison Leech. We are going to dive into this question. What does language learning look like? Now, we’ve been in touch with educational teams and experts all over the country to revisit this question and find ways to continue to support educational teams as they meet the diverse needs of multilingual learners in their classrooms.

As a reminder, multilingual learners each have a story. Many of these stories include major transitions or life changes, different schooling experiences, varying ability levels, and diverse needs.

Where the rubber meets the road is when we are able to use research and our different lenses of expertise to guide our practices when working with multilingual learners with significant cognitive disabilities.

And this means acknowledging our own areas of growth and a need for recalibration of our tools.

In order for students to show growth, we need to take an asset-based approach to building their profiles and abilities.

So how do we get there? How do we build our roadmap to meet these students’ needs collectively as a team?

This is where the Advancing ALTELLA toolkit comes into play, and all of the elements of the toolkit are designed to support educational teams and teachers as they build out lessons and consider the needs of all of the students in their classrooms, especially multilingual learners with significant cognitive disabilities.

So let’s take a tour, shall we?

Here are all of the elements of the Advancing ALTELLA toolkit.

First, we have applying the framework: our Advancing ALTELLA brief number two. This brief illustrates several different profiles of multilingual learners with significant cognitive disabilities and how to meet their instructional needs using the language
and disability needs framework.

Speaking of the framework, that is another element of our toolkit, the language
and disability needs framework.

Coming around the curve, on our toolkit game board, we have the verb list. This is what educators and teams will use to create objectives for students based on their current levels while increasing language demand. More on that later.

Next, we have our learning matrix that teams are going to use to determine students’ language and disability-related needs. And using this placement tool, teams can incorporate elements of the toolkit to guide their instruction and help each member of the team plan their lessons.

Another element of our toolkit is our student language builder. This is a planning tool for educational teams to facilitate conversation about students and their educational histories, home languages, people that live in their home, family input, as well as incorporating content that will be discussed and covered in upcoming units and considerations. This planning tool is designed to facilitate collaboration between all team members to create a successful educational plan for this student.

And last but not least, is our introductory video. If you haven’t watched it already,
that’s a great place to start. The introductory video introduces elements of the toolkit
and the purpose behind some of the elements and who we’ve created it for.

Spoiler alert, this toolkit was created for educators just like you.

We’re hoping this toolkit helps facilitate more conversations about supporting the needs of multilingual learners with significant cognitive disabilities and helps to get educational teams talking about ways that we can work together and leverage all of the lenses of expertise in the room to create a cohesive, positive educational experience for each student in our classrooms, bringing together all of their assets and challenges.

Now that we’ve looked at all of the different elements of the toolkit, let’s revisit that question.

How do we build our roadmap? Where do we start?

We are going to start right here with our student language builder. Each of the sections in our student language builder comes with a guiding question to help start and facilitate conversation with educational teams to make sure that everyone is heard, including the family and the student themselves.

Together we build an asset-based profile using input from students and their families, teachers and members of each student’s support team.

Let’s take a look at an example together.

Jorge is a 9-year-old male who came to the United States from Honduras. He was held in a detention center for around 90 days In Honduras, his parents reported that he struggled with paying attention and was often sent home from school early, but that he did not have an Individualized Education Plan or any equivalent education plan or accessibility supports in place. He has no physical disabilities other than some fine motor coordination challenges, and he has articulation and speech goals based on a speech and language screening. On initial assessments, the student is able to write numbers to 10, can trace basic object shapes and letter shapes, and can write his first name, but not his last name. He is able to identify 12 out of 26 letter sounds in Spanish.
Currently, he receives instruction primarily from a special education teacher, but also is in a co-taught class (with regular education and an English as a second language ESL teacher) for a portion of the reading and writing (English/Language Arts) block.

Based on what we know about Jorge, we would place him in the quadrant that has high language needs and low disability-related needs.

Next, our team will meet and collaborate together to complete a student language builder, for Jorge.

When thinking about planning upcoming units or concepts to be taught, Jorge’s educational team will start with these verbs from our Verb List and our Alternate Can-Do descriptors. Jorge’s educational team members are able to provide consistent expectations and supports for Jorge as he builds on new concepts and continues to develop expressive and interpretive language. A reminder that our verb list provides examples of verbs that are used in some of the standards, but not all.

So, let’s think about a specific concept.

How about sink or float? Teaching the concept of sink or float. During a science lesson,
we have our materials, our theme, and our expressive and receptive goals and language objectives.
In thinking about Jorge’s placement on our matrix, high language needs and low disability related needs, we will begin with our outer rung and move towards the center
or the origin with increased language demands. Some of the language objectives that Jorge may have to complete are student will point to the picture cards and words for sink, float, water, bowl, and cork. Moving on to the next expressive
and receptive skill, student will match vocabulary words with their characteristics, light heavy float, full water, full and empty.

Using our verb list, we are able to create objectives that increase language demand
as Jorge masters the outer rungs and moves towards the origin.

Now, this is just a quick example of ways to use elements of our toolkit to support a multilingual learner with significant cognitive disabilities.

To further help educational teams with planning and co-teaching, we’ve created an objective focus sheet that helps teachers co-plan for a lesson while taking individual student needs into account. This sheet provides a place for classroom teachers, ELD teachers and special education teachers to work together to provide high expectations for all students involved in a co-taught lesson.

As always, we appreciate you and all of the work you’re doing to support multilingual learners of all backgrounds and abilities.