During Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month, TNTP hosted a fireside chat and panel focused on the bilingual educator workforce, which served as inspiration for this post. Watch a recording of the discussion among experts from higher education, policy makers, researchers, and other leaders working in bilingual education (enter passcode: Lly1*%JC).
In the United States, where nearly 500 languages are spoken, our students are brimming with talent and multilingual potential. English Learners (ELs), who come into our classrooms with various heritage languages, have the power to see the world through different lenses and connect across cultural barriers. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has invested in recruiting, training, and retaining more educators to meet the needs of our nation’s increasingly multilingual students. As this dynamic population continues to grow, supporting them increases the demand for multilingual educators and leadership. To meet the demand, we must look beyond traditional applicant pools and tap into the talent that exists in communities across the nation.
TNTP believes that with the right training and support, multilingual paraprofessionals, school support staff, or caregivers from the community could be developed into a cadre of bilingual educators who are uniquely equipped to reflect and affirm young people’s linguistic and cultural identities. But bringing this talent into the classroom will take a collaborative effort to reduce barriers to the profession and ensure teachers have the skills and resources they need to support ELs effectively. TNTP has identified three priorities that should be considered to support these efforts.
Priority #1: Reducing barriers to the teaching profession
Sometimes the very licensure and credential exams required to become bilingual teachers can be the obstacles preventing aspiring educators from entering the profession. Costly and time-consuming, those hurdles can be replaced by alternative pathways and equivalencies favoring practical experience and evidence of student success. The Los Angeles Teacher Preparation Pathway (LATPP) recruits talented adults who are already serving students to step into a teacher role with coaching, financial aid, and group support. LATPP offers low-cost, flexible, accelerated bachelor’s degrees for paraprofessionals without them and job-embedded professional learning for those with degrees. Mentorship programs, peer coaching, and collaborative spaces can further incentivize training. And shifts like moving away from monolingualism in the training itself help create more culturally and linguistically affirming ecosystems.
Priority #2: Preparing bilingual teachers in partnership with districts
Districts and teacher preparation programs are creating new approaches to attract and prepare strong, effective teachers with the skills to support ELs. The University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA) offers a bilingual/dual language residency model that blends research and practice by partnering with the local district, connecting trained teachers with placements in local schools. UTSA’s “culturally efficacious framework” means that leaders, supervisors, and staff all have expertise in multilingual education and commit to innovative practices.
Priority #3: Developing the skills to support ELs
TNTP’s Unlocking Learning Acceleration for Multilingual Learners report shared best practices for how districts can support multilingualism. While we must continue to expand our multilingual educator workforce, it’s important to note that teachers do not have to speak another language to become more effective at supporting ML students. Every teacher across subject areas and grade levels can benefit from learning new content and instructional skills to improve their impact and work with multilingual students and their families.
OELA offers multiple federal grant opportunities that fund programs to improve instruction for MLs, including the National Professional Development Program, and resources to support state and local educational agencies in fulfilling their legal obligations to ELs, including toolkits and a variety of instructional briefs, podcasts and webinars that showcase evidenced-based practices and approaches.
ELs benefit when their linguistic and cultural identities are sustained and affirmed in schools by diverse, effective educators. We must foster and celebrate their gifts by bringing and retaining more multilingual educators into the classroom, whether by forging new pathways, strengthening teacher preparation programs, or increasing professional learning opportunities for current educators.
